Law Commons^™

First Amendment, Fourth Estate & Hot News: Misappropriation Is Not A Solution To The Journalism Crisis, Joseph A. Tomain

Joseph A Tomain

Journalism is a public good. The Framers understood the importance of a free press in a self-governing society and embedded a structural right for freedom of the press in the First Amendment. There is a journalism crisis. Symptoms of the crisis include layoffs of journalists, diminishing content in newspapers and shuttering of newspapers. The rise of online technologies has exacerbated the crisis, mainly by siphoning advertising revenue away from traditional news organizations to free classified advertisement websites such as Craigslist, search engines and myriad other non-journalistic online endeavors. The internet, however, is not the main cause of the journalism crisis. …

The Mythical Right To Obscurity, Heidi R. Anderson

Heidi R Anderson

In several states, citizens who videotaped police misconduct and distributed the videos via the Internet recently were arrested for violating state wiretapping statutes. These arrests highlight a clash between two key interests—the public’s desire to hold the officers accountable via exposure and the officers’ desire to keep the information private. The arrests also raise an oft-debated privacy law question: When should something done or said in public nevertheless be legally protected as private?

For decades, the answer has been: “There can be no privacy in that which is already public.” However, given recent technological developments (e.g., cell phone cameras and …