Archive | First Amendment

Required Drone Registration Coming

By on November 16, 2015 in First Amendment, Journalism

Required Drone Registration

Drone owners will be required to register their aircraft with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) soon. The FAA’s drone registration task force is expected to finalize its recommendations for drone registration guidelines by Friday, November 20, 2015.

The FAA announced the creation of the Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Registration Task Force on October 29, and said its goal was to establish recommended guidelines for drone registration. During the meetings, members discussed “how an operator might prove a UAS is registered, how the aircraft would be marked, and how to use the registration process to encourage or require UAS operators to become educated on basic safety rules,” according to a news update on the FAA’s website.

The task force’s last meeting occurred on November 5 and they will finalize their recommendations for FAA Administrator Michael Huerta to review by November 20.

Drone safety rules are increasingly disregarded and officials have trouble tracking down rule-breakers under the current system. Pilots have reported more than 650 sightings of drones from the start of the year to August 9, despite it being illegal and dangerous to fly drones by planes or helicopters.

For more on this subject, check out these articles:

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First Amendment Day Events

By on September 20, 2015 in First Amendment

FirstAmendmentDay

Carolina’s seventh-annual First Amendment Day celebration will be held on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2015. You can view the full schedule of events here. 

Organized by the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy, this year’s festivities will include a banned-book reading by Chancellor Carol Folt; a First Amendment trivia contest; and a keynote address by Danielle Keats Citron, a legal scholar who has written extensively about hate crimes in cyberspace — especially those targeting women. There also will be a panel discussion at which UNC student journalists will discuss their problems covering UNC athletics. Steve Kirschner, the senior associate athletic director for communications at UNC, will be on the panel to respond. At a second panel discussion, students and others will discuss the symbols of the South that have created a firestorm of opinion about their meaning and their impact on students. The panelists will explore the law regarding these controversial Southern symbols and the activism surrounding symbols of the South.

Generous funding for the day’s events is provided by Time Warner Cable.

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Media Law Center Welcomes Prof. Papandrea and a new Ph.D. Student

By on August 24, 2015 in First Amendment, Journalism

A senior scholar and a new Ph.D. student have joined UNC’s community of media law scholars.  The Center for Media Law and Policy is happy to welcome Professor Mary-Rose Papandrea and Ph.D. student Shao Chengyuan.

ProfPapandrea3Mary-Rose Papandrea came to the UNC School of Law this summer from Boston College Law School. Her teaching and research interests include constitutional law, media law, torts, civil procedure, and national security and civil liberties.

After graduating from Yale College and the University of Chicago Law School, Professor Papandrea clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter as well as Hon. Douglas H. Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Hon. John G. Koeltl of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. She then worked as an associate at Williams & Connolly LLP in Washington, D.C., where she specialized in First Amendment and media law litigation. In addition to spending over a decade at Boston College Law School, Professor Papandrea taught as a visiting professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, Fordham Law School, Wake Forest Law School, and the University of Paris (Nanterre).

Co-author of the casebook Media and the Law (LexisNexis, 2nd ed. 2014) (with Lee Levine, David Ardia & Dale Cohen), Professor Papandrea has written extensively about government secrecy and national security leaks, the reporter’s privilege, student speech rights, the First Amendment rights of public employees, and the U.S. Supreme Court and technology.

Professor Papandrea has also served as the chair of the American Association of Law School’s Mass Media Law and National Security Law sections and remains on the executive committee of both sections. She is currently a member of the editorial board for the Journal of National Security Law & Policy. In addition, she has served on the board of directors for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.

ShaoShao Chengyuan came to the UNC School of Media and Journalism from Beijing, China. She earned a master’s in communication from Beijing Foreign Studies University and a bachelor’s in English from China Agricultural University in Beijing. She has been studying media law issues in China, specifically new media-related legislation and the legal boundaries of online free speech. She also has worked as a television news producer for Spanish TV Etib’s Beijing Bureau. Her research interests include Internet policy and governance, freedom of expression, online anonymity, and government information publicity. She is planning to conduct comparative media law research.

 

 

 

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United States Supreme Court decides Facebook true threats case

By on June 1, 2015 in First Amendment

The Supreme Court has issued its long-awaited opinion in Elonis v. United States, the Facebook threats case. In a narrow opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court overturned the conviction of Anthony Elonis, who allegedly threatened his ex-wife and federal law enforcement agents through rap lyrics he posted to his Facebook page under personal hip-hop moniker “Tone Dougie.”

The government closed oral argument by emphasizing that “what [Elonis] thinks doesn’t matter.” The Supreme Court, on the other hand, said it does. Specifically, the Court held that in order to successfully prosecute a defendant under the federal interstate threats statute, 18 U.S.C. 875(c), the government must show that the defendant acted with a criminally culpable mental state beyond mere negligence. The Court rejected the notion that a criminal threats conviction could rest solely on proof that a hypothetical reasonable person would find that a statement amounted to a true threat.

The trouble with the opinion issued by the Court in Elonis — and with the current landscape of federal law on true threats — is that it remains unclear exactly what state of mind the law requires. The majority in Elonis expressly declined to decide whether recklessness is sufficient. Furthermore, section 18 U.S.C. 875(c) does not explicitly set forth a requisite mental state, so Elonis could trigger a legislative response by Congress. Lawmakers could shore up the language in 875(c) and explicitly define the mental state greater required for criminal threats convictions. The ball is in Capitol Hill’s court.

So what about the First Amendment?

The Court declined to address the First Amendment argument made by Elonis at trial and on appeal — that the Constitution requires the government to prove that the defendant specifically intended to threaten an identifiable person or group of persons when he communicated the threat. Justices Alito and Thomas chastised the majority for avoiding the constitutional question, but we saw this coming. When the Court granted certiorari in Elonis, it asked the parties to brief and argue the statutory interpretation question even though Elonis appealed solely on First Amendment grounds.

If there is anything we can infer about free speech jurisprudence from the Supreme Court’s holding in Elonis, it is that courts must look beyond the mere content of the purported threat and scrutinize the defendant’s behaviors for indicia of a criminal state of mind. Under Elonis, the hypothetical reasonable person may no longer be the sole arbiter of criminal speech determinations under 875(c). This standard provides some additional breathing space for threatening speech and heightens the importance of context. Nevertheless, artists, lawyers, and scholars are left wondering whether the First Amendment protects violence-laden speech uttered recklessly and without regard for foreseeable emotional and psychological harms to victims.

Brooks Fuller is a 3rd-Year Ph.D. student in the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

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Student Thesis Examines Aereo Case

By on May 4, 2015 in First Amendment

aereo_antenna_array1-640x425This semester I completed my master’s thesis, which was titled “Aereo, the Public Performance Right, and the Future of Broadcasting.”  As the title suggests, in the thesis I evaluated the Supreme Court’s recent decision in American Broadcasting Cos. v. Aereo, Inc., and reflected on how the decision stood to impact the future of copyright law and broadcasting.   

If you are unfamiliar, the dispute at the heart of the case started after a company called Aereo began transmitting broadcast content, without a license, over the Internet to paying subscribers.  Not surprisingly, a group of television broadcasters were quick to assert that Aereo’s conduct violated their right to perform copyrighted works publicly, one of the exclusive rights granted to copyright holders under the Copyright Act.  The broadcasters were concerned about Aereo because Aereo stood to impact their ability to earn revenue from retransmission consent agreements, which are agreements under which cable and satellite providers compensate broadcasters for the right to retransmit their signals.     

Aereo defended its actions by claiming it developed a system that permitted it to transmit broadcast content without violating the public performance right.  Under the system, Aereo used dime-sized antennas to capture and then save unique copies of television programs that were personal to each subscriber.  Because Aereo never transmitted copies of broadcast programs to more than one subscriber, Aereo contended it was transmitting private—not public—performances.  The company accordingly asserted that it did not violate the public performance right when it transmitted broadcast content over the Internet. 

The Supreme Court disagreed.  In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Breyer, the Court essentially held that Aereo performed works publicly because its system resembled cable systems, which “do perform publicly.”  In reaching its decision, the Court relied on the Copyright Act’s legislative history.  The term “legislative history” refers to the supporting documents Congress creates when enacting a piece of legislation to help explain the legislation. 

In the thesis, I wrote that the Court ultimately reached the correct outcome.  I, however, criticized the Court for overly relying on the Copyright Act’s legislative history.  As I asserted in the thesis, the Court could have reached the same outcome by clearly interpreting the text of the Copyright Act.  Doing so would have benefited the lower courts by providing them with increased guidance when facing questions regarding the public performance right in the future. 

In the thesis, I also analyzed Justice Scalia’s dissenting opinion.  Justice Scalia contended that the case should have been decided on the basis of secondary copyright liability.  Under such an approach, the question for the Court would have been whether Aereo violated copyright law by aiding its subscribers, who would be viewed as the direct infringers, in violating the law.  

I enjoyed writing about and dissecting the Court’s decision in American Broadcasting Cos. v. Aereo, Inc.  It was a challenging, but certainly worthwhile, topic for a thesis.  I am grateful for the help my committee members—Dr. Cathy Packer, Dr. Michael Hoefges, and Professor Deborah Gerhardt—provided throughout the process.

Kevin Delaney

Dual-degree student (master’s in mass communication/J.D.)

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