What is Twitter?

San Francisco technology blog GigaOM has raised an essential discussion on how Twitter should be assessed by the law.
Mathew Ingram writes that an Australian TV personality was successfully sued for defamation over her tweets, with Twitter also now being sued after the message was retweeted many times and appeared on the site homepage. Therefore, should Twitter be seen as a publisher, a distributor of information like a newspaper? Or is Twitter a closer match to a telephone network, which simply relays messages sent by users? As Twitter routinely monitors, edits and blocks tweets, lawyers may argue it is the former.

No hope for street artist

Findlaw blogger Stephanie Rabiner has commented on the fate of Shepard Fairly, a street artist who rose to fame with the patriotic Barack Obama ‘hope’ poster, who has now pleaded guilty to criminal contempt.
Mr Fairly, who hoped to copyright his poster as an original work, eventually admitted to deleting evidence and lying in court in the action he brought against the Associated Press news agency.
The artist, who had argued that his use of a close-up picture fell within the realm of fair use, admitted that he had in fact cropped a copyrighted picture, as the AP had long alleged. He could go to jail for up to six months.

Ex-DLA lawyers get ‘benchslapped’

Above the Law blogger Christopher Danzig continues his entertaining series of ‘benchslaps’ with a patent dispute involving Talon Research, purveyors of fine military kit, and Japanese electronics company Toshiba.
According to the blog, several ex-DLA Piper lawyers, who were working for litigation firm Feinberg Day in the patent case, were kicked to the curb by a federal judge in San Francisco. It had emerged that the lawyers, who represented Talon, had previously put in more than 3,000 hours for Toshiba when they were at DLA.
Clearly, they had forgotten that they were not allowed to oppose an old client, even when at a new firm.

Lost cat? Call a lawyer

Andrew Chow from Findlaw’s legal lifestyle and careers blog tells the story of ex-lawyer Jodana Serebrenik, once a terrier of the courts who is now gaining fame in her new career as New York’s only cat-catcher.
‘I just got to a point where I didn't enjoy the work,’ Ms Serebrenik told The Wall Street Journal. ‘I had turned 40, and I was like, I paid off my student loans. I had a good run, but I'm not happy with it anymore.’
Some may say she is barking mad, but reported fees of around $80 per feline for her cat-catching skills may give paws for thought.