Internet

An online reporter qualifies as a journalist entitled to certain protections under state law, a Texas appellate court ruled last month.

A judge in Illinois has rejected the Alton Telegraph's argument that the identities of anonymous commenters on a newspaper's Web site are protected by the state's shield law, The Associated Press reports.

A California court ruled last week that a high school principal who sent a copy of a MySpace journal entry to a local newspaper is not liable for invading the Web author’s privacy.

A Tennessee state court refused to unmask an anonymous blogger last week, citing the recent Maryland high court decision that upheld a balancing test for identifying anonymous speakers on the Internet, the Citizen Media Law Project reports.

Maryland’s highest court on Friday ruled that a newspaper company does not have to reveal the identities of three people who commented anonymously on a newspaper-owned community forum Web site.

In upholding the right to anonymous speech, the court also for the first time adopted a standard for lower courts to apply when dealing with anonymous defendants in defamation cases.

The York Daily Record/Sunday News reports that the company that owns its online readers' comment section is expected to turn over the personal information of anonymous individuals who commented on a Daily Record/Sunday News story about a Dec. 28 murder.

A gossip Web site that took college campuses by storm has shut down.

As of Feb. 5, JuicyCampus is no longer up and running, according to The Associated Press. CEO Matt Ivester, who founded the site in 2007, said in a statement online that “in these historically difficult economic times, online ad revenue has plummeted and venture capital funding has dissolved."

A group of Google lawyers and executives are facing criminal prosecution in Italy for not immediately removing from their Italian Web site a video depicting a group of teenagers teasing a boy with Downs syndrome.

A Virginia-based blogger is fighting a subpoena that seeks the identities of everyone who viewed an online article he wrote about a defamation lawsuit, the Citizen Media Law Project reports.

The copyright lawsuit between GateHouse Media and The New York Times Co. over linking articles on the Internet was settled this week, just one day before trial was to begin in the case.

GateHouse sued The New York Times Co. last month after The Boston Globe, which the Times Co. owns, began aggregating on its Web site headlines, leads and links from local news sites owned by GateHouse.