I've been negligent in posting here since the end of April because of competing priorities. Nevertheless, I've been scanning for news items with you in mind:
Sam Glover informs us at his Lawyerist blog (here) of a fantastic new Firefox plug-in called RECAP that, while a user is browsing documents in PACER, provides the option to download a free copy from public.resource.org (if the document exists there) by placing an icon next to the regular download link. Alternatively, if you download a document that isn't on public.resource.org, RECAP will upload the document thereto. More info. is at https://www.recapthelaw.org/
"Judges and journalists have more in common than they probably realize: They search for the truth every day, they’re never entirely sure who’s lying to them and they routinely publish writings that live forever in the public record."\
So begins an article published by The First Amendment Center discussing the difficulty in determining who is a journalist, including "online contributors, bloggers and tweeters," and citing the recent Texas Court of Appeals decision in Kaufman v. Islamic Society of Arlington, where the court held that a contributor to a Web site was entitled to a statutory right of interlucutory appeal available to members of “the electronic or print media.”
The court, finding support from other jurisdictions, extended the First Amendment and other protections to Internet publications as “a type of nontraditional electronic media.” Although the court did hold that not everyone who publishes to the Internet qualifies under Texas' interlocutory appeal statute, the court rejected the argument that an Internet author never is a member of the media.
Here are some other news stories from the last few months that I thought you'd find interesting:
