By: Mark Fitzgerald Two California newspapers being sued for publishing the ingredients of a controversial anti-moth spray will have to wait for a ruling that could seal court documents about the product.
A Monterey County (Calif.) judge on Thursday ended a court hearing without ruling on a bio-pesticide manufacturer's new motion to seal court documents referring to inert ingredients of CheckMate OLR-F that were first revealed publicly by the Santa Cruz (Calif.) Sentinel.
The dust-up between the manufacturer, Suterra LLC, and the Sentinel over the disclosure of the spray's inert ingredients pits claims of trade secrets against arguments that the newspaper is exercising its First Amendment rights on behalf of the public interest.
"Our firm belief from the beginning is that the public has a right to know what is in a substance that will be sprayed by their government," Sentinel Managing Editor Don Miller told E&P in an e-mail Thursday night.
The legal fight has also been joined by the alternative Monterey County Weekly, which has sued Suterra for trying to prevent publication of some of the ingredients of CheckMate OLR-F, which reportedly disrupts the mating process of apple brown moths -- a pest from Australia with a voracious appetite for a wide variety of crops.
Suterra in turn has sued both newspapers to block publication of the ingredients.
On Sept. 28, the Sentinel published a list of some ingredients of CheckMate, noting that it included polymethylene polyphenyl isocyanate (PPI), which has been linked to respiratory problems. About 100 Monterey County residents complained of health problems after the spray was used in September.
The paper received the list of the ingredients from the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which later said CheckMate does not contain PPI.
Suterra sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Sentinel, demanding it remove the list from its Web site and claiming publication of the ingredients violated trade secrets law. The Monterey County Weekly also published the list, citing the Sentinel's reporting.
"While the Sentinel, on the advice of legal counsel who had reviewed state and federal trade secrets laws, did temporarily remove the ingredient list from our Web site after five days, we subsequently, and quickly, published the name of the inert ingredient in follow-up stories and editorials, and then republished the entire list again, based on the judge's ruling in Los Angeles," Miller said, referring Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge David Yaffe's rejection of Suterra's request for a temporary restraining order blocking publication of the ingredients.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here