Nearly 40 years ago, Daniel Ellsberg leaked what's now known as The Pentagon Papers to the NY Times, exposing a "classified" study that showed how the Johnson Administration had regularly (and systematically) lied about the war in Vietnam. The Nixon administration claimed that Ellsberg violated the Espionage Act of 1917, since they had no authority to share those classified documents. The administration also sought injunctions against newspapers for publishing excerpts of the documents. Eventually, the Supreme Court allowed the newspapers to publish. As for Ellsberg, his case went to trial, but it was thrown out due to government bungling, including wiretapping him without a warrant and slapstick government attempts to spy on and/or discredit Ellsberg. These days many people consider Ellsberg quite a hero for whistleblowing on illegal activities by the US government.

This all has become very pertinent again, as it appears that the US Army has finally charged intelligence analyst Bradley Manning with violating the Espionage Act for his leaking of certain "classified" information to Wikileaks.

And that leaves us back to square one of a very difficult question: what's the difference between whistleblowing and criminally leaking classified works? It seems like the line is pretty clear. If the "leak" is designed to expose otherwise illegal activities, that should be protected in some manner. If the leak, on the other hand, has nothing to do with exposing illegal activities and, instead, is just to reveal secret (but legal) information, it probably falls on the other side of the line. Where Manning's actions fall on this spectrum are still not at all clear -- but it seems like folks are rushing to push him into one or the other camps already. Hopefully some more details will come out and it becomes clear where he really falls (no matter what a court may decide...).

Yes, part of the business model for using free music to your advantage is recognizing how that free music acts as a promotional good for you, but the band BuckCherry seems to have taken that a bit too far. It definitely seemed quite suspicious when the band, signed to a major label, put out a press release about how angry they were that their latest music was leaked online. So, the good folks over at TorrentFreak did a little investigating, and tracked down the fact that whoever leaked the album just so happened to use the same exact IP address as the band's manager. Oops.

So, let's try this again. Using free music as a promotional tool can work wonders, but part of that is in publicly embracing the fact that your fans want to share your music. Not creating mock outrage about it.