[Infowarrior] - Documents Borne by Winds of Free Speech

[Richard Forno]

January 15, 2007
Link by Link
Documents Borne by Winds of Free Speech
By TOM ZELLER Jr.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/technology/15link.html?pagewanted=print

A showdown is scheduled for a federal courtroom in Brooklyn tomorrow
afternoon, where words like ³First Amendment² and ³freedom of speech² and
³prior restraint² are likely to mix seamlessly with references to
³BitTorrent² and ³Wiki.²

It is a messy plot that pits Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant at the
center of several articles in The New York Times suggesting that the company
tried to hide or play down the health risks of its leading antipsychotic
drug, Zyprexa, and lawyers representing various individuals, organizations
and Web sites ‹ all arguing that their online speech has been gagged.

The case has attracted the attention of the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
the venerable digital rights group based in San Francisco, and one of its
lawyers, Fred von Lohmann, who is now representing an anonymous Internet
user caught up in the legal fracas.

³One of the core missions of the foundation¹s 16-year history has been to
establish that when you go online, you take with you all the same civil
rights with you had with you in prior media,² said Mr. von Lohmann. ³But of
course, you need to fight for that principle.²

€

The quick background:

It all began with Dr. David Egilman of Massachusetts, who was a consulting
witness in ongoing litigation against Lilly. Dr. Egilman had in his
possession a trove of internal Lilly documents ‹ not all of them flattering
to the company ‹ sealed by the court as part of that litigation.

Comes James B. Gottstein, a lawyer from Alaska, who was pursuing unrelated
litigation for mentally ill patients in his state. He somehow got wind (and
precisely how is the subject of separate legal jujitsu) that Dr. Egilman had
some interesting documents.

Mr. Gottstein sends Dr. Egilman a subpoena for copies. Hell begins breaking
loose.

In a letter dated Dec. 6, Dr. Egilman informed Lilly¹s lawyers, as was
required by the order sealing the documents, that he had been subpoenaed.
Lilly¹s lawyers expressed their deep displeasure in a Dec. 14 letter to Mr.
Gottstein, and politely told him to back off. In a response a day later, Mr.
Gottstein informed them, among other things, that it was too late, and that
some of the material had already been produced.

It seems Mr. Gottstein was also apparently in a sharing mood, which is how
hundreds of pages ended up with a Times reporter, Alex Berenson ‹ and about
a dozen or so other individuals and organizations.

This is also how copies of the documents ended up on various Web servers ‹
and when that happened, things changed. While surely painful for Lilly, the
online proliferation began flirting with some bedrock principles of free
speech and press, as well as some practical realities that looked a fair bit
like toothpaste out of its tube.

Nonetheless, last month, United States District Judge Jack B. Weinstein
ordered Mr. Gottstein to provide a list of recipients to whom he had
distributed the contraband pages, and to collect each copy back.

The Times, which politely declined to oblige, has since been left out of the
legal wrangling, but on Dec. 29, the court temporarily enjoined an expansive
list ‹ 14 named individuals, two health advocacy groups (MindFreedom
International and the Alliance for Human Research Protection), their Web
sites, and a site devoted to the Zyprexa issue ‹ not just from ³further
disseminating these documents.² They were specifically ordered to
communicate the injunction to anyone else who had copies, and enjoined from
³posting information to Web sites to facilitate dissemination of these
documents.²

That¹s right ‹ it appeared that even writing on their Web sites something
like, ³Hey, there¹s a site in Brazil where you can get those Zyprexa
documents,² would run afoul of the injunction.

The order was extended by Judge Weinstein on Jan. 4, and tomorrow the court
will revisit the issue at length.

As Mr. von Lohmann and the Electronic Frontier Foundation see it, the
injunction is simply untenable. Whatever the legal merits of Lilly¹s claims
against Mr. Gottstein and Dr. Egilman for violating the seal, the court¹s
power to stifle the ever-growing chain of unrelated individuals and Web
sites who, after one or two degrees of remove, had nothing to do with the
Lilly litigation, cannot extend to infinity. Very quickly, Mr. von Lohmann
argues, you are dealing with ordinary citizens who are merely trading in and
discussing documents of interest to public health.

³Judges have a natural inclination that if documents have been stolen under
their watch, they want to get them back,² said Mr. von Lohmann, whose John
Doe client was a contributor to the site zyprexa.pbwiki.com ‹ a wiki where a
hive of users compiled and contributed links and information relating to the
Zyprexa case. ³But there are some limits to how many degrees of separation
the court can reach.²

There is also a traditionally high bar set for placing prior restraint on
the press ‹ which, whether Judge Weinstein recognizes it or not, very much
includes a colony of citizen journalists feeding a wiki.

Of course, the other, slightly more absurd side to all this is that
attempting to stop the documents from spreading is, by now, a Sisyphean
task.

³The court is trying to get the genie back into the bottle until it can sort
out what¹s going on through the course of litigation, which takes place at
non-Internet speed,² said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet
governance and regulation at Oxford and a founder of the Berkman Center for
Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

³Perhaps the court thinks that whoever is adding to the wiki is among the
parties to the original case,² Professor Zittrain said. ³That¹s
understandable, but it puts the court in a no-win situation. It¹s left
issuing an order that sounds like no one in the world is allowed to post the
documents.²

For its part, even The Times, which often posts original documents for its
readers, tried to put the things online when Mr. Berenson wrote his first
article, but the raw pages ‹ more than 350 individual image files weighing
in at over 500 megabytes ‹ proved unwieldy.

George H. Freeman, vice president and general counsel for The Times, said,
³The Times fulfilled its role by doing a lot of research and then
highlighting and including the most important issues and documents in a
series of well-placed news articles.²

€

For now, copies of the Lilly documents sit defiantly on servers in Sweden,
and under a domain registered at Christmas Island, the Australian dot in the
ocean 224 miles off the coast of Java. ³Proudly served from outside the
United States,² the site declares. There are surely others.

On his TortsProf blog (snipurl.com/Torts), William G. Childs, an assistant
professor at Western New England School of Law in Springfield, Mass., put it
this way in a headline: ³Judge Tries to Unring Bell Hanging Around Neck of
Horse Already Out of Barn Being Carried on Ship That Has Sailed.²