This is awesome:

The rules of engagement became clearer in Eugene's U.S. District Court last week, when a civil jury determined that a city police sergeant violated an environmental activist's constitutional protections against illegal search and seizure during a 2009 leafletting campaign outside a bank.

The eight-person panel determined that Sgt. Bill Solesbee arrested environmentalist Josh Schlossberg without probable cause and used excessive force. But it was Solesbee's next act that sent legal minds across Oregon into hyperdrive: He seized the environmentalist's video camera without a warrant.

That's the electronic equivalent of police walking off with several file cabinets of private papers without benefit of a judge's signature, said Lauren Regan, Schlossberg's lawyer.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Coffin ruled in a pretrial hearing in the Eugene case that Solesbee violated Schlossberg's Fourth Amendment rights by searching the contents of his camera without a warrant. That ruling marked the first time that a federal court in Oregon weighed in on warrantless seizures of digital devices.