Cyberlaw Cases

In today’s New York Times, there is an excellent article on the ongoing battle between companies and consumers over online criticism. In addition to discussing the various lawsuits that have been brought, the article also noted the following:

Recognizing that lawsuits can bring more unwanted attention, one organization has taken a different tack. The group Medical Justice, which helps protect doctors from meritless malpractice suits, advises its members to have patients sign an agreement that gives the doctor copyright over a Web posting if the patient mentions the doctor or practice.

Dr. Jeffrey Segal, chief executive of Medical Justice, said about half of the group’s 2,500 members use the agreement.

“I, like everyone else, like to hear two sides of the story,” he said. “The problem is that physicians are foreclosed from ever responding because of state and federal privacy laws. In the rare circumstance that a posting is false, fictional or fraudulent, the doctor now has the tool to get that post taken down.”

This so-called “agreement” strikes me as both legally and ethically suspect. Not only does copyright law generally require written assignments of copyright to be for some kind of payment (what is the payment here? The medical treatment? I thought that was what health insurance and co-pays were for?) but unless it is a work-for hire or some other kind of ongoing employment relationship, you generally can’t force people to assign their copyright in a web posting before it is written.

Moreover, such an agreement seems unethical under the American Medical Association Ethics Code. AMA Ethics Opinion 8.03 states:

Under no circumstances may physicians place their own financial interests above the welfare of their patients. The primary objective of the medical profession is to render service to humanity; reward or financial gain is a subordinate consideration. For a physician to unnecessarily hospitalize a patient, prescribe a drug, or conduct diagnostic tests for the physician’s financial benefit is unethical. If a conflict develops between the physician’s financial interest and the physician’s responsibilities to the patient, the conflict must be resolved to the patient’s benefit.

Since the main concern of Medical Justice appears to be preventing harm to the physician’s reputation (and thus financial interest), forcing patients to assign away their copyrights in exchange for medical care strikes me as close if not over this line. It certainly is not putting patients first. When a patient goes to see a doctor, they are often anxious, in pain, or worried and thus in a very psychologically vulnerable position, or what the law often calls a position of “duress” where they will often sign documents without giving them proper consideration. This hardly seems to me to be a fair time to demand they assign some unknown number of future copyrights to their doctor; instead it feels like a huge power grab by the physician.

Moreover, as Dr. Segal states in the article, these so-called “assignments” of copyright become a “tool” to take posts down from the Web. One can surmise that he intends for these doctors to invoke the notice-and-takedown provisions of Section 512 of the DMCA as a convenient way to censor criticism and cajole websites like Yelp! to remove the postings. However, this too strikes me as unethical and a potential abuse of the DMCA system. The DMCA takedown system was meant to allow copyright owners whose works were being posted online by others and costing them sales of copyrighted goods (e.g. movies and music) to enjoy an expedited process for stopping infringement and limiting economic harm to their content.

Here, it is clear that these web postings have no economic value as content to the physicians — rather they are, at best, potentially harmful to their reputations (note again, though, that this would likely be a violation of their ethical duty either way).

I should note that much of this is speculation on my part. I have not seen this so-called agreement and have not heard of any doctor taking things off the web based on it; but it does strike me as ironic that a group like Medical Justice, which proclaims its mission as “relentlessly protecting physicians from frivolous lawsuits” would embrace and endorse potentially frivolous, unethical, and abusive legal documents and actions to further its goals.

Case and Court:

American Booksellers Foundation For Free Expression v. Strickland, No. 07-4375 (6th Cir. Apr. 15, 2010).

See our prior coverage of this case in State Efforts to Regulate the Internet, coverage of the oral argument before the Supreme Court of Ohio, and when the Ohio Supreme Court adopted a narrow reading of this anti-dissemination statute.

On April 15, 2010, the Sixth Circuit, now working with the benefit of the Ohio Supreme Court’s narrow reading of Ohio’s anti-dissemination statute, upheld the constitutionality of Ohio Revised Code § 2907.31(D), reversing the district court.

You’ll recall that the statute prohibits providing material and performances with certain sexual content to juveniles, while exempting material and performances disseminated to a juvenile by a “method of mass distribution [which] does not provide the [sender] the ability to prevent a particular recipient from receiving the information.” O.R.C. § 2907.31(D)(2)(b). On certified questions from the Sixth Circuit, the Ohio Supreme Court limited the scope of the statute to personally-directed communications and not those communicated through generally accessible websites or public chatrooms where an individual cannot control whether a particular recipient is a juvenile. With the benefit of this narrow construction, the Sixth Circuit found that the statute was neither overbroad nor vague in violation of the First Amendment. The Court further held that the statute did not violate the dormant Commerce Clause as it it did not affect out-of-state actors differently than in-state actors.

Both sides are apparently declaring victory, and so long as the statute really is only applied narrowly to personally-directed communications, this is a fine result. However, it has been somewhat unsatisfying to watch both the Ohio Supreme Court and the Sixth Circuit dodge the most difficult questions posed by the broadly-worded portions of this statute. The Sixth Circuit merely tells us that

“in determining whether a new communication technology or device is covered under section 2907.31(D), future courts must determine whether that technology is more similar to ones which are personally directed, like an email, or those that are generally accessible, like postings on a public website.”

The problem is not that future courts that will have to determine how to apply this statute to new technologies, but rather that it remains less than clear how it applies to existing technologies, such as listservs, chat rooms or other web services where one arguably has the “ability” to limit one’s communications to a select group of individuals depending upon how “ability” is interpreted. Both the Ohio Supreme Court and the Sixth Circuit had the opportunity to definitively foreclose such applications of the statute by overzealous prosecutors, but failed to do so. I certainly think the better argument going forward is that the statute must be narrowly construed, but with these less-than-comprehensive rulings, there remains the slightest room for a prosecutor to attempt an overly broad reading in some remaining contexts, and then we will have to revisit these same arguments all over again.

See also:

• William Hershey, Anti-porn law ruled OK by court, Dayton Daily News (Apr. 16, 2010).

Case and Court

• Am. Booksellers Found. for Free Expression v. Strickland (6th Cir.), on certified questions to Ohio Supreme Court as Cordray v. Am. Booksellers Found. for Free Expression.

On January 27, 2010 the Ohio Supreme Court issued its opinion in American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression v. Cordray. We previously wrote about the oral argument in this case, and discussed this case with other state efforts to regulate the internet.

To recap, this case involved the Sixth Circuit’s certification of questions of state law for the Ohio Supreme Court to consider, particularly whether the Ohio Attorney General was correct to construe narrowly Ohio’s R.C. 2907.31, an anti-dissemination statute aimed at restricting material deemed harmful to minors, such that its application be limited to personally directed communications via instant messaging, person-to-person e-mails, and private chat rooms and not to material posted on generally accessible websites and in public chat rooms.

The Ohio Supreme Court agreed with the Attorney General’s narrow reading. The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression had instead urged the court to find the statute unconstitutional and leave the task of writing a constitutional statute to the Ohio state legislature.

In a very short opinion the Ohio Supreme Court believed the statute could be salvaged because the Ohio Attorney General claims “that a person who does not ‘know or have reason to believe that a particular recipient of the information or offer is a juvenile’ does not violate the statute upon transmitting harmful-to-juveniles material, even if a minor receives it.” Thus, the Court limited the scope of the statute to personally-directed communications and not those communicated through generally accessible websites or public chatrooms where an individual cannot control whether a particular recipient is a juvenile.

Particularly disappointing in this opinion was the Court’s avoidance of the tough hypothetical questions asked at oral argument. At oral argument the parties discussed email listservs where a sender might have knowledge or reason to believe that juveniles were subscribers but because of the nature of listserv technology a sender would lack the ability to restrict recipients. Any time one had reason to believe at least one juvenile were subscribed to a list, one would be forced to restrict one’s otherwise permissible adult-to-adult communications via that list or run afoul of this statute. As I wrote before, this may be the right policy result, but it is not what the statute says in section (D)(2)(b). The court fails to discuss listservs at all, leaving this question unresolved.

However, recall that this case had an odd posture in which both parties were essentially arguing for this same narrow reading of the statute. With the above-mentioned exception of greater clarity on listservs, mailing lists, and perhaps USENET groups that ABFFE desired, both ABFFE and the Attorney General can claim something of a victory here. The case now returns to the Sixth Circuit and we will see how they apply the Ohio Supreme Court’s interpretation of this statute.

See also:

• James Nash, State high court upholds Net law to protect kids, The Columbus Dispatch (Jan. 28, 2010).
• Laura A. Bischoff, Anti-predator porn law doesn’t apply to web sites, Dayton Daily News (Jan. 28, 2010).
• Julie Carr Smyth, Ohio high court narrowly interprets anti-porn law, BusinessWeek (Jan. 27, 2010).

Case and Court

• Am. Booksellers Found. for Free Expression v. Strickland (6th Cir.), on certified questions to Ohio Supreme Court as Cordray v. Am. Booksellers Found. for Free Expression.

In our previous coverage of state efforts to regulate the internet, we discussed the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression’s challenge to Ohio’s O.R.C. § 2907.31, which prohibits providing material and performances with certain sexual content to juveniles, while exempting material and performances disseminated to a juvenile by a “method of mass distribution [which] does not provide the [sender] the ability to prevent a particular recipient from receiving the information.” O.R.C. § 2907.31(D)(2)(b).

The Sixth Circuit certified two questions regarding the appropriate interpretation of the statute to the Ohio Supreme Court, which heard oral argument in the case on Oct. 20, 2009. You can view video of the oral argument from the Supreme Court of Ohio’s website:

Continue Reading »

Cases and Courts:

• The King’s English, Inc. v. Shurtleff (D. Utah), now Florence v. Shurtleff.
• Am. Booksellers Found. for Free Expression v. Strickland (6th Cir.), on certified questions to Ohio Supreme Court as Cordray v. Am. Booksellers Found. for Free Expression.
• Interactive Media Ent’mt & Gaming Ass’n v. Wingate (Ky. Ct. App.), on appeal to Kentucky Supreme Court as Commonwealth v. Interactive Media Ent’mt & Gaming Ass’n.

Background

States are struggling to determine whether and how they can regulate the internet in those areas where the federal government has either chosen not to regulate or where its efforts have proven unconstitutional. Congress has had significant difficulty regulating indecent and obscene material online and in keeping it away from minors. In particular, the prohibitions in the Communications Decency Act (”CDA”) against transmitting or displaying indecent or obscene material were held unconstitutional in Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997) and the Child Online Protection Act (”COPA”), which sought to criminalize posting material “harmful to minors” was also held unconstitutional in Ashcroft v. ACLU, 542 U.S. 656 (2004).

More recently Congress has sought to regulate internet gambling, enacting the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (”UIGEA”), 31 U.S.C. §§ 5361-5367. The UIGEA, however, does not itself criminalize internet gambling, but instead prohibits the use of the internet to transfer funds in circumstances where doing so already violates another state, federal, or tribal law.

The failures of the CDA and COPA, and the narrow scope of the UIGEA have created a situation in which many states seek to address these issues of internet regulation themselves, although the states too run into constitutional difficulties. Continue Reading »