A civil liberties lawyer says a bill about blog libel is too broadly written.

Matt Zimmerman, an attorney with the pro-civil liberties Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that a proposed Senate bill conflicts with federal law and the U.S. constitution in three major ways:

LIBELOUS COMMENTS. The bill says that administrators of Web sites shall only be held liable for libel posted by third parties, such as a blog comment, if they are negligent. But Zimmerman says the federal Communications Decency Act of 1996 expressly forbids administrators from ever being held liable for third-party comments.

JURISDICTION. The bill covers libelous material "received or viewed" in North Carolina. But Zimmerman said that would effectively put the entire planet under the jurisdiction of the state law, since anything published on the World Wide Web can be seen here. He said that is unconstitutional because it oversteps the state's legal jurisdiction.

CRIMINAL LIBEL. The bill includes criminal penalties for libel, although a sponsor said that was a mistake. Still, Zimmerman said that while criminal libel laws are rarely enforced due to First Amendment concerns, even those that remain on the books require the person to be maliciously or willfully spreading a libelous statement they know is untrue.

Despite his concerns, Zimmerman said that he does not view the underlying rationale for the bill as wrong.

"I don't think there's anything objectionable necessarily about updating a statute to make it clear that libel law extends to online communication," he said.

Here's another political gem from the Andy Griffith files.

In January of 2007, a YouTube clip from "The Andy Griffith Show" made its way around the blogosphere. It showed a handful of scenes from a 1967 episode about Opie's tape recorder.

In the scenes, Opie tries to convince his father to listen to a tape he secretly made of a prisoner confessing, but Sheriff Taylor refuses, saying even a guilty man has rights.

"The law can't use that kind of help," he tells Opie.

The clips were meant to contrast Andy Griffith with then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who was testifying about warrantless wiretapping before Congress at the time.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation called it a "civics lesson" that Gonzales should study. BoingBoing jokingly called Andy Griffith a "terrorist sympathizer."

The video was taken down after CBS claimed it was a copyright violation, though dozens of other clips from the show remain on YouTube.