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The war on Jim Robinson
Every dissident website of any significance was targeted for harassment during the Clinton years. FreeRepublic.com was no exception.
Like thousands of newsgroups and message boards, FreeRepublic offers a forum for posting and discussing articles picked up from newspapers, magazines or other websites. Posting of full-length articles for discussion purposes has been a standard practice since the earliest days of the Internet.
On Sept. 12, 1997, however, the practice suddenly became controversial – at least for FreeRepublic.com. The trouble began when a Freeper posted an article from that day's Washington Post, revealing new developments in the Chinagate scandal. The article cited intelligence sources accusing Indonesian businessman Ted Sioeng, a suspected agent for the Chinese government, of having donated $250,000 to the Democratic Party – possibly as part of a broad Chinese plan, confirmed by electronic intercepts, to influence U.S. policy through illegal campaign contributions.
Soon after, Jim Robinson began receiving cease-and-desist orders from major news organizations, charging commercial misappropriation, copyright and trademark infringement, and unfair competition. They commanded Robinson to stop posting their articles. The Washington Weekly noted:
"There is something odd about these cease and desist orders, which Robinson has shown to the Washington Weekly. They use similar wording and details, and three of the letters were sent on the same day, Dec. 5. The timing and language suggests that this was a concerted effort. Some person or group did the legal research on Robinson and his website, uncovering all his past and present business affiliations, and distributed a legal brief to the news organizations Times Mirror, Dow Jones, Reuters and Washington Post."
The Washington Weekly identified Debevoise and Plimpton – a law firm used by the Clintons and the Democratic National Committee – as the coordinator of the attack.
"Debevoise & Plimpton [is] a DNC law firm that has conducted most of the internal investigation of illegal foreign contributions received by the DNC," wrote Wesley Phelan and Marvin Lee in the Washington Weekly. "Clinton private eye Terry Lenzner admitted in a Filegate deposition earlier this year that he had been retained by Debevoise & Plimpton to perform investigations of a political nature. Debevoise & Plimpton refused to answer questions about the selection of the FreeRepublic site when contacted by the Washington Weekly. …" Robinson had recently noted a large number of visits to his site from eop.gov, a White House domain, suggesting that he was under White House scrutiny.
The e-mail that Robinson received from the Washington Post complained specifically about FreeRepublic's posting of the article about suspected Chinese agent Ted Sioeng and his ties to the Clinton machine.
Robinson refused to stop posting articles, arguing that the Freepers had a First Amendment right to discuss news stories, and that posting copies of such stories for reference purposes on a nonprofit discussion forum constituted "fair use" under copyright law.
By the time Debevoise & Plimpton attacked, Mr. and Mrs. Robinson were both confined to wheelchairs. But they fought with extraordinary zest and courage. "They'll have to pry my keyboard from my cold dead fingers," Jim Robinson famously told Washington Weekly in April 1998. The battle lines were drawn.
On Sept. 28, 1998, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times – the latter owned by the Times Mirror Company – joined forces to sue FreeRepublic.com for copyright infringement, filing suit in a Los Angeles federal court. However, the plaintiffs seemed to lose interest in the case after the Clintons left office. Though they had already obtained a million-dollar judgment against Robinson in a lower court, during Robinson's appeal in May 2002, they quietly agreed to settle for a token payment of $5,000 apiece from Robinson. He agreed that in future he would permit Freepers to post only excerpts and links to the plaintiffs' articles, not the full text.
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Much much more at the source web site.
BUMP!
Thanks.
It included some details I hadn't read, either.