New media is having a rough week in the courts. First, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a video stream of the federal trial about the constitutionality of California's law banning gay marriage. Then, Thursday, a judge in Florida decided mid-trial to stop a Times-Union reporter from continuing to live blog an ongoing capital murder trial.

The digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation helped expose one of the biggest net neutrality violations to date -- Comcast's deliberate throttling of peer-to-peer traffic. But that doesn't mean the EFF supports the Federal Communications Commission's efforts to craft neutrality rules. In comments filed today, the civil rights organization says the FCC lacks authority to issue neutrality regulations that would ban ISPs from discriminating against content.

Taking up a request by the digital rights group Center for Democracy & Technology, the Federal Communications Commission is asking for public comment about "the use of personal information and privacy in an online, broadband world."

A federal appellate court reportedly appeared sympathetic to Comcast's arguments that it shouldn't have been sanctioned for violating neutrality principles by throttling peer-to-peer traffic. The company maintains that the Federal Communication Commission's Internet principles, set out in a 2005 policy statement, were never codified as regulations. Therefore, the company says, it wasn't put on notice that the principles were legally binding.Comcast also makes the far broader argument that the FCC has no authority to regulate the Internet.

Looks like clips of the upcoming federal court trial about California's ban on gay marriage will be available online after the fact, but won't be shown in real time.

The New York entrepreneur behind an organization called the National Association of Professional Women has sued Google and four unknown bloggers who allegedly libeled him by calling the group a "scam." The businessman, Matthew Proman, is seeking an injunction ordering Google to delete the blog posts -- all allegedly hosted through Google's Knol or Blogspot. He's also seeking a court order unmasking the bloggers.

Are net neutrality rules inconsistent with anti-piracy efforts? Some content owners say the answer is yes.

All Facebook users can deactivate their profiles, but doing so quietly might not make quite the same statement as using another service to slam the door on the site.