Judge sets precedent for online reporting – will it affect the Veitch trial?

This week in the Manukau District Court, Judge David Harvey issued a supression order banning online news organisations (and presumably bloggers) from naming two men who have been committed for trail over the murder of 14-year-old John Hapeta on August 12.

The supression order does not apply to print and broadcast media. The judge’s reasoning is interesting. He argued that people (including potential jurors) could “Google” the information during the trial leading to possible prejudicial outcomes and also that material on the Internet tends to go “viral” within a short space of time.

According the the NZ Herald:

Judge Harvey teaches the Law and Information Technology course at the University of Auckland. The course looks at the way technology impacts on evidence, jurisdiction and freedom of information.

Judge Harvey has also written a textbook on the internet and law called internet.law.nz.

Perhaps he needs to read my material on the techno-legal time gap. I’ve written about this idea – which is fairly basic – that the law and regulatory regimes do not always keep up with the technology and what it can do.

Communication and New Media

I also wonder if this ruling might be a precedent that the judge sitting on the Tony Veitch case might consider. There’s already concern that some media outlets may have breached the sub judice rule by publishing details of the charges against Mr Veitch over last weekend.

As others have pointed out, the idea that we might all have to go through our online archives and delete references to pending, or live court cases is a bit scary.

Lawyers for the various media companies are scrambling to interepret the ruling and there may well be a challenged to the suppression orders.

A web of mundanity?

In a recent post I suggested that the blogosphere is now “officially mundane”. [Baby Herbal Soup]
I felt at the time EM readers might think that comment a bit pretentious and a bit of a put-down. It wasn’t meant that way, so I figured I should explain myself. I like to be provocative (in case you hadn’t noticed), but I also like to develop arguments and cases to back up my provocations. It’s the polemic method of a teacher.

The opportunity for further reflection and articulation of the Internet=Mundane idea has presented itself this week with a number of interesting news stories that show what I mean:

a Sky News story about the university gossip site, JuicyCampus, and attempts to have it banned on campuses

an NZ herald story about teenagers sending inappropriate images of themselves to each other then finding them in the public eye unexpectedly

a Sunday Star Times story about an irate online buyer who went round to an online seller’s house and forced him to remove comments posted to the Trade Me site about their transaction.

On any given day these “what were they thinking?” and “weird news” stories are in the media, they’re an indicator of something more profound.

[Dribblejaws alert: If you don’t like “theory”, go away now]

Copyright and fair dealing

What is the protocol about linking to content and using photographs in blogs about the media? I wonder because today I was asked to remove a photograph from a blog post on the grounds it was a breach of copyright.

The photograph was obtained by the newspaper from someone involved in the story; it wasn’t shot by a staff photographer. According an email in the correspondence chain between the publication and I, the owner of the image had vested copyright in the news organisation and I was in breach of this copyright by linking to the image in my blog.