FBI vs. Wikipedia (LawStrut R)
nzshadow
5,526 Posts
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/us/03fbi.html?_r=1
[email=http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/us/20100803-wiki-LetterFromLarson.pdf]Letter from FBI to Wikipedia[/email]
[email=http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/us/20100803-wiki-LetterToLarson.pdf]Reply from Wikipedia[/email]
August 2, 2010
F.B.I., Challenging Use of Seal, Gets Back a Primer on the Law
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has taken on everyone from Al Capone to John Dillinger to the Unabomber. Its latest adversary: Wikipedia.
The bureau wrote a letter in July to the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia, demanding that it take down an image of the F.B.I. seal accompanying an article on the bureau, and threatened litigation: ???Failure to comply may result in further legal action. We appreciate your timely attention to this matter.???
The problem, those at Wikipedia say, is that the law cited in the F.B.I.???s letter is largely about keeping people from flashing fake badges or profiting from the use of the seal, and not about posting images on noncommercial Web sites. Many sites, including the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, display the seal.
Other organizations might simply back down. But Wikipedia sent back a politely feisty response, stating that the bureau???s lawyers had misquoted the law. ???While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version??? that the F.B.I. had provided.
Michael Godwin, the general counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote, ???we are prepared to argue our view in court.??? He signed off, ???with all appropriate respect.???
An F.B.I. spokesman, William Carter, said that such letters go out ???from time to time??? from the office of general counsel.
???You can???t use the F.B.I. seal, by law, unless you have the permission of the F.B.I. director,??? he said.
Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the dust-up both ???silly??? and ???troubling???; Wikipedia has a First Amendment right to display the seal, she said.
???Really,??? she added, ???I have to believe the F.B.I. has better things to do than this.???
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Wow, thats a great response, id be interested to hear some of our resident lawyers opinions on this.
[email=http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/us/20100803-wiki-LetterFromLarson.pdf]Letter from FBI to Wikipedia[/email]
[email=http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/us/20100803-wiki-LetterToLarson.pdf]Reply from Wikipedia[/email]
August 2, 2010
F.B.I., Challenging Use of Seal, Gets Back a Primer on the Law
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has taken on everyone from Al Capone to John Dillinger to the Unabomber. Its latest adversary: Wikipedia.
The bureau wrote a letter in July to the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia, demanding that it take down an image of the F.B.I. seal accompanying an article on the bureau, and threatened litigation: ???Failure to comply may result in further legal action. We appreciate your timely attention to this matter.???
The problem, those at Wikipedia say, is that the law cited in the F.B.I.???s letter is largely about keeping people from flashing fake badges or profiting from the use of the seal, and not about posting images on noncommercial Web sites. Many sites, including the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, display the seal.
Other organizations might simply back down. But Wikipedia sent back a politely feisty response, stating that the bureau???s lawyers had misquoted the law. ???While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version??? that the F.B.I. had provided.
Michael Godwin, the general counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote, ???we are prepared to argue our view in court.??? He signed off, ???with all appropriate respect.???
An F.B.I. spokesman, William Carter, said that such letters go out ???from time to time??? from the office of general counsel.
???You can???t use the F.B.I. seal, by law, unless you have the permission of the F.B.I. director,??? he said.
Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the dust-up both ???silly??? and ???troubling???; Wikipedia has a First Amendment right to display the seal, she said.
???Really,??? she added, ???I have to believe the F.B.I. has better things to do than this.???
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Wow, thats a great response, id be interested to hear some of our resident lawyers opinions on this.
Comments
Whoever manufactures, sells, or possesses any badge, identification card, or other insignia, of the design prescribed by the head of any department or agency of the United States for use by any officer or employee thereof, or any colorable imitation thereof, or photographs, prints, or in any other manner makes or executes any engraving, photograph, print, or impression in the likeness of any such badge, identification card, or other insignia, or any colorable imitation thereof, except as authorized under regulations made pursuant to law, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
like that?
As a non-lawyer, I read this as pertaining to physical copies or representations - does displaying it on a web page qualify as physical?
I'm also guessing that the FBI objects because this makes the seal easily copied by anybody who cares to do so. As though that weren't already the case.
From the letter:
The underlined words are conclusive proof that the canon of statutory construction ejusdem
generis applies. Under that principle, ???where general words follow specific words in a statutory
enumeration, the general words are construed to embrace only objects similar in nature to those
objects enumerated by the preceding specific words.??? Circuit City Stores, Inc. v. Adams, 532
U.S. 105, 114-15 (2001). Courts use ejusdem generis in conjunction with common sense and
legislative history to discern the legislature???s intent in writing a statute.
You will note that the phrase ???or other??? precedes the word ???insignia???, both of which follow the
enumerated items ???badges??? and ???identification cards.??? This constrains the definition of insignia
to those objects which are similar in nature to badges and identification cards. This definition
comports with case law interpreting 701. As I have noted above (I???m requoting this passage
because I truly love it), ???the enactment of section 701 was intended to protect the public
against the use of a recognizable assertion of authority with intent to deceive.??? United States v.
Goeltz, 513 F.2d 193, 197 (10th Cir. 1975) (contrasting political use of insignia with
defendants??? conduct, which ???was of the dirty-trick variety and was for the purpose of enraging
its victims???). Badges and identification cards are physical manifestations that may be used by a
possessor to invoke the authority of the federal government. An encyclopedia article is not. The
use of the image on Wikipedia is not for the purpose of deception or falsely to represent anyone
as an agent of the federal government. Using both ejusdem generis and common sense, we can
see that 701 does not apply to the use of an image on an online encyclopedia.
From the holding in United States v. Goeltz, 513 F.2d 193, 197 (10th Cir. 1975).
Next, defendants argue that the statute does not apply to them. Using the principle of ejusdem generis, they say that the reference to ???badge, identification card, or other insignia??? limits insignia to badges and identification cards. Ejusdem generis is a canon of construction and may not be used to defeat the intent of Congress. United States v. Alpers, 338 U.S. 680, 682, 70 S.Ct. 352, 94 L.Ed. 457 and Gooch v. United States, 297 U.S. 124, 128, 56 S.Ct. 395, 80 L.Ed. 522. The enactment of s 701 was intended to protect the public against the use of a recognizable assertion of authority with intent to deceive. Defendants' conduct was well within the statute's proscription.
fbi = 0
its funny things like this that make me question what the hell is going on in the world, its not like wikipedia is attempting to impersonate the FBI, i have a t-shirt with the fbi logo on it, does that instantly make me the fbi or someone who is trying to be an fbi agent....
bollocks i say!
FEMALE BODY INSPECTOR
I'd slam that smart ass wiki lawyer with a criminal prosecution and see how cute his bosses think he is when they have to defend against that.
I like this. You sound like one of them real American lawyers from the TV.
Do you party?
A great use of the Bureau's budget and that of DOJ.
I'm wearing such a T-shirt right this very moment--I got it back when I worked for the FBI as a summer job, which I guess puts me in the clear?
You really want to go there?
Ms. Flowers agrees that they should be spending their time and money elsewhere...
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Christine M. Flowers: The New Black Panthers voting-rights case has nine lives
By Christine M. Flowers
Philadelphia Daily News
IN SPRING 1967, my father was a young lawyer trying to figure out what to do with rest of his professional life.
As an editor of Temple's Law Review, he had choices. But before embarking on a career that eventually led him to be named a "Legend of the Philadelphia Bar," Dad took a detour to Mississippi.
The year before Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, Tenn., Ted Flowers spent a summer registering African-Americans to vote and run for office in Copiah County. His journals tell tales that sound as if they were ripped from the pages of "To Kill a Mockingbird," including one incident he and some other lawyers experienced on the steps of a small courthouse:
"In the course of the next few seconds, we were called 'white n---s,' 'n--r lovers' and a few other names unworthy to print. I was amazed by all of this and couldn't help looking over at them. The expressions on their faces mirrored an intense hatred of us personally, and of everything we stood for. Even the small children seemed to wish us dead. It made me feel ill to know that there were people in America who differed very little in my judgment from those who manned Auschwitz in 1944."
I thought of Dad when I heard about what happened at a polling place in North Philly on Election Day 2008. Some militants of the New Black Panthers went to a polling place near the old Richard Allen Projects and strutted their stuff, complete with uniforms and billy clubs. Their clear intent was to intimidate people exercising their right to vote in what many called a historic election.
The story is old, but after a few brief mentions here at the time, people haven't heard much about it until recently. That's because the mainstream press, usually sensitive to the mere whiff of voter intimidation and ethnically insensitive behavior, basically dumped it.
Now, though, it (almost) can't avoid it. This week, a former career federal prosecutor appeared before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and talked about how the Obama Justice Department mishandled a violation of the Voting Rights Act. The irony is apparent: The black attorney general is in the cross hairs for failing to prosecute a case of racial intimidation that happened to occur on the day of the first black president's greatest glory.
J. Christian Adams resigned from the Justice Department in May to protest what he saw as a blatant violation of the department's responsibility to the American people - to enforce the laws in a race-neutral way.
In an article in the Washington Times, he described what happened when a DOJ headed by Eric Holder and filled with political appointees of a decidedly liberal stripe decided to derail the prosecution of the New Black Panthers, who had already been convicted by default by not even bothering to show up to defend themselves. Justice simply dropped the case, refusing to seek any criminal or civil penalties against all but one of the violators. Adams attributes this decision to "the open and pervasive hostility within the Justice Department to bringing civil rights cases against nonwhite defendants on behalf of white victims."
WHILE THERE might have been legitimate reasons to derail the prosecution before convictions were obtained against the Panther defendants (although none is apparent in this case), there was absolutely no reasonable excuse for dropping claims that had already been won by the government, even if by default.
I tried to get an answer from the NAACP, since it's one of the foremost organizations in this country concerned with voter rights. I thought it might have some idea why Justice would decide to drop a case of voter intimidation after a significant victory.
Their response? "No comment." (Maybe not surprising, since Adams testified that the NAACP actually lobbied the Obama administration to drop the prosecution.)
Fact is, when reason goes out the window, conspiracy theory creeps in through the back door. The president and his crew have no one to blame but themselves for the impression they've created that they don't care about the civil rights of nonminorities, at least not at polling places. With no valid explanation for essentially letting a small band of domestic terrorists run wild on Election Day, you have to believe that this administration doesn't exactly see the Voting Rights Act the way my father did.
And that's a tragedy.
Christine M. Flowers is a lawyer.
Read more: http://www.philly.com/dailynews/opinion/20100709_Christine_M__Flowers__The_New_Black_Panthers_voting-rights_case_has_nine_lives.html#ixzz0vZSQZAdp
No one came forward saying they had been intimidated. So there was no case.
A couple of idiots yelling in front of a polling place does not a federal case make.
It just makes for hours of yahoo baiting on Fox News.
No, it proves that OBAMA'S GOT A SECRET PLAN TO MAKE WHITE PEOPLE PAY REPARATIONS TO BLACK PEOPLE!
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Why-did-feds-claim-Kindle-violates-civil-rights_-1006723-99801389.html
From its introduction in 2007, the Kindle has drawn criticism from the National Federation of the Blind and other activist groups. While the Kindle's text-to-speech feature could read a book aloud, its menu functions required sight to operate. "If you could get a sighted person to fire up the device and start reading the book to you, that's fine," says Chris Danielsen, a spokesman for the federation. "But other than that, there was really no way to use it."
God, you just can't make this shit up.