Seven Years of Serving and Studying the Legal Needs of Digital Journalism

We have some important news to share from the Digital Media Law Project. After seven years of providing legal assistance to independent journalism through various methods, the DMLP will soon spin off its most effective initiatives and cease operation as a stand-alone project within the Berkman Center. The upcoming changes will ensure that our work continues in a robust and sustainable fashion, and so, while those of us here are a bit melancholy to see the end of an era, we are hopeful for what comes next.

I wanted to take this opportunity to look back over the history of the DMLP and its accomplishments, and to talk a bit about what the future will hold for our work.

The Beginning

In 2007, a group of scholars and attorneys at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society recognized a growing problem for online speech: namely, that a vast array of bloggers, citizen journalists, and other non-professional writers were publishing information on the Internet without a solid understanding of their rights and responsibilities under the law. Those without legal training or resources were unprepared for challenges such as defamation, privacy, and copyright claims, and often ran into pitfalls when dealing with issues such as corporate formation, contract negotiation, and development of website policies.

While the Berkman Center had been providing legal services to online ventures for several years through the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic, this growing need among independent publishers was simultaneously too widespread for the Clinic to address through its existing service model and too basic in many specific instances to present a valid case-by-case training opportunity for law students. A different approach was required.

Thus, in May 2007 the Berkman Center launched a new experiment: the "Citizen Media Law Project." The CMLP was an offshoot of the Cyberlaw Clinic, intended to address the lack of legal knowledge among bloggers and citizen journalists through the publication of online informational resources targeted at lay readers. The CMLP's primary resource was a detailed Legal Guide, which provided basic information on a broad array of media law and business law topics that online publishers could expect to encounter. The CMLP's Threats Database tracked legal challenges to online speech, such as lawsuits, police activity, and cease and desist letters, in order to address the lack of publicly available background information and primary source material relating to this type of activity.

The CMLP also engaged in a number of public outreach efforts, including organizing conferences, making speaking appearances, publishing its regular blog, and maintaining an online forum for discussion of legal issues affecting digital speech. These activities had the effect of raising the public profile of the project as an authoritative source of legal information.

The Online Media Legal Network

While these resources were successful and popular, there remained situations where citizen journalists and bloggers required more than just general legal information; rather, they needed the direct assistance of attorneys. Many members of the CMLP's audience were unable to afford counsel to support their legal rights, even if thanks to the CMLP's resources they had an understanding of those rights. Occasionally, CMLP staff members would represent a client directly in connection with narrowly defined legal questions; more commonly, the CMLP would appear as an amicus curiae in cases involving free speech issues. But this was insufficient to meet the needs of the CMLP's constituency.

Again, a broader solution was necessary, and in November 2009 the CMLP expanded its ability to support clients with the launch of its free attorney referral service, the Online Media Legal Network. The launch of the OMLN marked a quantum leap in the breadth and impact of the CMLP's services, placing individual online media clients in contact with skilled media and business attorneys throughout the United States willing to provide legal services on a pro bono or reduced fee basis. The network expanded dramatically as the CMLP promoted the concept of pro bono media law services, eventually reaching the point where the OMLN's member attorneys included hundreds of law firms, individual attorneys, and legal clinics, with members in all fifty states (plus the District of Columbia) and affiliations with international media law networks.

The "Early Warning System"

Throughout the growth of the project, the CMLP was building relationships with a wide array of partners, including the attorneys of the OMLN and their clients, non-profit organizations dedicated to journalism and online freedom, academic affiliates at other universities, and journalists and press organizations experimenting with online media. These individuals and organization