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Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Law - Eli Liily moves in federal court today to enjoin online posting of Zyprexa documents
This morning NPR's Morning Edition has a story by Snigdha Prakash titled "Documents Leaked to Web Prompt First-Amendment Debate." The blurb:
A federal court will hear a first-amendment debate over online postings. The case revolves around a liability case involving drugmaker Eli Lilly. Documents sealed from public inspection wound up on the Web.Listen to the story here. The lead-in describes it as a case involving the rights of bloggers vs. the rights of the established media - is John Doe a full-fledged member of the press?
Yesterday's NY Times story referred to in the NPR story is available here. Some quotes:
It is a messy plot that pits Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant at the center of several articles in The New York Times suggesting that the company tried to hide or play down the health risks of its leading antipsychotic drug, Zyprexa, and lawyers representing various individuals, organizations and Web sites — all arguing that their online speech has been gagged. * * *[C]opies of the documents ended up on various Web servers — and when that happened, things changed. While surely painful for Lilly, the online proliferation began flirting with some bedrock principles of free speech and press, as well as some practical realities that looked a fair bit like toothpaste out of its tube.
Nonetheless, last month, United States District Judge Jack B. Weinstein ordered Mr. Gottstein to provide a list of recipients to whom he had distributed the contraband pages, and to collect each copy back.
The Times, which politely declined to oblige, has since been left out of the legal wrangling, but on Dec. 29, the court temporarily enjoined an expansive list — 14 named individuals, two health advocacy groups (MindFreedom International and the Alliance for Human Research Protection), their Web sites, and a site devoted to the Zyprexa issue — not just from “further disseminating these documents.” They were specifically ordered to communicate the injunction to anyone else who had copies, and enjoined from “posting information to Web sites to facilitate dissemination of these documents.”
That’s right — it appeared that even writing on their Web sites something like, “Hey, there’s a site in Brazil where you can get those Zyprexa documents,” would run afoul of the injunction.
The order was extended by Judge Weinstein on Jan. 4, and tomorrow the court will revisit the issue at length.
As Mr. von Lohmann and the Electronic Frontier Foundation see it, the injunction is simply untenable. Whatever the legal merits of Lilly’s claims against Mr. Gottstein and Dr. Egilman for violating the seal, the court’s power to stifle the ever-growing chain of unrelated individuals and Web sites who, after one or two degrees of remove, had nothing to do with the Lilly litigation, cannot extend to infinity. Very quickly, Mr. von Lohmann argues, you are dealing with ordinary citizens who are merely trading in and discussing documents of interest to public health.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on January 17, 2007 08:52 AM
Posted to General Law Related