Daily Archives: May 9, 2012

Just as the New York Times can decide All the News Thats Fit to Print, search engines have a free speech right to choose who or what to put in their search rankings.

Thats the conclusion of a prominent First Amendment scholar commissioned by Google to make the case that the government cant tell search engines how to design their results.

A Free Speech Right?

According to the report authored by UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh: Google, Microsofts Bing, Yahoo! Search and other search engine companies are rightly seen as media enterprises, much as the New York Times Company or CNN are media enterprises and deserve the same protections. It adds that search engines have the same freedom to choose a set of links as do news aggregators like the Drudge Report or the Huffington Post.

Search engine results are a form of opinion, says the report, in which companies offer information they think is most relevant to users.

In practice, this would mean Google has the right to punt sites like Yelp, which has complained that Google is a monopolist, to the search equivalent of Siberia if it decided that was best for users (Yelp now comes up second in a search for restaurant review).

The US has a long history of companies claiming First Amendment protections. One example is a newspaper that was allowed to exclude certain advertisers even though it had a substantial monopoly.

The courts have also made a few exceptions to the free speech rule. One case involved a publisher that was sued for providing inaccurate flight maps. Another involved cable providers which, a court said, did not have a free speech right to exclude certain channels.

Volokhs report says those free speech exceptions dont apply to search engines because, unlike cable providers, its not just a pipe for information. It also echoes Google position that consumers can easily use a competing search engine.

In an interview, Volokh said Googles situation is also similar to a 1980s case in which an author launched a failed suit against the New York Times over the accuracy of the newspapers weekly best-seller list.

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Search engines have same speech rights as the New York Times, says Google report

Just as the New York Times can decide All the News Thats Fit to Print, search engines have a free speech right to choose who or what to put in their search rankings.

Thats the conclusion of a prominent First Amendment scholar commissioned by Google to make the case that the government cant tell search engines how to design their results.

A Free Speech Right?

According to the report authored by UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh: Google, Microsofts Bing, Yahoo! Search and other search engine companies are rightly seen as media enterprises, much as the New York Times Company or CNN are media enterprises and deserve the same protections. It adds that search engines have the same freedom to choose a set of links as do news aggregators like the Drudge Report or the Huffington Post.

Search engine results are a form of opinion, says the report, in which companies offer information they think is most relevant to users.

In practice, this would mean Google has the right to punt sites like Yelp, which has complained that Google is a monopolist, to the search equivalent of Siberia if it decided that was best for users (Yelp now comes up second in a search for restaurant review).

The US has a long history of companies claiming First Amendment protections. One example is a newspaper that was allowed to exclude certain advertisers even though it had a substantial monopoly.

The courts have also made a few exceptions to the free speech rule. One case involved a publisher that was sued for providing inaccurate flight maps. Another involved cable providers which, a court said, did not have a free speech right to exclude certain channels.

Volokhs report says those free speech exceptions dont apply to search engines because, unlike cable providers, its not just a pipe for information. It also echoes Google position that consumers can easily use a competing search engine.

In an interview, Volokh said Googles situation is also similar to a 1980s case in which an author launched a failed suit against the New York Times over the accuracy of the newspapers weekly best-seller list.

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Search engines have same speech rights as New York Times says Google report

As various levels of government both in the U.S. and around the world have stepped up their attempts to track down dissidents through social networks, the pressure has intensified on companies like Twitter and Facebook to comply with these demands even at the expense of their users privacy. Despite that pressure, Twitter at least seems determined to fight these incursions wherever possible. As a case in point, the company has filed a motion in New York state court to quash a court order compelling it to hand over information about a user involved in the Occupy Wall Street protests, arguing that the order violates that individuals rights.

The case in question involves a protester by the name of Malcolm Harris, whose Twitter handle was @destructuremal, and who was involved in a protest against Wall Street financial mismanagement in October of 2011 that saw more than 700 people arrested for a variety of charges, including destruction of public property and resisting arrest. Earlier this year, the New York district attorneys office sent Twitter a subpoena for information relating to Harris use of the network during the protest including personal details about him, and also specific messages that he sent.

As my PaidContent colleague Jeff John Roberts reported last month, Harris attempt to have this court order struck down failed for a somewhat unusual reason: namely, the judge hearing the case decided that Harris did not have any legal interest in the tweets he sent, because such rights only apply to things a user actually owns and users do not own their tweets for the purposes of the U.S. Constitution. According to the judge:

While the Fourth Amendment provides protection for our physical homes, we do not have a physical home on the Internet some of our most private information is sent to third parties and held far away on remote network servers.

Now Twitter has stepped in to try and force the court to quash the order, as reported first by the American Civil Liberties Union blog. According to Twitters motion (embedded below) the judges decision that Harris doesnt own his tweets contradicts both Twitters terms of use which specifically state that a users retain [their] rights to any Content [they] submit, post or display on or through the service as well as the federal Stored Communications Act, which the Twitter motion says expressly permits users to challenge demands for their account records.

Twitter seems to be stepping up its opposition to these kinds of cases: in an earlier case related to the Boston version of the Occupy protests, Twitter handed over a users data to Boston police after they submitted a court order alleging that the user in question who went by the names @@pOisAnON and Guido Fawkes was involved in a hacking attempt on the police department. But the company said that it only handed over the minimum amount of information required by the police investigation.

And while the company ultimately gave this user data to the Boston police, it defied a request not to make the police departments court order public, something it has also done in the past in more serious cases, such as the Justice Departments attempts to get details about the Twitter activity of WikiLeaks supporters such as Jacob Appelbaum and Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir. In that case, Twitter fought for the right to tell users that authorities were seeking the information unlike a number of other companies who likely also got similar requests although the company was eventually ordered to provide the data.

As it has evolved from being just a social toy into a real-time information network used by Arab Spring dissidents in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, Twitter has repeatedly affirmed its commitment to free speech by its users both in blog posts about how the tweets must flow despite attempts by governments to stop them, and in comments by CEO Dick Costolo and general counsel Alex Macgillivray that the company is the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.

That commitment was questioned by some when the company announced late last year that it had developed the capacity to selectively censor content from the network within specific countries, but Twitter stressed that it would only do this if required by law, and that it would publicize these requests at the Chilling Effects website. The latest moves in the Harris case suggest that Twitter plans to continue fighting for the rights of its users, and also that it intends to make these battles as public as possible. And Harris, who now tweets under the name @BigMeanInternet, seems pretty thankful.

http://www.scribd.com/embeds/92886294/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list

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Twitter: We’re still the free-speech wing of the free-speech party