Posts about Privacy Torts by Professor Daniel J. Solove for his blog at TeachPrivacy, a privacy awareness and security training company.
In a very interesting case, Saffold v. Plain Dealer Publishing Co., a state court judge (Shirley Strickland Saffold) is suing the Cleveland Plan Dealer for stating that comments posted on the newspaper’s website under the screen name “lawmiss” originated from a computer used by the judge and/or her daughter. Some of these comments related to […]
Jessica Bennett at Newsweek brought my attention to a story about the family of the killer whale trainer (Dawn Brancheau) who was killed while training the whale at SeaWorld: Brancheau’s family announced this week that they would seek an injunction to protect the release of the death imagery, captured by SeaWorld’s surveillance cameras on Feb. […]
In Newsweek, Jessica Bennett tells the tragic story about a family being harassed by the spread of death-scene images of their daughter, who was killed in an automobile accident. The photos of Nikki Catsouras were particularly gruesome — Nikki was decapitated in the crash. According to the article, soon after the crash, photos taken by […]
When does civil liability for speech trigger First Amendment protections? Recently, Professor Neil Richards and I posted on SSRN our new article exploring this question: Rethinking Free Speech and Civil Liability, 109 Columbia Law Review (forthcoming 2009).
Over at Emergent Chaos, Adam Shostack raises an interesting issue regarding Alex Rodriguez (A-Rod) and confidentiality. According to the rules in place about the baseball steroid testing back in 2003, the results of these tests were supposed to be confidential. According to Gregg Doyel at CBS:
Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Herring v. United States, a case examining whether the exclusionary rule should apply to a search that was based on an error in a database. In particular, due to a negligent error in a computer database indicating that there was an outstanding felony arrest warrant for Bennie […]
An interesting case from the Wisconsin Court of Appeals embodies what I believe is a thoughtful and nuanced understanding of privacy. The case is Wisconsin v. Jahnke, 2007AP2130-CR (Dec. 30, 2008). The case is a criminal prosecution of a man who secretly recorded his girlfriend in the nude, in violation of Wisconsin Statute § 942.09(2)(am). […]
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (en banc) has just issued a very interesting opinion interpreting a federal law providing immunity from liability for online speech — the Communications Decency Act (CDA), 47 U.S.C. § 230. The case is Fair Housing Council v. Roommates.com, LLC, 2008 WL 879293 (9th Cir. April 3, […]
A few days ago, I posted about Facebook’s new Social Ads and I argued that they might give rise to an action under the appropriation of name or likeness tort. The most common formulation of the appropriation tort is defined in the Restatement (Second) of Torts § 652C: “One who appropriates to his own use […]
The WSJ blog points to this interesting update [link no longer available] about the TB patient who was quarantined for having a highly-resistant strain of TB. I blogged about the case here and here. According to the news story, times aren’t very good from Andrew Speaker, the TB patient: