NASA Tiny Christmas Island: Once the site of atomic bomb tests, and hopefully not the future home of the next leaked documents you need to publish.

Any day now, a federal judge in Brooklyn, N.Y. is expected to rule on a case that could significantly affect both citizen and professional journalists who share leaked information with the public. It involves documents from pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly about the schizophrenia drug Zyprexa -- one of the company's top sellers.

According to a Jan. 15 New York Times article by Tom Zeller Jr., a consulting witness for Lilly was subpoenaed to provide -- and did turn over -- confidential internal Lilly documents to an Alaskan lawyer representing patients suing the company over Zyprexa's alleged harmful effects. Attorney James B. Gottstein was "apparently in a sharing mood, which is how hundreds of pages ended up with a Times reporter, Alex Berenson -- and about a dozen or so other individuals and organizations."

The cat leapt out of the bag and onto the Web. To Lilly's distress, copies of the documents began appearing on several sites critical of Zyprexa. In December 2006, U.S. District Judge Jack B. Weinstein ordered Gottstein to reveal to whom he'd given the documents, and get each copy back.

Zeller wrote: "The Times, which politely declined to oblige, has since been left out of the legal wrangling, but on Dec. 29, the court temporarily enjoined an expansive list -- 14 named individuals, two health advocacy groups (MindFreedom International and the Alliance for Human Research Protection), their Web sites, and a site devoted to the Zyprexa issue -- not just from 'further disseminating these documents.' They were specifically ordered to communicate the injunction to anyone else who had copies, and enjoined from 'posting information to Web sites to facilitate dissemination of these documents.' That's right -- it appeared that even writing on their Web sites something like, 'Hey, there's a site in Brazil where you can get those Zyprexa documents,' would run afoul of the injunction."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is arguing the case on behalf of "John Doe," who linked to the documents from the public wiki Zyprexa Kills. EFF has published court documents and other info about the case. (EFF is the easiest place to follow case developments. On Jan. 8, the court refused to amend its injunction -- but EFF was allowed to try again yesterday.

UPDATE JAN 18: There was a update on this case in EFF's Deep Links blog.

EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann wrote: "Just like the courts couldn't stop newspapers from publishing the Pentagon Papers, so, too, they may not prohibit the public from linking to these documents on a wiki."

Similarly, Zeller observed: "There is a traditionally high bar set for placing prior restraint on the press -- which, whether Judge Weinstein recognizes it or not, very much includes a colony of citizen journalists feeding a wiki."

A case like this assumes profound significance as news organizations such as Gannett become more active with blogging, citizen journalism, and providing forums, wikis or other online collaborative projects -- or even just posting or linking to source documents.

As for the leaked documents: They remain available online, hosted by servers outside the U.S. Zeller noted, "copies of the Lilly documents sit defiantly on servers in Sweden, and under a domain registered at Christmas Island, the Australian dot in the ocean 224 miles off the coast of Java. 'Proudly served from outside the United States,' the site declares. There are surely others."

Zeller did not link to those sites. Neither does EFF, or the many blogs, forums, and wikis discussing this case -- demonstrating the power of a federal court injunction, even in a freewheeling medium often criticized for widespread ignorance or disregard of the law.

However, a quick Google search based on Zeller's clues yields a short list of sites that contains the documents' current online home. You can download the file using BitTorrent.

News organizations have adopted many useful techniques from citizen journalists, bloggers, and online communities. Let's hope that posting leaked documents to offshore servers doesn't have to become part of the regular newsroom skill set.