How much freedom do students have on social media?

Kirkwood High School in suburban St. Louis is the latest public school to get caught in the uncertainties about how much free speech students have on social media.

The Kirkwood Call, the school’s top-notch student paper, reported (story) this week that a student was suspended for three days for a Tweet cursing a teacher. The student, Josh Spiller, sent the Tweet early this month after the teacher sent him to the office for refusing to surrender his cell phone. Spiller admitted his Tweet was wrong, but he still thought his rights were violated.

Principal Michael Havener explained that the high school considered tweets to be the equivalent of face-to-face communication. “…vulgar language toward a staff member or threats is just like saying it to the staff member,” he said in the Call story. “When you use it in a negative way toward staff members, it’s just like you’re saying it in the classroom.”

Televising court proceedings may not be all it’s cracked up to be

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.

Silicon Valley wins round one in SOPA fight

Over the past week, Silicon Valley’s internet powerhouses out-communicated Hollywood, stopped internet piracy bills pushed by the big studios and even prodded the Republican presidential candidates and President Barack Obama to agree on something — that Hollywood’s internet piracy bills threatened the innovation of the web.

Traditionally, Silicon Valley has been reluctant to play by Washington’s rules. Microsoft did not build a major Washington presence until the late 1990s when it faced a big anti-trust suit. But last week, the industry demonstrated its power through a concerted campaign of shutting down some sites and posting notices on others about the industry’s opposition to the internet piracy bills.

Supreme Court decision on copyright may not injure major opera companies, symphonies

Established opera companies and symphonies should not be hurt seriously by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last week upholding a law that moved the work of composers such as Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitry Shostakovich from the public domain to copyright protection.

Timothy O’Leary, general director of Opera Theatre of St. Louis, said in an interview, “It is possible that (the decision) will add some additional costs but not substantially.” O’Leary said that about one of Opera Theatre’s four productions each season is under copyright, but that “we don’t make decisions about what operas to perform” based on whether royalties are due.