California Courts Rule Bloggers are Journalists

About a year ago Lauren Gelman of the Stanford Law School Clinical Education Center for Internet & Society's Cyberlaw Clinic asked me if the Media Bloggers Association would sign on to the Amicus Brief she was preparing for the Apple Blogger case. That case finally came to ahead in California today.

Justice Conrad L. Rushing got it right when he found against Apple Computer in the O'Grady case:

We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes "legitimate journalis[m]." The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here. We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish "legitimate" from "illegitimate" news. Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment, which is to identify the best, most important, and most valuable ideas not by any sociological or economic formula, rule of law, or process of government, but through the rough and tumble competition of the memetic marketplace.

This is inarguably the most important ruling to date on the issue of bloggers v. journalists.

Jeff Jarvis blogs it as a “big victory” for bloggers and citizen journalists.

Dave Winer offers a simple note - “Blogging won, again”.

Eugene Volokh blogs a detailed legal analysis of the case.

Dan Gillmor emails “This is big and important news for bloggers and other citizen journalists. Apple's control-freakery has been, temporarily (there will undoubtedly be an appeal to the state Supreme Court), held up for what it is.”