Featured FEN Organizations
February 4th, 2013
LAST DAY TO BE A VALENTINE’S HERO!
Today is the last day to order a signed or personalized gift and get it in time to surprise your sweetie on Valentine’s Day! CBLDF is offering you the chance to get graphic novels personalized by Brian K. Vaughan, Craig Thompson, Brian Wood, Cliff Chiang, Terry Moore, Jeffrey Brown, and Paul Pope for your nearest and dearest comics fan!
We also have excellent gifts signed by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Howard Cruse, and an amazing assortment of fragrances from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. To cap it all off, every donation supporting CBLDF as part of this drive will include an exclusive gift card featuring art from SAGA by Fiona Staples! You can check out the entire collection here.
Your donation to CBLDF doesn’t just get you the best romantic gift for the comics fan in your life, it also helps protect the freedom to read. Contributions to CBLDF allow us to provide expert legal defense for First Amendment emergencies, respond to challenges to comics in libraries, and create important tools to support the rights of kids, parents, and adult readers to have access to the full range of comics. To learn more about our important work, please visit ...
February 4th, 2013
EFF to Supreme Court: Blanket DNA Collection Violates Fourth Amendment
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the Supreme Court Friday to block DNA collection from everyone arrested for a crime, arguing that law enforcement must get a warrant before forcing people to give samples of their genetic material.
EFF's amicus brief was filed Friday in Maryland v. King – a case challenging a law in the state of Maryland that requires DNA collection from all arrestees, whether they are ultimately convicted of a crime or not. Maryland officials claim that DNA is necessary for definitive identification, but they do not use the sample to "identify" the arrestee. Instead, they use the sample for other investigatory purposes – retaining and repeatedly accessing the wealth of personal information disclosed by an individual's genetic material despite lacking individualized suspicion connecting the arrestee to another crime. This violates the Fourth Amendment.
"Your DNA is the roadmap to an extraordinary amount of private information about you and your family," said EFF Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch. "It contains data on your current health, your potential for disease, and your family background. For government access to personal information this sensitive, the Fourth Amendment requires ...
February 4th, 2013
No, Mob-Rule Censorship Is Not Free Speech
At the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) website, the organization posts a nice response from DePaul University President Dennis Holtschneider in response to the recent vandalism of the campus YAF chapter's pro-life display. Holtschneider assures YAF president Kristopher Del Campo that a thorough investigation of the vandalism is being conducted. He also acknowledges that the vandalism is "deeply upsetting in that your and your fellow students' opportunity to give voice to your beliefs was unacceptably stifled by other students." That's right.
I had planned on ending this blog entry right there. Then I read to the bottom of the page, to the comments, where "Maria" had posted a reply arguing that removing the flags was also an act of free speech.
I would just like to point out that taking down the flags was just as much of an act of freedom of speech as putting them up were. I think for a man (Kris) to push his views on a college campus, where many women do not believe a man has any right to say one way or another what to do with their bodies, he got what he deserved. The students showed their right to activism ...
February 2nd, 2013
February Student Spotlight: Danielle Susi & ‘The Quad News’ Staff
FIRE's Student Spotlight feature recognizes students who are doing outstanding work to promote individual rights on their campuses. In honor of Free Press Week, we have a special Student Spotlight for February: Danielle Susi, the Senior Managing Editor of The Quad News at Quinnipiac University.
Back in 2008, students working for the Quinnipiac campus newspaper, The Quinnipiac Chronicle, were frustrated by QU administrators' efforts to muzzle the paper, including an absurd demand from President John Lahey that the paper not publish articles online before they were in print. In the face of these threats to a free press, the student editors decided to form a new, independent student news source online: The Quad News. Almost five years later, the website is still publishing campus news daily.
As The Quad News celebrates five years on campus, I asked Danielle to talk about her experience as a student journalist and tell me what advice The Quad News staff has for other students who want to stand up for press rights on campus. You can read her full interview on the Student Spotlight page.
Congratulations to Danielle and The Quad News staff! Check back on The Torch next ...
February 1st, 2013
Jury Finds Former College President Personally Liable for $50,000 in Victory for Student Rights
Here's today's press release from FIRE:
ATLANTA, February 1, 2013—A federal jury today found former Valdosta State University (VSU) President Ronald M. Zaccari personally liable for $50,000 for violating the due process rights of former student Hayden Barnes in the case of Barnes v. Zaccari. In May 2007, Zaccari expelled Barnes for peacefully protesting Zaccari's plan to construct two parking garages on campus, calling a collage posted by Barnes on his personal Facebook page a "threatening document" and labeling Barnes a "clear and present danger" to VSU. Barnes first came to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help in October 2007.
"College administrators have been blatantly and willfully violating student rights for decades, but they have far too often dodged personal responsibility. Not so today," said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff. "We hope this serves as a much-needed wake up call to college administrators that it's time to start paying close attention to the basic rights of their students."
"After five years, I finally feel vindicated. This is a victory for me but it's also a victory for students everywhere," said Barnes. "I hope that other college administrators take heed and see that violating students' rights can ...
February 1st, 2013
The Unique Free Speech Challenges Facing Student Satire and Humor
As we wrap up Free Press Week, we take a look today at the unique challenges that college students face when engaging in satire and humor on campus, from humor magazines and editorial cartoons to satirical flyers and blogs. Like newspaper theft and denial of newspaper funding (which we have already explored this week), this is an issue that FIRE has seen time and time again on university campuses over the years.
For any number of reasons, parody, jokes, and satire-whether in print or otherwise—tend to rankle students and university administrators alike as few other forms of expression do. Consequently, student humor is often the target of calls for campus censorship and punishment. This despite the fact that, as FIRE has argued many times, parody, jokes, and satire exist precisely to challenge, to amuse, and even to offend. To witness, in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988), the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the First Amendment protects even the most outlandishly offensive parody—in that case, a satirical advertisement suggesting that the Reverend Jerry Falwell lost his virginity in a drunken encounter with his mother in an outhouse. With respect ...
February 1st, 2013
Aaron’s Law 2.0: Major Steps Forward, More Work to Be Done
Representative Zoe Lofgren has posted on Reddit a modified draft of Aaron's Law, a proposal to update the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and wire fraud law in honor of our friend Aaron Swartz and to make sure that the misguided prosecution that happened to him doesn't happen to anyone else. We're very pleased with the proposal's progress and we're hopeful about the future of this important bill.
EFF believes that any reform to the computer crime laws must have three crucial elements:
- Computer users must not face criminal liability for violating private agreements, policies, or duties.
- If a computer user is allowed to access information, simply doing it in an innovative way must not be a crime.
- Penalties need to be proportionate to computer crime offenses.
This draft bill works toward achieving the first two elements.
The proposal meets our first goal by enshrining two recent decisions from federal appeals courts into the text of the CFAA. Those decisions said that running afoul of private computer-use policies and duties doesn't violate the statute. Aaron's Law would update the CFAA to exend that important precedent to the entire country, and that's great news.
Aaron's Law attempts to reach our ...
February 1st, 2013
Missouri Man Receives Three Years In Prison For Comics
The Department of Justice has announced that Christjan Bee, 36, of Monett, MO was sentenced this week to three years in federal prison without parole, followed by five years of supervised release because of comics he possessed on his computer. Last fall Bee pleaded guilty to possession of what the government characterized as a “pornographic cartoon, which depicted children engaging in sexual behavior.” Prosecutors assert the material “is categorized as obscene and therefore illegal,” despite the fact that the material was not tried in court under the Miller obscenity test. Bee pleaded guilty to possession of obscene material rather than stand trial under the original indictment of receiving child pornography. He did not contact the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund for assistance in his case.
CBLDF Executive Director Charles Brownstein says, “At this time, little is known about the material Bee pleaded guilty to possessing. Based on the government’s characterization of the material, I remain unpersuaded that it is legally obscene under the Supreme Court’s Miller obscenity test. It is also distressing that Bee is being sent to prison for mere possession of obscene material, where there is precedent that the court’s power ‘does not extend to mere possession by ...
February 1st, 2013
Three Things Students Can Do Now to Promote Open Access
The open access movement is a long-standing campaign in the world of research to make scholarly works freely available and reusable. One of its fundamental premises is that the progress of knowledge and culture happens scholarly works of all kinds are widely shared, not hidden in ivory towers built with paywalls and shorn by harsh legal regimes.
Scholarly journal publishers currently compile research done by professors (for free), send articles out to be peer reviewed (for free), and distribute the edited journals back to universities around the world (for costs anywhere up to $35,000 each). Subscription prices have outpaced inflation by over 250 percent in the past 30 years, and these fees go straight to the publisher. Neither the authors nor their institutions are paid a cent, and the research itself—which is largely funded by taxpayers—remains difficult to attain. Skyrocketing costs have forced university libraries—even Harvard's, the richest American university—to pick and choose between journal subscriptions.
The result: students and citizens face barriers accessing information they need; professors have a harder time reviewing and teaching the state of the art; and cutting-edge research remains hidden behind paywalls, depriving it of the visibility it deserves.
The good news is that ...
February 1st, 2013
College Paper Sparks Debate Over Social and Racial Commentary in Cartoons
On January 24th, the editorial board of the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s student newspaper, The Badger Herald, decided not to run artist Vincent Cheng’s “Ya Boi, Inc.” comic strip for that day. Cheng’s strip (shown above) depicts a middle-aged man updating his musical “Likes” on Facebook based not on his actual interests but on their cultural value. After liking some “interesting” and classical music, the man decides he needs to add “some ‘mainstream’ artists that I surprisingly claim to sincerely enjoy.” The man does not actually know any mainstream artists so after pondering for a second, he asks himself, “What are the names of some black people?”
The Badger‘s Editor-in-Chief Ryan Rainey decided to not run the cartoon, a decision that was supported by his two chief advisers. Rainey’s decision was based on the possibility that UW’s campus would misinterpret the cartoon; he argues that “editors of college newspapers like the Herald, which has been at the center of many unnecessary and preventable campus-wide controversies before and throughout my time here, often have to take a lesser-of-two-evils approach to those ethical decisions.”
Rainey feels the risk was not worth it, explaining that “I did not feel like ...