For a time late last month, Rush Limbaugh succeeded in abusing copyright law to get YouTube to take down a Daily Kos video stringing together the insulting remarks he made about Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student who became a featured player in the contraception controversy a few months back.

The video stitched together short excerpts of Limbaugh calling Fluke a slut and a prostitute who should videotape herself having sex. Limbaugh apologized (sort of) after he began to lose advertisers. But when Daily Kos helpfully put together a greatest hits of Limbaugh’s comments, Limbaugh used copyright law to demand that YouTube take down the video.

Last week the Missouri House passed a bill that the sponsor calls the Whistleblower Protection Act. The law actually removes protections from whistleblowers rather than enacting them. This is the latest version of a bill commonly called the Enterprise Rent-A-Car bill because the Clayton, Mo. firm has been lobbying to weaken whistleblower protections for the past six years. Earlier versions of the bill have passed but been vetoed by Gov. Jay Nixon.

Enterprise has made weakening whistleblower protections a top legislative priority ever since the firm lost a whistleblower lawsuit filed by its fired corporate comptroller, Thomas P. Dunn. Dunn testified that he was fired after taking the position that Enterprise was not following the accounting principles required of a public company. At the time of the dispute, around the time of the Enron debacle, Enterprise was planning to go public, although it later decided against that course. To go public, it needed Dunn to attest to the company’s adherence to generally accepted accounting principles.

British journalists seem to have been reading too many of Stieg Larsson’s books about the Girl with the Dragon Tatoo in which investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist gets his best information from computer hacking.

Sky News, part-owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, admitted to The Guardian newspaper that it authorized a journalist to hack into emails to pursue at least two stories. Sky News went on to defend its action as “editorially justified and in the public interest.”

A Cook County judge became the second state judge in Illinois to rule that the state’s tough eavesdropping law is unconstitutional. The judge said the law, which makes it a felony to record audio without the consent of all parties, criminalizes potentially innocent conduct.

The Gateway Journalism Review followed this story for over a year. Here are some of the previous stories posted on the issue:

The press generally applauded this month when the Senate Judiciary
Committee voted to require the U. S. Supreme Court to televise
proceedings. Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., was one of the big
proponents.

As a card-carrying member of the press, I have reservations.

But both the city of St. Louis and Mrs. Spink made the same argument. Both claimed that cities could set rules for signs that would preserve the aesthetics of the community. Both lost, and both lost big. The decisions were unanimous.

The appeals court panel, referring to the Ladue case, decided that the definition of sign in the St. Louis ordinance was based on the content of the sign because all of the exceptions to the definition were ones based on content. The exceptions permitted flags, symbols of fraternal or religious organizations, works of art and time and temperature devices.