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UCLA vs. Free SpeechUCLA-weeding101.info went up on the Internet in mid-July, 2009.
On August 6, 2009, UCLA threatened legal action if this
domain name was not canceled and this website was not taken down by
August 17th, 2009. Legal threat: page 1 / page 2.
The wording in UCLA's
threat would have us believe that UCLA's armada of attorneys cannot
discern between commercial enterprises and free speech. We can
nonetheless be certain that an institution of UCLA's stature would
surely not hire any attorney incapable of making this basic distinction
in law. Consequently, UCLA offers the public an important event here,
since UCLA would certainly not market itself globally as a university
that attempts to quash speech protected by the U.S. Constitution.
In fact, UCLA Constitutional law professor, Eugene Volokh, had already said this and this about this type of threat by UCLA.
08/15/09: FIRE (website) sent this letter to UCLA Chancellor Gene Block in response to UCLA's letter.
08/20/09: FIRE's press release and a response to FIRE from UCLA.
08/21/09: UCLA backed down on its attempts to quash free speech. Read FIRE's press release.
08/26/09: UCLA's cover letter to me and its letter
to me via FIRE. A look at both these letters shows that my attempt to
shine light on UCLA's weeding operations is evidently so heretical that UCLA can neither
bring itself to address me directly to drop its threat against me, nor can
it describe its termination practices as termination practices.
Instead, UCLA states that my website's describing how UCLA terminated me could be confused with the university's
"describing its student retention practices." Here, UCLA's Senior Counsel Patricia Jasper does Orwell
proud, indeed.
In
fact, now we can determine the legal grounds
(and intent) of UCLA's threat through a simple test: Remove this
website's "disclaimer" that UCLA states was "helpful in addressing the
University's concerns." Then wait to see if UCLA resumes its
threat on these same grounds. If the university makes no further
threat on these grounds, we can understand them to be non-existent, and
the actual intent of UCLA's threat then becomes clear: UCLA
markets itself as a university committed to free speech and its 'free
marketplace of
ideas,' but only as long as this speech and this marketplace serve "to protect its trademarks and reputation."( Jump back to Home Page) << Previous | Page 17 | Next >>
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