ReclaimDemocracy.org has created a web resource tracking the Kasky vs. Nike case, in which a California activist is suing the sportswear company for making misleading statements about its overseas labor practices.

The Holmes Report, a PR industry trade newsletter, has published the results of its survey on the "best PR firms to work for." Winners included:

• Fleishman Hillard, whose employees covertly infiltrated and tape-recorded a group that works to stop teenage tobacco addiction
• Ketchum Communications, which drafted a Clorox crisis plan that called for labeling environmentalists as terrorists, and also helped fuel the diet drug craze of the 1990s
• APCO Associates, whose sleazy work for big tobacco, WorldCom and Russian robber baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been detailed here previously.

(Note: APCO is listed in the print edition of the Holmes Report but inexplicably doesn't appear in the online version of this story.)

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 has given corporations increased power to censor speech that they don't like. It severely curtails the "fair use" doctrine which allows artists, writers and scholars to use fragments of copyrighted works without permission for the purposes of education, criticism and parody. Kembrew McLeod notes that trademark law has been used to spike a web site that parodied Dow Chemical, and Vivendi Universal studios used it to kill VivendiUniversalSucks.com on grounds that "certain members of the public ... would be likely to understand 'sucks' as a banal and obscure addition to the reasonably well-known mark Vivendi Universal." Just to prove the absurdity of the law, McLeod has taken out a trademark on the phrase "freedom of expression" itself. "Apparently, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office did not find the idea of someone controlling this phrase morally, socially and politically unsettling, and it granted me ownership of the mark in 1998," he writes.

"Newspapers and political organizations are engaged in technological one-upmanship over 'AstroTurf' - letters to the editor that look like authentic grass-roots responses from readers but are not," reports Jennifer Lee. "Groups like the Republican National Committee and Planned Parenthood are using Web sites and e-mail lists to help disseminate form letters to publications across the country." However, the people who edit the letters pages are fighting back: "Armed with Internet search engines and e-mail lists of their own, they are mapping Web sites and alerting each other about the form letters appearing in their mailboxes."