This is due to a statement made on Bluestone’s blog referring to a malpractice case against Marina Tylo.

The Citizen Media Law Project sees the case as frivolous.

Unless I’m missing something, this looks like a purely frivolous case, perhaps a situation where sanctions against Tylo are appropriate. As explained in our legal guide [6], section 74 of the New York Civil Rights Law [7] codifies the fair report privilege [8]. Under the statute, speakers cannot be held liable for giving a “fair and true report of any judicial proceeding, legislative proceeding or other official proceeding.”

We will monitor the case and give you further updates.

SF Gate, San Francisco Chronicle says

City Manager Joseph Tanner on Monday added the Vallejo Times Herald’s local news blog and the Vallejo Is Burning Web site to the list of Internet addresses employees cannot access from city computers. “We blocked these because they are political in nature,” Tanner said. “We blocked them because one is an anti-bankruptcy site and the other is a rag of a newspaper.”

The two sites, Vallejo is burning and Vallejo Times Herald have now been ranked together with porn, gambling, social networking and hate sites that have been banned.The city labour unions are up in arms decrying the affront on free speech, the are qouoted on SF Gate

“With this bankruptcy filing, the city declared war on its employees and our contracts,” said one employee who requested his name not be used because of Tanner’s memo. “Now they want the opposition with our hands tied behind our backs and gags in our mouths.”

We, here, don’t think Tanner’s actions will save the city from bankruptcy if indeed it is indeed in the red.

According to Maggie Thurber:

The bill was introduced by Rep. Jeb Hensarling, Chairman of the Republican Study Committee, to protect bloggers from FEC regulations and keep them safe from reporting to the FEC. Since a majority of bloggers are not paid for their netroots activism on behalf of a candidate, this bill will protect bloggers from keeping track of expenditures, equipment and having to report their activity to the FEC, whenever they write about a candidate.

The problem with this is that there has been no hearing for defamation or any other imagined crime. It is “prior restraint” which flies in the face of First Amendment (to the U.S. Constitution) law and free speech tradition and case law in the U.S. There seems to be a real sense that those elements of law which apply to everything from radio to newspapers to signs in your yard somehow stop at the keyboard.

Mr. Krasnansky has declned to abide by Judge Devine’s injunction.

We don’t know Mr. Krasnansky. For all we know, he’s a turd. We also don’t care. We care about our free speech and the tradition of free speech in this country and the timely extension of those rights into the electronic environment. If Mr. Krasnansky has broken the law, a prosecutor or private citizen should take him to court and, in due process, require him to remove the libelous or defamatory material. But Judge Devine is not president-for-life and sure as hell ought to know better.

Just read the CNET article on Comcast allegedly using Great Firewall of China methods to censor users’ BitTorrent information loads. “Is Comcast’s BitTorrent filtering violating the law?“