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This study examines public, digitally focused reactions to civilian arrests in the aftermath of the police killing of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in July 2016. We employ a qualitative content analysis to investigate 302 comments from six Facebook Live videos streamed by local news organizations during racial justice protests following Sterling's death. We first categorize users' comments according to two broad and divergent themes around appeals for authoritarian order and for social justice. From these themes, analyses revealed subthemes that illustrate the bases for commenters' ideological alignments in the immediate aftermath of Sterling's shooting and the protests that followed. Our findings suggest that online comments reflect existing social inequalities and offline divisions that are still felt in Baton Rouge, a functionally segregated city in the Southern United States. This research contributes to our understanding of online distant witnessing as opposing groups react to live-streamed videos of arrests by police on one of the nation's most divisive issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1980s, anti-pornography ideologues--an unlikely alliance of feminist activists and right-wing evangelical Christians--waged an open war against pornography and the anti-censorship feminists who supported legal protection for pornographic works. Following a pivotal defeat of an anti-pornography ordinance in federal court, the ideologies constituted in the so-called "Porn Wars" continued to guide obscenity doctrine. These ideologies have informed lower courts' understanding of the harms and values associated with sexually explicit content more than constitutional scholars recognize, at least explicitly. Although courts recognize core feminist values such as sexual autonomy and privacy in sexually explicit content, they have built doctrine that essentially forestalls the exchange of sexual content, even among consenting adults in private and quasi-private spaces. Anti-pornography presumptions of harmful effects predominate lower court decisions in ways that could produce disastrous consequences for artistic speech, privacy, and even public health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Sampling" copyrighted works to create new expression has a rich history in creative culture, particularly in hip-hop music, a genre that values revision and recontextualization. However, courts are mixed on whether sampling should be considered fair use. Many courts have found that sampling harms the original artist's ability to license copyrighted material, thereby diminishing the work's marketability. But some courts recognize that sampling can enhance the market for the original work. The present study explores the tension between these opposing fair use models—what we call the "pure market substitute" and "market enhancement" models—currently percolating in lower courts. Through an analysis of cases involving hip-hop sampling and similar practices, we argue that the "market enhancement" model, which considers cultural and audience characteristics that impact marketability, better serves the goals of copyright law and should be more widely adopted. We further recommend that courts consider three factors when analyzing market impact in fair use sampling cases: provable effects of the sample on the market for the original work, the nature and duration of the original author's market participation, and the similarity between markets for the original and secondary works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1969 caseWatts v. United States,courts have consistently held that politically motivated speech about or directed to public figures may be punished if it qualifies as a “true threat” rather than protected political hyperbole. Criticism of public officials lies at the core of First Amendment protection, even when that criticism is caustic or crude. Such caustic speech appears on Twitter with increasing frequency, often pushing the boundaries of the constitutional guarantees of free speech. Through an analysis of the political speech-true threat cases that applyWatts,this study identifies and assesses three distinct modes of analysis that lower courts use to distinguish political speech from true threats. They are: (1) criteria-based analysis; (2)ad hocbalancing; and (3) a form of balancing referred to herein as “line-crossing analysis.” This study concludes that criteria-based analysis is the most prominent mode used by lower courts. As applied to new media and political participation, criteria-based analysis risks unduly restricting valuable political speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]