« January 12, 2014 - January 18, 2014 | Main | January 26, 2014 - February 01, 2014 »
January 25, 2014
Defendant-Tweeter Courtney Love Prevails in First Twitter Libel Trial.
Chalk up a victory and some trail-blazing for rocker Courtney Love. On its unusual facts, and given somewhat implausible testimony on both sides, the first Twitter libel case to go to trial sounds like a poor test case. But "Twibel" of course is making lots of headlines anyway. See, e.g., the Los Angeles Times' coverage of yesterday's jury verdict for Love in a case brought by her ex-attorney Rhonda Holmes. It springs from Love's defamatory, evidently inaccurate and slightly cryptic June 2010 tweet that attorney Holmes had been "bought off". The Los Angeles jury found that Love did not know the defamatory tweet was false, and did not act recklessly. Excerpt from the Los Angeles Times piece:
Dubbed "Twibel," the civil suit seeking $8 million was filed by Rhonda Holmes, who had once acted as Love's fraud litigation attorney. The singer-actress filed her own complaint against Holmes, claiming legal malpractice.
Holmes had been hired in December 2008 to look into missing funds from the estate of Kurt Cobain, Love's late husband.
Holmes and Love parted ways after less than six months. The attorney alleged that the relationship had been contingent on Love refraining from substance abuse, a stipulation that eventually angered the singer. The attorney also said that Love became a difficult client and wouldn't return calls.
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Courtney Love performing at the Dream Downtown in Manhattan, New York, September 9th, 2013. (Source: Studio Havens/Marie Havens)
Posted by JD Hull at 03:26 PM | Comments (0)
January 24, 2014
UPDATED: The Week in Wild West Shows: Free Speech, Dueling & Other Manly Arts.
The Wild West Show that is still the blogosphere can get ugly. There are some rough spots. Apart from law that governs our discourse on the Internet, we are still in the process of creating--and learning--the folkways of cyberspace. Most are unwritten common sense do's and dont's of how to behave as we sort things out in the ether. And there are lessons. Some of the lessons come with a short-term price. This week's lessons emerged from a week-long multi-participant brawl, triggered by a young lawyer's testosterone-drenched reaction to a post Scott Greenfield penned way back on December 2. Specifics and vigorous coverage are in the links below.
But let it be known here that Greenfield deftly moderated comments in a four-post (yes, he wrote four) round-the-clock discussion this past week. When Greenfield himself came under attack, he got an informed, elegant and King-Hell funny defense from Ken White at Popehat. Free speech was the overall topic. Subtopics: plagiarism, intellectual property, commercial speech, defamation, how to write, how to persuade, emotional intelligence, your online footprint, Internet culture clash and avoiding the appearance of a certain ethnocentrism. If you want lessons, there are scads in this story. So, for some teaching posts, see here, here, here and here by Greenfield at Simple Justice and this one by Ken White at Popehat. Thanks, you two. We learned something. And you got us all thinking about our new ditigal world.
UPDATE. There were other sage posts covering this week's Speechfest. In no particular order:
This Lawyer Just Failed Blogging and Social Media Basics by lawyer-journalist Bill Peacock at FindLaw's Strategist.
Bring a First Aid Kit: Online Damage Control for Lawyers by Mark Bennett at Defending People.
What Is The First Rule Of Holes? Bueller…Bueller? by Mike G at That Mr. G Guy's Blog.
12 Steps To Ruining Your Reputation by Keith Lee at his weekly Above The Law column.
Not every wrong act violates a black-letter ethics rule by fellow Maryland lawyer Bruce Godfrey.
Burr v. Hamilton, July 11, 1804, Weehawken, NJ (Wikipedia Commons)
Posted by JD Hull at 03:17 PM | Comments (0)
January 22, 2014
Got sand?
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)