WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The letter sent by Sony Pictures Entertainment’s attorney to US media outlets warning them to refrain from writing about the recent WikiLeaks posts of the company's hacked archives has little legal merit, US free speech advocacy group told Sputnik.
“I do not think Sony would be wise to pursue legal action against a news organization that decides to report on that content,” Freepress Senior Director of Strategy Timothy Karr said on Wednesday. “At this point, it sounds like it is more sort of a hollow legal threat, intended to scare certain news outlets away from this sort of reporting.”
On Thursday, the whistleblower website WikiLeaks published a detailed search system and analysis for the so-called Sony Archives including thousands of company’s documents and e-mails. WikiLeaks revealed that the entertainment giant had ties to the US government and military-industrial complex.
“I do not imagine that they [Sony] will have any success in the courts, nor will that [legal] action be smiled upon by the news media who believe they have a right to cover this type of news,” Karr said.
Karr told Sputnik that although Sony may be able to make a stronger legal case for the company emails that were leaked, now that it is in “public domain,” and a lot of that content is newsworthy, “journalists have the right” to write stories about what was published by WikiLeaks.
“It is incumbent upon news organizations to exercise a certain degree of discretion whenever they come across these types of massive data dumps and there are certain items in this archive that could damage people in ways that could harm people in ways that may not be intended,” Karr said.
Sony's confidential data was first released on November 24, 2014, but the recent WikiLeaks release made it easy to search documents.
The initial leak came two weeks before the premiere of the company's political comedy The Interview, whose plot is centered on the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
