More Online Jurisdiction Questions
from the local-ain't-so-local-anymore dept
A murder trial in Canada brings up some interesting “local” issues that wouldn’t matter so much, if not for the internet. The judge has ordered local journalists not to publish information about what’s happening in the lawsuit, so as not to bias jurors. However, while the ban applies to local journalists, what about those from the US who feel they have the right to report whatever they want? Pre-internet, this wouldn’t be an issue, since a local paper in Seattle would have a much smaller chance of being read by someone in Vancouver. However, the internet changes all that, and the judge is now threatening to bar those American reporters from the courtroom. It would seem that this sort of effort to tell journalists what they can and cannot write about is unlikely to be workable. This becomes increasingly true when the definition of “journalist” becomes more fluid. What happens if someone in the courtroom has a personal blog, and posts their own report of what happened?
