For example, the company's ticket policy includes a "ticket fraud" clause that hits riders who hand the wrong ticket to a driver with a $100 fine, charged to the credit card used to purchase their ticket. "In the event that ticket is used to obtain transportation on another day or at another time," the company's policy statement reads, "or to or from a Chicago area stop other than printed on your ticket, you will be charged full fare for the trip you actually rode PLUS $100 penalty. You will also be permanently banned." The company also has a history of suing passengers for violating its terms and conditions—it has filed 125 tort and contract damage lawsuits against passengers this year alone, according to a report from a student newspaper.

Four days later, Leval told the Daily Illini, University of Illinois' student newspaper, about the incident. He received an e-mail from the company that said he was being fined $500 for "liquidated damages" and was permanently banned. In a statement on the company's website, company owner [Dennis] Toeppen threatened to sue Leval, saying, "The attorneys for Suburban Express are reviewing this incident with a view towards filing the appropriate legal action against this meddlesome MBA student."

Toeppen is no stranger to legal action over Internet controversy. In the late 1990s, he was a self-confessed cybersquatter, registering over 200 domain names and asking for payment by trademark holders in exchange for them—including Panavision.com, for which he demanded $13,000. That led to the 1998 case Panavision International L.P. v. Toeppen (which Toeppen lost) and in part to the AntiCybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999.

"It was clear to me at the time that domain names were valuable, undeveloped virtual real estate," he wrote on his personal home page. "There was absolutely no statutory or case law regarding trademarks in the context of Internet domain names at the time. It seemed to be an excellent opportunity to do the virtual equivalent of buying up property around a factory—eventually the factory owner would realize that he needed the scarce resource which I possessed."

The legal threat against Finnicum quickly drew promises of support from others on reddit—including Ken White, the lawyer behind the legal blog Popehat. White sent an e-mail to Long, which he also posted to reddit: "I do not represent any party (though I have offered to connect the recipient of your threat with pro bono counsel). However, I am considering writing a post about the matter."

"Would you be willing to answer some questions about your threat?" White continued. "I'm particularly interested in discussing the factual basis for your assertions, how you reconcile your position with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and your evaluation of risks in light of the Streisand Effect."

"I will confess that I have very limited understanding of Reddit," he wrote, "and your response regarding the thread being moderated by several different individuals was instructive and was confirmed by individuals with much more knowledge of Reddit than I possess. At this time Suburban Express is of the opinion that it is best for the company and all individuals involved with this issue for Suburban Express to move forward with its mission to provide safe, courteous and efficient service to its current and future customers."

Asked about the recordings at an unrelated news conference Monday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said the issue was “much ado about nothing.”

“My view is, like all, we have a press conference here, I expect my staff to have a record of it,” he said. “And if I have a phone conversation, an interview, I expect to have a record of it as well.”

So remember when Chicago police were arresting people for recording them, and charging them with crimes punishable by 10 or more years in prison? Remember the woman who was arrested and charged because she attempted to record Chicago PD internal affairs police browbeating her when she tried to report a sexual assault by a Chicago cop? Remember all that stuff we heard from Chicago PD and Cook County DA Anita Alvarez’s office about protecting privacy?

The issue reached a public forum last week when a court filing in a wrongful death lawsuit against the city raised questions about whether a city spokeswoman had recorded Tribune reporters without their consent as they conducted a phone interview with Chicago police Superintendent Garry McCarthy in October 2011.

And in separate incidents this past September, city spokespeople twice recorded a Tribune reporter as he conducted phone interviews with a top city official involved in Emanuel's controversial speed camera program. The spokespeople acknowledged that they independently recorded the interviews without asking the reporter for consent.

Last month, the city turned over to the plaintiff's lawyers an audio recording and transcript of the conference call showing no evidence that McCarthy or Hamilton sought consent to record the Tribune reporters.

"Absent from the audio and the transcript was evidence of the parties' consent," according to a court filing last week by the plaintiff's attorney, Craig Sandberg.

Gerould Kern, senior vice president and editor of the Tribune, declined to comment Friday about the recordings. Instead, he cited the letter sent by Tribune Co. attorney Karen Flax to Patton, demanding that city officials cease recording Tribune reporters without consent. The letter also asked that the city preserve copies of all recorded conversations and turn them over to the Tribune.

In its response Saturday, the city said it was unclear whether there would be any tapes to turn over.

While Uber advertises itself as “Everyone’s Private Driver”—that is in fact a gross mischaracterization as Uber only chooses to cater to what it perceives as the technologically elite and well-off individuals. It is obvious that through Uber’s marketing it caters to young, hip, urban professionals, which is perfectly reasonable on the livery side. But using the publicly regulated (and limited number) taxis in order to create a two tier system— “high quality taxis” for the “haves” and the remainder for the “have nots”—runs contrary to the many ordinances enacted in Chicago to ensure non-discriminatory service for everyone in Chicago, not just those “cool” enough to use Uber.

Adel Daoud, 18, was arrested following a months-long FBI undercover investigation. He was taken into custody after he parked a Jeep Cherokee in front of the bar Friday night and walked into a nearby alley where he tried to detonate the device, court documents allege.

The bomb, which was inert and had been constructed by FBI technicians, didn't explode, according to federal authorities.

Buddy Bell participated in a January 2008 protest against the Iraq War in downtown Chicago. While President George W. Bush was at a luncheon nearby, Bell held a banner that said: "End the war and occupation TROOPS HOME NOW."

After Chicago police arrested a protester who entered the street carrying a banner, Bell and two other protesters also stepped into the street and approached the police squad car, chanting, "Hell no, we won't go. Set him free." When the activists refused to get back on the sidewalk, the police arrested them for disorderly conduct.

In particular, the police charged Bell under a Chicago municipal code that makes it a crime to disobey a police officer's instruction to leave the scene when other individuals are engaging in nearby acts of disorderly conduct that "are likely to cause substantial harm or serious inconvenience, annoyance or alarm."

"To the extent that [the ordinance] authorizes dispersal when an assembly creates or is threatened by 'substantial harm,' it does not improperly infringe upon protected speech," Judge Joel Flaum wrote for a three-member panel. "We cannot say the same, however, for authorizing dispersal on the basis of 'serious inconvenience, annoyance or alarm.'"

Unlike the code's provision for responding to nuisances, the ordinance "does not specify what inconveniences, if performed by three or more individuals, may trigger an order to disperse," the 35-page decision states.

"Nor does it clarify that, whatever the inconvenience at issue, dispersal must be necessary to confront the violation," Flaum wrote. "To this end, the ordinance lacks the necessary specificity and tailoring to pass constitutional muster, and we must conclude that the ordinance substantially impacts speech."

As for "annoy," Flaum noted that the ordinary meaning, "which is 'to trouble, to vex, to impede, to incommode, to provoke, to harass or to irritate,' compels this reading: not every annoying act gives rise to imminent danger or nuisance."

"Avoiding annoyance is never a proper basis on which to curtail protected speech," he wrote.

"We cannot conceive of an annoying behavior, however annoying it may be, that could constitutionally draw as a remedy dispersing others engaged in protected speech," Flaum added.

When my wife tried to make a mid-career switch to teaching math in the Chicago Public Schools, I no longer needed a hypothetical example. I realized that licensing had the potential to be every bit as harmful in practice as I'd been saying it was in theory.

My wife Leah graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth. She was a computer science major with an emphasis on math. She worked in the software industry, built a company, and then sold it. She seemed, in every respect, perfectly qualified to teach middle-school math.

She found a job at a school adjacent to a public housing project on Chicago's South Side. On about day three of that job—after she had met the students, decorated the classroom, and started teaching—the principal informed Leah that she did not have a "middle-school math endorsement," which the State of Illinois requires.

But, perhaps worse still, there is the fact that police don't always need a law to protect them from the public's lenses—they can just take matters into their own hands. There are plenty of examples of police harassing people who film them, often threatening to arrest them or going ahead and doing it. It's an intimidation tactic, and really just part of a much larger problem, which is that no matter how much a person is in the right (and how much they know it), the police have plenty of ways to make their life hell for a long time before they see justice, if they ever do. This appears to be the case in a recent Chicago lawsuit, where two men allege they were battered, strip-searched and falsely charged for filming a traffic accident caused by a police car.

Benjamin Perez and Bobby Milton sued Chicago and nine police officers in Federal Court.

The men say they were talking outside with some friends in an early morning in August 2011 when a friend rode by on a motorcycle, heading south on Chicago Avenue.

"At the same time, defendant Captain [Kevin Navarro] was driving a marked Chicago Police Department vehicle, an SUV, northbound on South Chicago Avenue in the wrong lane of traffic, heading northbound in the southbound lane," according to the complaint.

"Defendant Captain drove his police vehicle into plaintiffs' friend, who was traveling southbound on his motorcycle, causing plaintiffs' friend to suffer serious injury."

Numerous police officers arrived quickly.

"Defendant officers observed plaintiffs using their cell phones to record the collision scene, and immediately took plaintiff Perez's cell phone and placed handcuffs on him, taking him into custody even though Perez was not doing anything illegal," the complaint states.

"Defendant officers placed Perez in the back of a police car and demanded that Perez show them how to delete the photographs he had taken with his cell phone.

"After plaintiff Perez was taken into custody, plaintiff Milton, who had also been using his cell phone to record the scene, was seated on his motorcycle, when defendant [Officers] Frahm and Hernandez approached him.

"Defendants Frahm and Hernandez grabbed plaintiff Milton, forced him off of his motorcycle, and threw him to the ground.

The suit continues, claiming that the men were taken to the police station and threatened with felony charges if they didn't help officers delete the recording, and one was strip-searched to check for "other cameras and recording devices" (because most people keep a spare iPhone taped to their inner thigh, of course). They are seeking damages for "false arrest, excessive force, unlawful search, conspiracy, false imprisonment, battery, and malicious prosecution".

Now, we don't have the officers' side of the story yet, but the allegations certainly look bad—and it's not hard to find plenty of instances of similar actions by the police. Assuming the complaint is even close to true, hopefully the court recognizes the affront to justice that this kind of police behavior represents, and joins the growing ranks of courts that are affirming the right to record the police and hold them accountable for their actions.

As owner of the Content, AOL has the obligation to prevent the improper use of its proprietary material. Before pursuing any additional avenues to remove the Infringing Content, we are demanding that MarylandJuice.com take immediate steps to remove Patch’s image and either 1) display no more than a 1-2 sentence snippet of this Content, with credit explicitly given as well as a link back to the full article available at http://wheatonmd. patch.com/articles/proposed-rule-change-for-accessory-apartments-meets-opposition ; or 2) remove and disable access to all Infringing Content, and agree to never repost or use the Infringing Content or any other AOL Content, absent compliance with the third-party use guidelines identified above.

And seeding HuffPo Chicago is a scheme whereby the publication takes some — in many cases all — of the content from another site, with a link back to the original.

The result is quick and easy traffic for the new Chicago edition, since the publication ends up catching some Google searches for keywords contained in the (Chicago-related) articles it takes. HuffPo already has good Google PageRank, so its own version of the content floats to the top of the results, even though it was not the original source.

HuffPo's justification, at least when the publication was pulling this crap with us, taking the entirety of our RSS feeds, was that the reprinted posts were good promotion, since they included (a totally buried) backlink to the original content on our site.

The new superintendent cautioned reporters not to lump all of the incidents into the same category. Some are shoplifting. Others are robberies. And on Tuesday night, there was an incident that he called completely unrelated. One group of young men solicited cigarettes from another group of young men. When one man took out his wallet to pay, a member of the other group snatched the wallet and ran.

“These three men chased ten men to get the wallet back and eventually caught up to the ten men and lost the fight. That in no way shape or form represents anything that we’ve been talking about,” he said.

[Section 230] limits who may be called the publisher of information that appears online. That might matter to liability for defamation, obscenity, or copyright infringement. But Chicago's amusement tax does not depend on who "publishes" any information or is a "speaker". Section 230(c) is irrelevant.

Even if not reflected in accident statistics, Belwood Police Chief Robert Collins Jr. said he sees drivers being more cautious as they approach stoplights. "Driver behavior has definitely changed," Collins said...

Roger Pawlowski, a division chief at the Oak Lawn Police Department, said the benefits of red-light cameras can't always be extrapolated from crash statistics.