The court said Yahoo was protected under a 1996 federal law that gives broad immunity to service providers to encourage the open exchange of material on the Internet by its users. The court’s ruling left open the possibility that Yahoo may be liable for promising to remove the offending materials and information. The plaintiff claimed that a Yahoo official promised to immediately remove the photos when a local TV station was preparing a report, but failed to carry out the promise.

Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/05/11/financial/f131829D98.DTL

New Jersey is currently arguing a case involving the issuance of anti-abortion specialty plates. The Assistant Attorney General of New Jersey argued the state isn’t trying to avoid controversy, but the law limits to designs to logos and group names, and does not allow slogans.

 Source: http://www.breakinglegalnews.com/entry/Abortion-debate-moves-to-special-license-plates

The 2005 California statute prohibited the sale or rental of violent video games to minors under the age of 17, and required retailers to label violent games. Courts in other states, including Michigan, Illinois, Louisiana, and Minnesota, have also declared similar laws to be unconstitutional.

Source: http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2009/02/ninth-circuit-rules-ban-on-video-game.php

Some of the cases in which the Justice Department is upholding the Bush administration’s refusal to release records include:

-A case involving a request for documents regarding the Automated Targeting System used by Customs officers to screen all travelers leaving or entering the country.

-A case seeking records of telecommunications companies regarding lobbying for legal immunity for their cooperation in warrantless domestic wiretapping.

-A case seeking the Department of Justice’s legal opinions justifying wiretapping.

-Three cases seeking the Department of Justice’s legal opinions about detention and interrogation of terrorism detainees.

Source: http://news.findlaw.com/ap/a/w/1151/02-17-2009/20090217002009_08.html

Summum’s position is that once a city accepts donations for a public park display, it must accept others as well. Veterans groups fear that if this position is accepted, a display of a memorial honoring veterans would also welcome a display dishonoring veterans. A federal appeals court ruled that the city violated First Amendment rights by allowing some private donations in its public park and denying others. The Court will have to decide whether a donated monument in a public park amounts to governmental speech or private speech. The government is permitted to limit its own speech as long as it doesn’t restrict private speech. Another issue to be decided is whether a city park is a “public forum,” where free speech is entitled to maximum First Amendment protection.

Source: http://www.breakinglegalnews.com/entry/High-court-hears-dispute-over-religious-monument

In the recently filed case, the unidentified teenager, age 16, had previously undergone outpatient treatment for 22 days in June and July for a psychiatric condition that the lawsuit claims was partly due to an obsessive relationship with a teenage boy. The suit claims someone created a fictitious Facebook account, using photos of an attractive, older model and the name “Jennifer Litzinger”, “for the purpose of creating a purported rival” for the boy’s affections. The suit claims that on the day before the teen was to finish outpatient treatment in July, “Litzinger” sent multiple communications, claiming she had been talking and texting with the boyfriend every day and night, was more attractive than the teen, and other comments designed to make the teen feel inferior to her fictitious rival.

Source: http://www6.lexisnexis.com/publisher/EndUser?Action=UserDisplayFullDocument&orgId=607&docId=l:l:865451574&topicId=13585&source=undefined&start=11&topics=single

The court said Virginia’s spam law amounted to an overly broad prohibition on anonymous free speech.

Jaynes was convicted in 2004 and sentenced to nine years in prison for sending millions of emails. A resident of North Carolina, Jaynes became the first person to be convicted of sending illegal spam in the U.S.

In 2003, Congress passed it own antispam law. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) establishes requirements for those who send commercial email, spells out penalties for spammers and companies whose products are advertised in spam if they violate the law, and gives consumers the right to ask emailers to stop spamming them.

Sources: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/151014/court_overturns_virginia_spam_law_conviction.html

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.shtm

The law prohibited the posting of material deemed harmful to minors on a website that is using the material for commercial purposes. The court found that the definition of the standards for material that was required to be hidden from open browsing was overbroad and would have required age verification for any material not suitable for a four-year-old.

The decision from the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court decision. The ACLU sued the government, arguing that the law criminalizes constitutionally protected speech, resulting in diverting pornography sites to non-U.S. servers, and preventing the spread of health information because of the requirement for people to enter sensitive information. The government will likely appeal the decision.

Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/AheadoftheCurve/Story?id=5428228&page=1

The panel ruled that the FCC acted unfairly in imposing the fine because it had previously exempted fleeting indecency in broadcast programming from punishment.

“The Commission’s determination that CBS’s broadcast of a nine-sixteenths of one second glimpse of a bare female breast was actionably indecent evidenced the agency’s departure from its prior policy,” the court said.

Sources: http://www.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinarch/063575p.pdf,

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/business/media/22FCC.html?ref=us

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that will determine the legality of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) policy that even a single utterance of an obscene word on radio and television broadcasts during daytime and early evening hours may be penalized. It will be the first time in 30 years for the court to rule on the use of expletives on television and radio.

The lawsuit arose when Fox Broadcasting sued the FCC after being reprimanded for the use of vulgar language by Cher and Nicole Richie during televised awards shows in 2002 and 2003. Fox claims the enforcement of the indecency policy is arbitrary and unconstitutional. The reprimand came after the FCC reversed its position in 2004 and said even “fleeting” expletives could subject a network to sanctions.

In June 2007, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York found that the FCC’s policy was “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act because the commission had “failed to articulate a reasoned basis for its change in policy.” The court also raised questions about its constitutionality under the First Amendment.

In FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978), involving a monologue by the comedian George Carlin, the Court held that the federal government has the authority to police over-the-air radio and television broadcasts for “patently offensive” material of a sexual or excretory nature from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., when children are mostly likely to be in the audience. However, Justice John Paul Stevens noted in the decision that “We have not decided that an occasional expletive in either setting would justify any sanction.” It was not until a wardrobe malfunction involving Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl in 2004 that the FCC changed its enforcement policy.

The FCC claims that technology has made it possible for the networks to edit the use of expletives. The networks argue that variants of expletives are used which don’t reference sexual or excretory organs or activities, and that the FCC has exceeded its authority when it issues sanctions for a word that does not convey a sexual message.

Source:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/17/AR2008031700842.html?sub=new