Boston workers and residents learned this week that Walsh has signed an agreement with the United States Olympic Committee that bans City of Boston employees from speaking negatively about the Games or the bidding process. The decree says:

The City, including its employees, officers, and representatives, shall not make, publish or communicate to any Person, or communicated in any public forum, any comments or statements (written or oral) that reflect unfavorably upon, denigrate or disparage, or are detrimental to the reputation or statute of, the [International Olympic Committee], the [International Paralympic Committee], the USOC, the IOC Bid, the Bid Committee or the Olympic or Paralympic movement. The City, including its employees, officers and representatives, shall each promote the Bid Committee, the USOC, the IOC Bid, U.S. Olympic and Paralympic athletes and hopefuls and the Olympic and Paralympic movement in a positive manner.

The decree nears iffy legal territory because it's so broad and seems to apply to all city employees, says Curtis Summers, a labor and employment lawyer from the Husch Blackwell firm. Employees at private companies have few free speech rights except for those related to improving their workplace and guaranteeing their rights as workers. But the Supreme Court in a June 2014 decision clarified the limits public employers can place on their workers' speech. The court ruled that speech outside the scope of an employee's duties is protected.

So, Summers says, if a school employee in Boston says that she doesn't want to deal with tax increases related to the Olympics and the city tries to enforce its decree against her, that could be a violation of her free speech rights. On the other hand, if an employee in the city's public relations office speaks ill of the Olympics bid, Boston would likely have more enforcement power against those comments since the PR employee's main responsibility is to speak publicly on behalf of the city.

“The basic principal is that public employees still have the First Amendment right to speak out as citizens on matters of public concern so long as it doesn’t disrupt their ability to do their jobs,” says Sarah Wunsch, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.

Mayor Walsh defended the decree to The Boston Globe, saying that it's not his intention to cripple open debate about the Olympics and that he has no plans to reprimand or punish city workers for voicing their opposition to the bid for the 2024 Games. When asked why he signed the decree if that was the case, Walsh said that the agreement was "boilerplate." The USOC has said that the non-disparagement language is typical of contracts between the organization and bidding cities.

“You can call it boilerplate, but boilerplate has meaning,” Wunsch says. The decree will have a chilling effect on free speech, she says, because it frames supporting the Olympics as positive and being critical of the bid as negative. “If you’re a city employee, you know what [the mayor] thinks.”

The mayor's office did not return Fortune's request for comment on the decree’s enforcement and its potential infringement on employees' First Amendment rights. The USOC also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

While the legality of the decree may be in question, here's something that's not: it's usefulness.

If the goal of Boston's ban on Olympic smack talk is to breed the cooperation needed to win and put on a successful Olympic Games, encouraging employees to bottle up their grievances could deliver the exact opposite effect.

“Having a way to deal with dissent is a concern for companies more broadly; they want people to disagree so they can come up with better solutions and build consensus,” says Adam Cobb, a professor at The Wharton School. The Boston ban “has the potential to be counterproductive," he says. "If you don't let [dissenters] voice their concerns, they'll just sit there mad or quit." Those left behind will simply be yes-men and yes-women. Sure, they will all be on the same page. And they’ll come up with nothing but the same solution for the same problem, again and again.

The search giant's arguments are being supported by dozens of amici curiae--interested outside parties--who are also up in arms over the precedent. These include Facebook FB , Twitter TWTR , Pinterest, Tumblr, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (who say ruling violates protections afforded Internet publishers by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act); The New York Times Co NYT , NPR, Public Citizen, and Techdirt publisher Floor64 (claiming it violates the First Amendment and the Communications Decency Act); Netflix NFLX and a bevy of documentary filmmakers, including Morgan (Super-Size Me) Spurlock (upset about its copyright holdings, which would "wreak havoc" with their business models); and a couple dozen legal scholars (incensed about all of the above).

Of course, none of the folks attacking the ruling has a fatwa on his head. Cindy Lee Garcia, the actress who brought the suit, does. She's got amicus support from the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and several other actors and musicians guilds.

The case is proof positive of the hoariest of old lawyers’ saws: Hard cases make bad law. Garcia v. Google is a classic of the genre.

Garcia says she was tricked into appearing in the infamous movie now known as The Innocence of Muslims, which depicts the Prophet Mohammed in the vilest of terms. When a 14-minute trailer of it was released on YouTube in Arabic translation on September 11, 2012, it triggered deadly protests in Cairo and other Muslim cities throughout the world.

It may or may not also have caused demonstrations in Benghazi, Libya, which preceded an attack on the U.S. consulate there in which four died, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. The video's perceived connection to that event--accurate or not--helped generate about 40 million clicks for the YouTube video, with many viewers doubtless assuming that Garcia was a willing participant in the incendiary, and, to many, blasphemous, propaganda reel.

Last February, in a ruling that stunned much of the legal establishment, Garcia persuaded a 2-1 majority of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to issue a preliminary injunction ordering Google's YouTube to take down all traces of the trailer and to patrol its site going forward to prevent any repostings. The ruling, written by the outspoken, ordinarily libertarian-leaning Alex Kozinski, found that Garcia was likely to win her claim that the trailer violated her copyright in her acting performance, a 5-second sliver of which had been included on the trailer.

Due to concerns among Kozinski's Ninth Circuit brethren and sistren about whether he got this one right, an 11-judge panel of the same court is now set to rehear the case Monday. Google's case will be argued by former Acting Solicitor General of the United States Neal Katyal, who is now with Hogan Lovells. Garcia's will be argued by Cris Armenta, a Los Angeles solo practitioner who mainly represents entertainment industry clients.

Here's Garcia's side of the story, according to a declaration she filed in court and my telephone interview with her lawyer, Armenta. Back in July 2011, Garcia, a Los Angeles grandmother and ordained minister who was struggling to support herself and her severely disabled husband, answered a casting call. She read for a part in an adventure movie set in Arabia 2000 years ago, to be called Desert Warriors. She got it, and then spent three-and-a-half days filming. She was paid about $500 by a producer she then knew as Sam Bacile.

The following summer, Garcia checked back with Bacile about the status of the film, and learned that he'd just posted a trailer of it on YouTube.

To her horror, the film was an assault on the character of the prophet Mohammed. In the course of it, a brief clip showed Garcia acting a line that in the original script had read: "Is George crazy? Our daughter is but a child." In this version, though, her line was dubbed over, so that she now appeared to be saying, "Is your Mohammed a child molester?"

The video was getting no attention online at the time, so Garcia, who was still struggling financially, took no immediate action.

In September, though, another version of the trailer, now dubbed in Arabic, was posted on YouTube. This one was was soon replayed on Egyptian television, and all hell broke loose. On September 19, an Egyptian cleric issued a fatwa calling upon "the Muslim youth in America and Europe … to kill the director, the producer, and the actors and everyone who helped and promoted the film."

Garcia began receiving death threats, as well as threats to rape her daughter. She changed home addresses and her place of work. She was not alone in taking the death threats seriously, she asserts in the declaration. When she visited New York that month, Port Authority police forbade her from entering the LaGuardia airport terminal, arranging instead for a squad car to take her directly to her plane as it waited on the tarmac.

Google removed the Innocence of Muslims clips from its local YouTube sites in countries where it was outlawed, including Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Though the video wasn't forbidden in Egypt or Libya, Google temporarily blocked it there, too, citing "difficult circumstances."

In the U.S., however, it refused to take it down, explaining that that it met YouTube's "community guidelines.” Google chairman Eric Schmidt explained at a press conference that month: "We believe the answer to bad speech is more speech."

Garcia sued Bacile, whose real name, she had come to believe, was Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. Nakoula had been convicted of federal bank fraud in February 2010, for a scheme involving taking out numerous credit cards under diverse names and social security numbers that didn't belong to him. In September 2012 he told a federal court that his real name was Mark Basseley Youssef, so we'll use that one here.

Youssef is a U.S. citizen, according to court records, and is an Egyptian Christian by ethnic background, according to his lawyer, Leonard Chaitin. Youssef denies misleading Garcia, Chaitin says in an interview, but Chaitin declines to detail Youssef's defense at this time.

In any event, suing Youssef--for fraud and other torts--couldn't get Garcia what she really wanted, which was to pull down the offensive trailers.

Only YouTube could do that, but it seemed to be shielded by two layers of adamantine legal protection. First, the First Amendment usually protects the right of anyone--be it Youssef or YouTube--to publish offensive speech, no matter how odious.

Second, the Communications Decency Act grants broad immunity to Internet publishers in particular, like YouTube, against liability stemming from content posted by their users. So even if Youssef was found to have commited some tort against Garcia--like fraud or defamation, say--YouTube would be protected by the CDA. The CDA encourages the creation of Internet forums for user-generated content, and it protects financially strapped startups against crushing legal costs that might otherwise strangle them in their cradles.

The narrow exception is that Internet publishers can be forced to take down copyright infringing content. But even in that case Internet publishers' obligations are highly circumscribed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA). Under the DMCA, for instance, publishers only need to take down links that copyright holders specifically identify; they don't need to monitor their sites proactively to prevent infringing material from getting posted in the first place.

On September 24, Garcia filed the first of eight DMCA takedown notices, claiming she had a copyright interest in her 5-second performance in the trailer. Her lawyer, Armenta, also petitioned the U.S. Copyright Office to register Garcia's performance.

Google and the Copyright Office both rebuffed Garcia, for basically the same reason. There's no such thing, the copyright office said, as a copyright interest in an actor's five-second performance captured in a snippet of a movie. "A motion picture is a single integrated work," it wrote. The copyright in a movie belongs to its "author"--which is ordinarily either the studio, the producer, the director, or the screenwriter.

In September 2012 Garcia filed a copyright suit against Google and YouTube in federal court seeking a preliminary injunction ordering takedown of the trailers. In late November, in an unpublished, 3-page order, U.S. District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald perfunctorily denied the injunction without a hearing, finding Garcia was unlikely to win her claim.

Fitzgerald found that he didn't need to decide whether Garcia had any copyrightable interest in her performance, because, even assuming she did, she'd granted an "implied license" to Youssef to use her performance when she accepted money to act in Youssef's film.

In February, the split Ninth Circuit panel overturned Fitzgerald in the stunning ruling by Kozinski. He rejected Fitzgerald's "implied license" theory, because Youssef had defrauded Garcia about the nature of movie she was going to be in. "The film differs so radically from anything Garcia could have imagined when she was cast," Kozinski wrote, "that it can’t possibly be authorized by any implied license she granted Youssef."

This part of Kozinski’s ruling has the documentary filmmakers bent out of shape, since they often rely on the "implied license" theory to protect themselves from assertions of various rights by the people they film. Though they don't quite admit the obvious--that they frequently mislead the subjects of their films about how unflatteringly they're going to be portrayed in the finished movie--they express the problem this way: "Often ... the narrative does not fully materialize until the filmmaker is in the editing room. Filmmakers regularly need to 'radically' alter the narrative to tell the most truthful or compelling story.'"

Be that as it may, Kozinski's rejection of the "implied license" theory meant he had to squarely address the underlying question: Can an actor have a separately assertable copyright in her 5-second performance in a movie? Kozinski answers yes, though he admits that the question is "fairly debatable." He then continues, opaquely: "We need not and do not decide whether every actor has a copyright in his performance within a movie. It suffices for now to hold that ... Garcia is likely to prevail based on the record and arguments before us."

That part of his ruling has Netflix in a tizzy. "If the panel opinion stands," its lawyers write, one DMCA takedown notice “from the actor who played Juror Number Four could be enough to justify removal of My Cousin Vinny from Netflix."

Kozinski's concession that his copyright ruling was "fairly debatable" lies at the root of a chorus of complaints from media defendants, like the Los Angeles Times. If it's not certain that any copyright infringement is even going on, then what really seems to be happening here is that the court is suppressing a message it finds offensive under the guise of a copyright ruling. That would constitute "a direct restraint on controversial speech," their lawyers argue, which is the core of what the First Amendment prohibits.

The media amici have another beef with Kozinski, too. For the first week that his ruling was in effect, it was secret! He issued a gag order forbidding Google and Garcia from even telling the public that a decision had been rendered. He did this so that users wouldn't make copies of the trailer and repost them elsewhere--although, obviously, in the more than 14 months since the trailer had become notorious, this had already widely occurred.

Finally, when Kozinski lowered the boom, he issued one of the broadest takedown orders every decreed. Apparently miffed that Google wouldn't take down the trailer in the exercise of its own discretion--as it did in Libya and Egypt, "due to difficult circumstances"--he required that YouTube not only scrub its sites worldwide of the trailer, but also that it proactively patrol its sites going forward to make sure that no one uploaded new versions of the film or trailer. (He made an exception for any version omitting Garcia's image.) This is the part of the ruling that has Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and the EFF so concerned. They say the order conflicts with the DMCA, which contemplates that Internet publishers will only have to passively and reactively respond to takedown requests for specifically identified offending files. "It puts Google in the role of a copyright cop," write lawyers for the EFF, "affirmatively monitoring user speech for signs of alleged infringement."

Kozinski's ruling begins to looks like a cardboard duck in a shooting gallery. On the other hand, it's a duck that's bought Garcia some time--time during which, perhaps, emotions have had a chance to calm and memories, to fade.

Maybe that was the point. Hard cases make bad law.

Correction: An earlier version of this misspelled the name of Garcia’s lawyer, M. Cris Armenta. I regret the error.

Noriega sued Activision Blizzard ATVI in Los Angeles in July, claiming the company used his name and likeness without his permission in its popular game “Call of Duty: Black Ops II.” The company said Monday that Giuliani, who is now a name partner at the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani, will serve as the company’s co-counsel as it plans to file a motion to dismiss Noriega’s lawsuit later today on the grounds that the depiction of the former military dictator in the game is a protected right to free speech.

The former mayor and U.S. attorney called Noriega’s lawsuit “absurd” in a statement saying that Activision Blizzard is seeking “to dismiss an outrageous lawsuit by one of the worst criminals of the last 50 years, Manuel Noriega,” who Giuliani calls “a minor figure” in the video game. The company is also being represented by the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson.

Noriega, who was removed as Panama’s military dictator in 1989 following a U.S. invasion, claims in his lawsuit that the company portrayed him as “a kidnapper, murderer and enemy of the state” in the video game in order to boost sales. Noriega spent almost two decades in prison in the U.S. after being convicted on multiple counts of drug trafficking, racketeering and money laundering in 1992.

Noriega’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Giuliani and the company argue that, if Noriega’s lawsuit were to be successful, it would pave the way for a deluge of lawsuits from the families of other historical figures attempting to block depictions in works of historical fiction, including movies like Forrest Gump and television shows like “Saturday Night Live.”

Historical figures, or their families, “could sue anytime they were mentioned, not just in a game, but in a movie or a book,” Giuliani said in a statement. “Games, movies and books are considered the same, according to the United States Supreme Court for free speech purposes, so it would destroy to a very, very large extent the creative genre of historical fiction.”

In July, actress Lindsay Lohan sued Rockstar Games, alleging the video game company appropriated her likeness without her permission for a character in its hugely popular game “Grand Theft Auto V.”

Of course, this is not the first time that Giuliani and Noriega have shared headlines. In 1989, several months before the U.S. invasion of Panama, Giuliani’s first campaign to be New York City’s mayor was plagued by accusations from his Republican primary opponents that his law firm at the time, White & Case, had ties to Noriega. White & Case admitted that the country of Panama was a client of the firm, but claimed that no work had been done specifically for Noriega. Giuliani prevailed in the Republican primary that year, but later lost in the general election to David Dinkins.

Noriega is seeking lost profits from the game, as well as damages. “Call of Duty: Black Ops II” hauled in over $1 billion in sales within two weeks of its November 2012 release. Activision Blizzard has a market capitalization of more than $15.5 billion. The company’s shares were down almost 0.5% on Monday morning.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Activision Blizzard makes the popular “Halo” video game series, which was actually created by Bungie. The story has been updated to reflect this mistake.

R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company RAI , for instance, used it to argue against a Food and Drug Administration requirement that would have plastered grisly images of smoking's side effects on cigarette packages. Such labels constituted compelled speech, Reynolds argued--successfully.

Likewise, ratings agencies Standard and Poor's and Fitch hid behind the First Amendment when it was criticized for giving high ratings to worthless securities in the run up to the financial crisis. They said that the ratings were based on opinion and therefore constituted protected speech.

So when Congress passed legislation imposing new rules requiring meat producers to attach country of origin labels to their products, the First Amendment defense must have looked like an attractive method for the industry to wiggle out of the regulation. In July 2013, industry groups representing livestock producers, feedlot operators, and meat packers gave it a shot.

Led by the American Meat Institute, the groups filed a lawsuit against the United States Department of Agriculture that claimed that requiring producers to use labels that identified the countries in which its animals were born, raised, and slaughtered, and to specify if meat in a single package was "co-mingled" from different countries of origin represented compelled speech and violated the First Amendment. The meat industry argued in its complaint that because there was no "legitimate justification" for the born, raised, and slaughtered labels, and because the new rules would "impose significant burdens on and radically restructure the way meat is produced and packaged in this country," the regulation violated the First Amendment, which prohibits compelled speech in the absence of substantial governmental interest.

The government, meanwhile, said its interest in allowing consumers to know the origin of the food they eat should be "beyond dispute." The meat industry "cannot and do[es] not provide any basis for second-guessing the considered judgment of Congress ... that country-of-origin labeling is warranted."

Despite what seems like a long line of corporations winning such cases, a divided panel of 11 judges in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit this week ruled against the meat producers after finding that the government interest in informing consumers and isolating potential food contamination superseded the industry's First Amendment claims.

"Simply because the agency believes [the meat industry] has other, superior means to protect food safety doesn't delegitimize a congressional decision to empower consumers to take possible country-specific differences in safety practices into account,” the court majority said. Nor does such a belief “undercut the economy-wide benefits of confining the market impact of a [potential] disease outbreak."

The court majority acknowledged that its decision seemed to fly in the face of previous rulings--specifically the Reynolds Tobacco case over the graphic cigarette warnings labels, which was decided by a three-judge panel in the same circuit court in 2012. The deciding judges in that case sided with Reynolds by ruling that the government interest didn’t trump Reynolds’ First Amendment rights since the labeling requirements weren’t aimed at preventing deception.

The court majority in the meat label case, meanwhile, provided more leeway in what sorts of government interest took precedence over a corporation's First Amendment rights; they ruled that government interest could reach beyond the prevention of deception to such objectives as consumer knowledge and containment of food-borne illness outbreaks.

The court majority in the meat label case explained its decision bluntly: "To the extent that other cases in this circuit may be read as holding to the contrary...we now overrule them."

That combative language could embolden regulators to require similar disclosures, says Joshua Turner, an attorney at Wiley Rein who specializes in federal and state regulation. At the very least, he says, it sets the stage for a federal regulation-versus-corporate free speech showdown in the Supreme Court.

In a unanimous decision written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court ruled that public employees who give sworn testimony that falls outside their everyday job duties are protected against retaliation by the First Amendment.

The decision came in a case brought by Edward Lane, a former director of a program for youth at a community college in Alabama, against his former boss Steve Franks. Lane claimed that Franks fired him after Lane delivered sworn testimony against a former colleague who was being investigated for and was later charged with fraud.

Lane sued Franks, claiming that his firing was a retaliatory act that violated his First Amendment right to free speech.

The case ended up before the Supreme Court because Lane appealed a decision by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that Lane testified against his former colleague as a government employee-not as a citizen. To rightfully claim retaliation for protected speech under the First Amendment, the appellate court ruled, a public employee must show that he spoke as a citizen on a matter of public concern.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that Lane had done just that.

The Supreme Court had to address whether the speech in question-Lane's testimony against his former colleague-constituted speech by a citizen on a matter of public concern. "It clearly is," wrote Justice Sotomayor. "Truthful testimony under oath by a public employee outside the scope of his ordinary job duties is speech as a citizen for First Amendment purposes. That is so even when the testimony relates to his public employment or concerns information learned during that employment."

While the court found that Lane’s speech was protected by the First Amendment, Justice Sotomayor warned that her ruling doesn’t rubber stamp First Amendment protection in every similar circumstance. “A public employee’s sworn testimony is not categorically entitled to First Amendment protection simply because it is speech as a citizen on a matter of public concern.” If the public employee discloses sensitive information during testimony, there’s a question of whether government interest outweighs an individual’s First Amendment right.

What can be applied more broadly, Justice Sotomayor wrote, is the notion that “public employees do not renounce their citizenship when they accept employment […] this court has cautioned time and again that public employers may not condition employment on the relinquishment of constitutional rights."