Judge Temporarily Blocks Use of Smartphone Apps to Hail Yellow Cabs

Granting at least a short-term victory to the livery and black-car operators who filed suit against the city, Justice Carol E. Huff issued a temporary restraining order until March 19, when the two sides are scheduled to reconvene. Owners of for-hire vehicles have argued that the city’s plan violates a longstanding ban on prearranged rides in yellow taxis and would upend their business model.

“It’s not an ‘e-hail.’ It’s an ‘e-prearranged pickup,’ ” said Randy M. Mastro, the lawyer representing the plaintiffs, which include the Livery Roundtable and the Black Car Assistance Corporation.

City officials expressed confidence that the program would not be stopped for long, noting that Justice Huff had not ruled on the merits of the case. “We understand why the court would want time to consider this issue after first receiving voluminous legal filings from all sides earlier this afternoon,” Michelle Goldberg-Cahn, a lawyer for the city, said in a statement.

David S. Yassky, the city’s taxi commissioner, said, “Passengers can wait 10 days to enjoy the latest technology.”

Smartphone apps are already widely used to reserve livery and black cars. In December, the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission approved, by a vote of 7 to 0 with 2 abstentions, a pilot program for the apps to be used for yellow cabs. A permanent rule change had initially been proposed, but as the vote neared and it appeared that a majority of board members might oppose the program, the commission settled on a temporary pilot program instead.

Before the vote, with app companies like Uber seeking to enter the yellow taxi market, the city faced criticism for not immediately embracing the new technology. The city said at the time that it could not approve the apps until its contracts with payment processors had expired.

The app suit is the latest in a deluge of legal challenges to the city’s taxi policies. The Bloomberg administration’s plan to expand street-hail service outside of Manhattan has been stalled in court since last year. And industry officials have expressed skepticism about whether the proposed Taxi of Tomorrow, which has also faced lawsuits in advance of its scheduled introduction late this year, will ever reach the road in its current form.

China Blocks Web Access to Times

The authorities were also blocking attempts to mention The Times or the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, in posts on Sina Weibo, an extremely popular mini-blogging service in China that resembles Twitter.

The Foreign Ministry spokesman on duty in Beijing early Friday morning did not answer phone calls seeking comment.

China maintains the world’s most extensive and sophisticated system for Internet censorship, employing tens of thousands of people to monitor what is said, delete entries that contravene the country’s extensive and unpublished regulations and even write new entries that are favorable to the government.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a senior fellow specializing in Internet free expression and privacy issues at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan group headquartered in Washington, said that the Chinese interruption of Internet access was typical of the response to information that offended leaders.

“This is what they do: they get mad, they block you,” she said.

The English-language and Chinese-language Web sites of The Times are hosted on servers outside mainland China.

A spokeswoman for The Times, Eileen Murphy, expressed disappointment that Internet access had been blocked and noted that the Chinese-language Web site had attracted “great interest” in China.

“We hope that full access is restored shortly, and we will ask the Chinese authorities to ensure that our readers in China can continue to enjoy New York Times journalism,” she said in a statement, adding, “We will continue to report and translate stories applying the same journalistic standards that are upheld across The New York Times.”

Former President Jiang Zemin of China ordered an end to blocking of The New York Times Web site after meeting with journalists from The Times in August 2001. The company’s Web sites, like those of most other foreign media organizations, have remained mostly free of blocking since then, with occasional, temporary exceptions.

By 7 a.m. Friday in China, access to both the English- and Chinese-language Web sites of The Times was blocked from all 31 cities in mainland China tested. The Times had posted the article in English at 4:34 p.m. on Thursday in New York (4:34 a.m. Friday in Beijing), and finished posting the article in Chinese three hours later after the translation of final edits to the English-language version.

Publication of the article about Mr. Wen and his family comes at a delicate time in Chinese politics, during a year in which factional rivalries and the personal lives of Chinese leaders have come into public view to a rare extent and drawn unprecedented international interest.

The Times’s statement called China “an increasingly open society, with increasingly sophisticated media,” adding, “The response to our site suggests that The Times can play an important role in the government’s efforts to raise the quality of journalism available to the Chinese people.”

The New York Times is not the first international organization to run into trouble with Chinese censors. Google decided to move its servers for the Chinese market in January 2010, to Hong Kong, a semiautonomous Chinese territory outside the country’s censorship firewalls, after the company was unable to reach an agreement with the Chinese authorities to allow unrestricted searches of the Internet.

Bloomberg published an article on June 29 describing wealth accumulated by the family of Vice President Xi Jinping, who is expected to become the country’s next top leader as general secretary of the Communist Party during the coming Party Congress.

Since then, Bloomberg’s operations have encountered a series of problems in mainland China, including the blocking of its Web site, which is in English.

Twitter Blocks Germans’ Access to Neo-Nazis’ Account

The move was the first time that Twitter acted on a policy known as “country-withheld content,” announced in January, in which it will block an account at the request of a government. But the company cracked open the gates to a complex new era in which it will increasingly have to referee legal challenges to the deluge of posts that has made the site so popular.

The company said the goal was to balance freedom of expression with compliance with local laws. “Never want to withhold content; good to have tools to do it narrowly & transparently,” Alexander Macgillivray, the company’s chief lawyer, wrote on Twitter.

A German spokesman for the company confirmed in an e-mail that it was the first time the policy had been used, although Twitter does not as a matter of policy announce government requests to block an account. In a “transparency report” issued earlier this year, the company said it had received six such requests but had not, for reasons it did not specify, acted upon them.

Uwe Schünemann, the interior minister for the state of Lower Saxony, where the neo-Nazi group is based, applauded the decision to block the Twitter feed, calling it in a statement “an important step.”

Twitter neither shut down the group’s account nor deleted the group’s posts. It blocked them for users only in Germany, who see a message that reads “Blocked” and “This account has been withheld in Germany,” along with a link to more information about the policy.

The decision to block the German feed was a relatively easy one, given that the group is banned and that the use of Nazi symbols and slogans can be criminally prosecuted. The more difficult question is how broadly and under what rules the policy will be applied by a company with users around the world.

Twitter employees are not combing through the hundreds of millions of messages posted each day searching for offensive material, but are responding only to government requests, beholden to free-expression laws in the countries in which it operates. That makes the company potentially subject to manipulation by authoritarian governments, rights advocates say.

“Where it really will be dangerous is in repressive regimes where Twitter is a very important means of communication between political dissenters, and where laws are interpreted by people who would interpret them in a politically biased fashion,” said Svetlana Mintcheva, the director of programs at the National Coalition Against Censorship in New York. “What, for instance, if the president of Belarus decides to suppress the tweets of a theater company which is critical of him?”

Authoritarian governments may wish to stifle the voices of dissidents just as ardently as German officials hope to silence the extreme right. In some countries, religious leaders may seek to prohibit messages they deem to be blasphemous.

Twitter is far from alone in negotiating these rules. Both Facebook and YouTube, owned by Google, complied with requests from German officials to take down content associated with the neo-Nazi group, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry in Lower Saxony said. Facebook and Google have long scoured content for keywords that suggest illegal material.

Last month, Google blocked access in some countries to a video on YouTube that mocked the Prophet Muhammad and touched off violent protests. The company has a policy of removing what it deems to be hate speech.

Twitter was sharply criticized over the summer after it suspended the account of a British journalist who wrote harshly about the Olympic broadcasts of NBC, a corporate sponsor. Twitter reinstated the account and apologized. The episode highlighted the tensions that Twitter faces as it tries to make money without alienating fans, who see the site as a public commons.

Twitter’s decision on the neo-Nazi group generated little controversy in Germany. In part because of its Nazi past, Germany has a different approach to free speech than that of the United States, where the First Amendment provides broad protections. People with expertise in far-right groups in Germany often point out that their Web sites are hosted on servers in the United States.

Stefan Pauly contributed reporting from Berlin, and Somini Sengupta from San Francisco.

Google Blocks Inflammatory Video in Egypt and Libya

Google said it decided to block the video in response to violence that killed four American diplomatic personnel in Libya. The company said its decision was unusual, made because of the exceptional circumstances. Its policy is to remove content only if it is hate speech, violating its terms of service, or if it is responding to valid court orders or government requests. And it said it had determined that under its own guidelines, the video was not hate speech.

Millions of people across the Muslim world, though, viewed the video as one of the most inflammatory pieces of content to circulate on the Internet. From Afghanistan to Libya, the authorities have been scrambling to contain an outpouring of popular outrage over the video and calling on the United States to take measures against its producers.

Google’s action raises fundamental questions about the control that Internet companies have over online expression. Should the companies themselves decide what standards govern what is seen on the Internet? How consistently should these policies be applied?

“Google is the world’s gatekeeper for information so if Google wants to define the First Amendment to exclude this sort of material then there’s not a lot the rest of the world can do about it,” said Peter Spiro, a constitutional and international law professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. “It makes this episode an even more significant one if Google broadens the block.”

He added, though, that “provisionally,” he thought Google made the right call. “Anything that helps calm the situation, I think is for the better.”

Under YouTube’s terms of service, hate speech is speech against individuals, not against groups. Because the video mocks Islam but not Muslim people, it has been allowed to stay on the site in most of the world, the company said Thursday.

“This video — which is widely available on the Web — is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube,” it said. “However, given the very difficult situation in Libya and Egypt we have temporarily restricted access in both countries.”

Though the video is still visible in other Arab countries where violence has flared, YouTube is closely monitoring the situation, according to a person briefed on YouTube’s decision-making who was not authorized to speak publicly. The Afghan government has asked YouTube to remove the video, and some Google services were blocked there Thursday.

Google is walking a precarious line, said Kevin Bankston, director of the free expression project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit in Washington that advocates for digital civil liberties.

On the one hand, he said, blocking the video “sends the message that if you violently object to speech you disagree with, you can get it censored.” At the same time, he said, “the decision to block in those two countries specifically is kind of hard to second guess, considering the severity of the violence in those two areas.”

“It seems they’re trying to balance the concern about censorship with the threat of actual violence in Egypt and Libya,” he added. “It’s a difficult calculation to make and highlights the difficult positions that content platforms are sometimes put in.”

All Web companies that allow people to post content online — Facebook and Twitter as well as Google — have grappled with issues involving content. The questions are complicated by the fact that the Internet has no geographical boundaries, so companies must navigate a morass of laws and cultural mores. Web companies receive dozens of requests a month to remove content. Google alone received more than 1,965 requests from government agencies last year to remove at least 20,311 pieces of content, it said.

These included a request from a Canadian government office to remove a video of a Canadian citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet, and a request from a Pakistan government office to remove six videos satirizing Pakistani officials. In both cases, Google refused to remove the videos.

But it did block access in Turkey to videos that exposed private details about public officials because, in response to Turkish government and court requests, it determined that they violated local laws.

Similarly, in India it blocked local access to some videos of protests and those that used offensive language against religious leaders because it determined that they violated local laws prohibiting speech that could incite enmity between communities.

Requests for content removal from United States governments and courts doubled over the course of last year to 279 requests to remove 6,949 items, according to Google. Members of Congress have publicly requested that YouTube take down jihadist videos they say incite terrorism, and in some cases YouTube has agreed.

Google has continually fallen back on its guidelines to remove only content that breaks laws or its terms of service, at the request of users, governments or courts, which is why blocking the anti-Islam video was exceptional.

Some wonder what precedent this might set, especially for government authorities keen to stanch expression they think will inflame their populace.

“It depends on whether this is the beginning of a trend or an extremely exceptional response to an extremely exceptional situation,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices, a network of bloggers worldwide, and author of “Consent of the Networked,” a book that addresses free speech in the digital age.

Somini Sengupta contributed reporting.

Google Blocks Inflammatory Video in Egypt and Libya

Google said it decided to block the video in response to violence that killed four American diplomatic personnel in Libya. The company said its decision was unusual, made because of the exceptional circumstances. Its policy is to remove content only if it is hate speech, violating its terms of service, or if it is responding to valid court orders or government requests. And it said it had determined that under its own guidelines, the video was not hate speech.

Millions of people across the Muslim world, though, viewed the video as one of the most inflammatory pieces of content to circulate on the Internet. From Afghanistan to Libya, the authorities have been scrambling to contain an outpouring of popular outrage over the video and calling on the United States to take measures against its producers.

Google’s action raises fundamental questions about the control that Internet companies have over online expression. Should the companies themselves decide what standards govern what is seen on the Internet? How consistently should these policies be applied?

“Google is the world’s gatekeeper for information so if Google wants to define the First Amendment to exclude this sort of material then there’s not a lot the rest of the world can do about it,” said Peter Spiro, a constitutional and international law professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. “It makes this episode an even more significant one if Google broadens the block.”

He added, though, that “provisionally,” he thought Google made the right call. “Anything that helps calm the situation, I think is for the better.”

Under YouTube’s terms of service, hate speech is speech against individuals, not against groups. Because the video mocks Islam but not Muslim people, it has been allowed to stay on the site in most of the world, the company said Thursday.

“This video — which is widely available on the Web — is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube,” it said. “However, given the very difficult situation in Libya and Egypt we have temporarily restricted access in both countries.”

Though the video is still visible in other Arab countries where violence has flared, YouTube is closely monitoring the situation, according to a person briefed on YouTube’s decision-making who was not authorized to speak publicly. The Afghan government has asked YouTube to remove the video, and some Google services were blocked there Thursday.

Google is walking a precarious line, said Kevin Bankston, director of the free expression project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit in Washington that advocates for digital civil liberties.

On the one hand, he said, blocking the video “sends the message that if you violently object to speech you disagree with, you can get it censored.” At the same time, he said, “the decision to block in those two countries specifically is kind of hard to second guess, considering the severity of the violence in those two areas.”

“It seems they’re trying to balance the concern about censorship with the threat of actual violence in Egypt and Libya,” he added. “It’s a difficult calculation to make and highlights the difficult positions that content platforms are sometimes put in.”

All Web companies that allow people to post content online — Facebook and Twitter as well as Google — have grappled with issues involving content. The questions are complicated by the fact that the Internet has no geographical boundaries, so companies must navigate a morass of laws and cultural mores. Web companies receive dozens of requests a month to remove content. Google alone received more than 1,965 requests from government agencies last year to remove at least 20,311 pieces of content, it said.

These included a request from a Canadian government office to remove a video of a Canadian citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet, and a request from a Pakistan government office to remove six videos satirizing Pakistani officials. In both cases, Google refused to remove the videos.

But it did block access in Turkey to videos that exposed private details about public officials because, in response to Turkish government and court requests, it determined that they violated local laws.

Similarly, in India it blocked local access to some videos of protests and those that used offensive language against religious leaders because it determined that they violated local laws prohibiting speech that could incite enmity between communities.

Requests for content removal from United States governments and courts doubled over the course of last year to 279 requests to remove 6,949 items, according to Google. Members of Congress have publicly requested that YouTube take down jihadist videos they say incite terrorism, and in some cases YouTube has agreed.

Google has continually fallen back on its guidelines to remove only content that breaks laws or its terms of service, at the request of users, governments or courts, which is why blocking the anti-Islam video was exceptional.

Some wonder what precedent this might set, especially for government authorities keen to stanch expression they think will inflame their populace.

“It depends on whether this is the beginning of a trend or an extremely exceptional response to an extremely exceptional situation,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices, a network of bloggers worldwide, and author of “Consent of the Networked,” a book that addresses free speech in the digital age.

Somini Sengupta contributed reporting.

Disruptions: When Craigslist Blocks Innovations - Disruptions

Thor Swift for The New York TimesCraig Newmark, founder and chairman of Craigslist, shown in 2004 at his company’s office in San Francisco.

In 1995, a good-hearted programmer named Craig Newmark thought of a way to make newspaper classified ad listings simple, and in turn, people’s lives easier. His free Web site, called Craigslist, quickly gained millions of users. Eye-popping offers to buy the company outright came in, all of which Mr. Newmark turned down, saying Craigslist was a “public good.”

Despite its success, Craigslist has become stagnant. Today, it feels stuck in the 1990s, where links are electric blue and everything is underlined. As a result, the site is now crammed with listings and is extremely difficult to use.

One might think Craigslist is as ready for disruption as sleepy newspaper classified ad sections once were. Why hasn’t a site this vulnerable been displaced?

There may be part of the answer in this tale. Eric DeMenthon, a 27-year-old programmer, was one of the users overwhelmed by the site. In 2008 he was searching for an apartment on Craigslist and he couldn’t navigate the endless listings. So he quickly built an application that placed Craigslist apartment ads on an online map. After finding an apartment with the tool he had cobbled together, he realized the product had saved him so much time that he should make it available to others, also as a “public good.”

He said, “I did the math and I figure if I save people three hours of their time on my site when they need to look for a new apartment, that’s over 350 years of time that I can save people each month.”

Last week, Craigslist served Mr. DeMenthon with a lawsuit accusing his site, Padmapper, of infringing on copyright and trademark, and it threw in a long list of other piracy-related claims for good measure.

But, according to Mr. DeMenthon, he isn’t stealing anything.

“I was kind of disappointed. I was always a great admirer of what Craigslist was doing,” he said by phone from his two-bedroom apartment in Mountain View, Calif., where he works on the site from noon until 3 a.m. daily as the only full-time employee. “I’m just trying to help people save time.”

This isn’t the first time Craigslist has claimed such violations. The Internet is littered with digital carcasses that once built on top of the listings site. Their pixelated tombstones are inscribed with one-liners that Craigslist killed access without any notice, or they were sent a cease-and-desist letter by Perkins Coie, a top corporate law firm that frequently represents Craigslist.

One, a site called Craigs Little Buddy, could search multiple Craigslist cities at once — a simple feature that Craigslist doesn’t offer. Another site, Craigsly, helped people set up e-mail alerts when a certain type of listing, like a specific car or apartment for sale, was posted in their area. Another, Ziink Craigslist Helper, which offered a free browser plug-in that made navigating listings easier, was also shut down by Craigslist lawyers.

Most of the sites that Craigslist killed began as hobby projects, making little to no money — just programmers trying to improve a product they loved.

Craigslist and its chief executive, Jim Buckmaster, did not return repeated requests for comment.

Yet something doesn’t add up in all this. In July 2010, on the question-and-answer site Quora, Mr. Newmark defended the company’s actions in a similar situation to Padmapper’s, saying he did not take issue with sites that do not affect Craigslist’s servers. “Actually, we take issue with only services which consume a lot of bandwidth, it’s that simple,” Mr. Newmark wrote.

But Padmapper does not siphon off a bit of bandwidth from Craigslist. Instead, it uses a company called 3Taps, which collects listings from Craigslist by looking for them on search engines, including Google and Bing, then organizing them and wrapping them up in an application programming interface so developers can build sites that point to Craigslist’s listings.

“The listings are already out there. We’re finding them already on the Web and organizing them so other people don’t have to do the same thing twice,” said Greg Kidd, the chief executive of 3Taps. “And we’re not breaking any laws because we are pulling in the facts from the listing; everyone knows you can’t copyright facts.” Craigslist also named 3Taps in the lawsuit filed last week.

As intellectual property lawyers will tell you, Mr. Kidd is not off base: facts, like those in classified listings, cannot be copyrighted.

So why hasn’t anyone managed to unseat Craigslist, a site that has barely changed in close to two decades?

It has dug an effective moat by cultivating an exaggerated image of “doing good” that keeps its customers loyal, while behind the scenes, it bullies any rivals that come near and it stifles innovation.

Mr. Kidd explained: “Where there is dominance in an exchange place, like a classified platform such as Craigslist, the importance is not in the listings posted on the site — those are just facts — but rather the critical mass of connecting people.”

As for Mr. DeMenthon of Padmapper, even in the face of legal action, he feels he has a moral obligation to keep the site running. “I don’t have a lawyer,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I definitely know I have a chance to do more good with this site.”

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 2, 2012

The Disruptions column on Monday, about Craigslist’s litigation against other Web sites, referred incorrectly to Craigslist’s financial performance. Its annual revenue was estimated at $115 million last year; it is not the case that the company has “hundreds of millions” of dollars in profit a year.

Disruptions: When Craigslist Blocks Innovations - Disruptions

Thor Swift for The New York TimesCraig Newmark, founder and chairman of Craigslist, shown in 2004 at his company’s office in San Francisco.

In 1995, a good-hearted programmer named Craig Newmark thought of a way to make newspaper classified ad listings simple, and in turn, people’s lives easier. His free Web site, called Craigslist, quickly gained millions of users. Eye-popping offers to buy the company outright came in, all of which Mr. Newmark turned down, saying Craigslist was a “public good.”

Craigslist makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but it has become stagnant. Today, it feels stuck in the 1990s, where links are electric blue and everything is underlined. As a result, the site is now crammed with listings and is extremely difficult to use.

One might think Craigslist is as ready for disruption as sleepy newspaper classified ad sections once were. Why hasn’t a site this vulnerable been displaced?

There may be part of the answer in this tale. Eric DeMenthon, a 27-year-old programmer, was one of the users overwhelmed by the site. In 2008 he was searching for an apartment on Craigslist and he couldn’t navigate the endless listings. So he quickly built an application that placed Craigslist apartment ads on an online map. After finding an apartment with the tool he had cobbled together, he realized the product had saved him so much time that he should make it available to others, also as a “public good.”

He said, “I did the math and I figure if I save people three hours of their time on my site when they need to look for a new apartment, that’s over 350 years of time that I can save people each month.”

Last week, Craigslist served Mr. DeMenthon with a lawsuit accusing his site, Padmapper, of infringing on copyright and trademark, and it threw in a long list of other piracy-related claims for good measure.

But, according to Mr. DeMenthon, he isn’t stealing anything.

“I was kind of disappointed. I was always a great admirer of what Craigslist was doing,” he said by phone from his two-bedroom apartment in Mountain View, Calif., where he works on the site from noon until 3 a.m. daily as the only full-time employee. “I’m just trying to help people save time.”

This isn’t the first time Craigslist has claimed such violations. The Internet is littered with digital carcasses that once built on top of the listings site. Their pixelated tombstones are inscribed with one-liners that Craigslist killed access without any notice, or they were sent a cease-and-desist letter by Perkins Coie, a top corporate law firm that frequently represents Craigslist.

One, a site called Craigs Little Buddy, could search multiple Craigslist cities at once — a simple feature that Craigslist doesn’t offer. Another site, Craigsly, helped people set up e-mail alerts when a certain type of listing, like a specific car or apartment for sale, was posted in their area. Another, Ziink Craigslist Helper, which offered a free browser plug-in that made navigating listings easier, was also shut down by Craigslist lawyers.

Most of the sites that Craigslist killed began as hobby projects, making little to no money — just programmers trying to improve a product they loved.

Craigslist and its chief executive, Jim Buckmaster, did not return repeated requests for comment.

Yet something doesn’t add up in all this. In July 2010, on the question-and-answer site Quora, Mr. Newmark defended the company’s actions in a similar situation to Padmapper’s, saying he did not take issue with sites that do not affect Craigslist’s servers. “Actually, we take issue with only services which consume a lot of bandwidth, it’s that simple,” Mr. Newmark wrote.

But Padmapper does not siphon off a bit of bandwidth from Craigslist. Instead, it uses a company called 3Taps, which collects listings from Craigslist by looking for them on search engines, including Google and Bing, then organizing them and wrapping them up in an application programming interface so developers can build sites that point to Craigslist’s listings.

“The listings are already out there. We’re finding them already on the Web and organizing them so other people don’t have to do the same thing twice,” said Greg Kidd, the chief executive of 3Taps. “And we’re not breaking any laws because we are pulling in the facts from the listing; everyone knows you can’t copyright facts.” Craigslist also named 3Taps in the lawsuit filed last week.

As intellectual property lawyers will tell you, Mr. Kidd is not off base: facts, like those in classified listings, cannot be copyrighted.

So why hasn’t anyone managed to unseat Craigslist, a site that has barely changed in close to two decades?

It has dug an effective moat by cultivating an exaggerated image of “doing good” that keeps its customers loyal, while behind the scenes, it bullies any rivals that come near and it stifles innovation.

Mr. Kidd explained: “Where there is dominance in an exchange place, like a classified platform such as Craigslist, the importance is not in the listings posted on the site — those are just facts — but rather the critical mass of connecting people.”

As for Mr. DeMenthon of Padmapper, even in the face of legal action, he feels he has a moral obligation to keep the site running. “I don’t have a lawyer,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I definitely know I have a chance to do more good with this site.”

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com