We've had a bunch of stories lately concerning people being arrested for filming or photographing the police while they're doing their job in public. This is pretty ridiculous, and thankfully courts have started to make it clear that this is a First Amendment violation. Of course, we also just had the story of the city of Boston having to pay $170,000 to one of the people it arrested for filming them. And yet, the message still hasn't reached the police, who seem to keep on arresting people for pointing a camera in their general direction.

JJ sent over a ridiculous story from Philadelphia where a Temple student was arrested for photographing the police, which he actually did as part of his photojournalism class, where he had a "night-photography" assignment. When he saw the police pull someone over near where he lived, he went over with his camera and started taking pictures. What happened next seems positively ridiculous:

As Van Kuyk tells it, he grabbed his camera and began taking photos of the occurrence. After being told to move away from the scene, Van Kuyk distanced himself but continued to take photos, he said. However, an officer soon after demanded Van Kuyk to stop taking photos, he said.

“He was pushing me, and I kept taking pictures and he didn’t like it, and he…got real aggressive and threw me to the ground,” Van Kuyk said.

When his girlfriend, Meghan Feighan, tried to pick up the camera, she was arrested and held for nearly 18 hours, he said. Van Kuyk was arrested and held for nearly 24 hours.

The National Press Photographers Association sent a letter to the police commissioner decrying this behavior, noting that just a few months ago, the commissioner, Charles Ramsey, had actually sent out a memo to police officers, reminding them that they can be "photographed, videotaped or audibly recorded" when in public.

Unfortunately, that hasn't stopped the prosecution of these two individuals from moving forward. The girlfriend agreed to "settle" her case, paying $200 and agreeing to 12 hours of community service, for daring to pick up her boyfriend's camera after he'd been shoved to the ground. However, Van Kuyk is still facing charges -- including one potential felony charge for "hindering apprehension." One hopes that the court here agrees with the appeals court in Boston. Either that, or the prosecutors in Philly learn about the $170,000 Boston just had to pay out...

As police are insisting that having the public record them is a dangerous situation that shouldn't be allowed, we get a striking example of just how important that right is at times. Julian Sanchez points us to a story of a guy in Philadelphia, who had a license to carry a firearm in a city where it's legal to openly carry a firearm -- but who ran into a police officer who apparently did not understand his city's own laws:

On a mild February afternoon, Fiorino, 25, decided to walk to an AutoZone on Frankford Avenue in Northeast Philly with the .40-caliber Glock he legally owns holstered in plain view on his left hip. His stroll ended when someone called out from behind: "Yo, Junior, what are you doing?"

Fiorino wheeled and saw Sgt. Michael Dougherty aiming a handgun at him.

What happened next would be hard to believe, except that Fiorino audio-recorded all of it: a tense, profanity-laced, 40-minute encounter with cops who told him that what he was doing - openly carrying a gun on the city's streets - was against the law.

"Do you know you can't openly carry here in Philadelphia?" Dougherty asked, according to the YouTube clip.

"Yes, you can, if you have a license to carry firearms," Fiorino said. "It's Directive 137. It's your own internal directive."

You can hear all of this via the YouTube clip, embedded here: It gets worse and worse. Dougherty threatens to shoot Fiorino for trying to show him his license:

Fiorino offered to show Dougherty his driver's and firearms licenses. The cop told him to get on his knees.

"Excuse me?" Fiorino said.

"Get down on your knees. Just obey what I'm saying," Dougherty said.

"Sir," Fiorino replied, "I'm more than happy to stand here -"

"If you make a move, I'm going to f------ shoot you," Dougherty snapped. "I'm telling you right now, you make a move, and you're going down!"

"Is this necessary?" Fiorino said.

Other cops show up and they continue to curse at him and scream at him, while he calmly responds to their claims. They discover that he has a recording device in his pocket, and they go even more ballistic, telling him he broke the law with that as well. Eventually, they finally realize that he wasn't breaking the law with the gun and let him go... But once he posted the audio on YouTube, suddenly the District Attorney took renewed interest in the case, and charged him with "reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct," claiming that he refused to cooperate with police. If you listen to the tapes, it's hard to see how anyone could make that claim with a straight face. It seems pretty clear, from the beginning, that it's the police who were recklessly endangering someone and who were disorderly in how they dealt with Fiorino.

No matter what your opinion is on guns or open carry rules, it's hard to see how this guy deserves the treatment he received from police who clearly did not understand the law in their own city -- and it's even more ridiculous to see him facing a (trumped up) charge, after he uploaded the audio. It seems like a pretty clear case of vindictive prosecution, even as part of the issue is that the very thing that pissed off law enforcement is precisely what proves this guy was perfectly reasonable throughout the encounter.

A whole bunch of you have been sending over this story about how the city of Philadelphia, in its desperate need for cash, is starting to demand that hobby bloggers get a business license if they've made any revenue at all. Not if they've made profit, but revenue. So, any blog that has Google ads and brings in a couple pennies could be required to get a business license. To make matters worse, the city has been relying on the fact that some of these bloggers are honest and reported the tiny bit of revenue they made, in order to send them demand letters that they go register for a business license. Nice way to convince people (a) not to blog and (b) not to bother with Philly. It really is amazing how confused various governments are in an internet age where it's easy for lots of people to make little bits of money on the side. They simply can't figure out that such things are not a "business." We've seen the same thing in the past with various local governments demanding that folks selling on eBay need to get an auctioneer's license. And then some people wonder why citizens are fed up with their government representatives?

And here we go again. Apparently there was recently a "flash mob" snowball fight in Philadephia that got a bit out of control, resulting in a "rampage" through a Macy's department store. Nobody was hurt, but 16 people were arrested. So how are Philly officials dealing with it? They're threatening to sue Twitter and Facebook. Seriously. Two city council members say that those companies deserve some of the blame and a lawsuit is an option:

"While [the kids] certainly owe this city an apology and deserve to be punished under the fullest extent of the law, we believe that social media outlets should also bear some of the blame." The letter, written by council members Frank DiCicco and James F. Kenney, explains that this is the second such time a band of mischievous teens has formed via social media and went on to destroy property. "We believe that the lack of monitoring of these sites allows for mass, organized riots to occur."

Hopefully someone explains to these two council members that both sites are certainly protected from liability under Section 230 of the CDA. But, more importantly, beyond just invoking those safe harbors, can someone explain to them how silly it is to blame a communication tool for how it's used? Do they want to sue the phone company when criminals use phones to plan their crimes? Do they threaten to sue the car companies when a car is used in a crime? Furthermore, if their complaint is that these sites failed to "monitor" what people were planning, then isn't the city council actually even more to blame? The content of Twitter is available to the public, and these days much of Facebook is as well (and info on such a flashmob would almost certainly be public). Then shouldn't Philadelphia officials be aware of what's being planned in their own city? Based on the reasoning of DiCicco and Kenney, perhaps they should be suing themselves for failing to monitor what kids in their city were planning on some very public forums.

A bunch of folks have been asking my opinion on this past weekend's NY Times Magazine article by Michael Sokolove entitled What's a Big City Without a Newspaper? To be honest, there's not much to say about it. The article itself sort of meanders around, and doesn't make much of a point. Sokolove is wistful for the "good old days" and hopes that there's a future for newspapers. He dips his toes into some of the new experiments out there to cover the news, and spends a lot of time with the guy who is currently CEO of the bankrupt big Philly newspapers. The article doesn't really break any new ground. There are a few times when it seems to falsely assume that only newspaper reporters are real reporters (though, at other times it doesn't make this mistake). About the only really noteworthy thing is that the guy who runs the Philadelphia Daily News and the Philadelphia Inquirer, Brian Tierney, seems to be a bit clueless about economics -- which doesn't bode well for the two papers:

As soon as possible, he wants to begin charging for online content. As he told me this, he banged a bagel on a conference table, which sounded like a rock as it hit. "You hear that?" This bagel stinks, he said. "It's got the same consistency inside and out, but if you went down to our cafeteria, it costs like $1.25. That's what people pay for stuff like this, so you mean to tell me I can't get them to pay that for online access to all the incredible stuff in The Inquirer and Daily News online? People who say that all this content wants to be free aren't paying talented people to create it."

As any first year econ student would tell Tierney, the reason people are willing to pay $1.25 for a stale bagel is because they really don't have another easy choice. To get a better bagel would mean having to leave the building and head out somewhere further away that isn't nearly as convenient. But online there are other options. Loads and loads and loads of other options -- all only a click away. If his cafeteria had 1,000 different bagel suppliers all competing to sell their bagels, he'd discover that the bagels would be both a lot cheaper and a lot better tasting. And those who thought they could get away with charging $1.25 for a crappy bagel would soon go out of business. Update: Ha! After writing this, I discovered that King Kaufman wrote basically the same thing.

Oh, and then he also seems to believe that there's something special about newsprint that makes it more suitable for reporting than the web, but he fails to explain what that is, other than "brawn."

"We do the brawny work," Tierney said, sounding like the C.E.O. of some smokestack industry. "The Web efforts, they add something. I congratulate them. Let a thousand flowers bloom. But if somebody thinks in any short term, or even medium term, that the answers are those things, they're kidding themselves. I know I sound like a heretic in that I won't come out and say, 'They're the future." But they're not. The brawny work is what we're doing, and the brawny vehicle to carry it is the printed product."

I'm not against newsprint -- if someone could come up with a way to make it really add more value. I've talked about magazines making their print product more valuable, and I'm sure a creative newspaper could do it too. But claiming that newsprint is better because it carries "brawny work" doesn't seem like a particularly compelling explanation. It sounds like someone pining for a past that isn't returning. There's no vision there. There's only someone insisting that things must be a certain way because that's the way it is. The world, unfortunately, doesn't work that way.

Last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News (both owned by the same media company) ran full page ads for a "new" airline called Derrie-Air that had a unique selling point: pay what you weigh. Different routes had different prices that were all per pound. The idea was that the lighter you (and your luggage) were, the less you would have to pay. The only thing is that the airline doesn't actually exist (which I assume anyone with a very slight knowledge of the French language could probably figure out from the name of the airline).

So why did the newspapers do this? It was actually as a test, to see how well advertisements in the paper could drive people to a website. The whole thing sounds like a good (and funny) way to test that out. But, of course, any time you trick some people, someone's going to get upset -- and that's exactly what's happening. Suddenly people are charging the company with some sort of ethical lapse for not making it clear the ad was fake. Of course, if they did that, the whole purpose of the ad would have been lost.

Plus, it's difficult to see what the "harm" is. If a few people thought it was real, they would quickly be disabused of that notion, with no harm done. The people complaining that this would somehow make people trust the news in the paper less apparently haven't been paying attention to the various reporting scandals over the past few years. People have plenty of reasons not to trust the news that they read. Seeing a fake (and mildly amusing) ad in a paper isn't going to make them trust the newspapers any less.