The Right to Link
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is defending the right to link.
EFF's client, an anonymous citizen-journalist, posted the links on the wiki located at http://zyprexa.pbwiki.com. Eli Lilly complained, and Judge Weinstein issued his order on January 4. EFF went to court today to challenge this order as an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech in violation of the First Amendment and to ensure that the right of nonparties in the litigation to link to publicly important information remains protected.
"Preventing a citizen-journalist from posting links to important health information on a public wiki violates the First Amendment," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "Eli Lilly's efforts to censor these documents off the Internet are particularly outrageous in light of the information reported by The New York Times, which suggests that doctors and patients who use Zyprexa need to know the information contained in those documents."
I made the above bumper sticker in support of this cause. Hopefully someone will remix it (.ai file) into something cool and it will show up on skateboards everywhere.
In related news, The Washington Post covers Wikileaks, a wiki for leaking classified documents. This is different from linking to sensitive information and I'd agree with Steven Aftergood's comment:
"I want to see how they launch and what direction they go in," he said. "Indiscriminate disclosure can be as problematic as indiscriminate secrecy."
