Posted on June 29th, 2009 by William McGeveran
Most commentary about the Supreme Court today surely will focus on the controversial Ricci employment discrimination case and its impact on Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings. But the Court also announced two important orders in Info/Law, both concerning decisions that it will not make. By refusing to grant cert. in these cases, the Court lets two [...]
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Filed under: Copyright, Court Decisions, First Amendment, Media, Privacy, Voting
Posted on June 25th, 2009 by William McGeveran
Cyberprof Michael Risch has posted some interesting thoughts on the emerging complexity of Section 230. We’ve talked about this provision on the blog many times before. And Mark Lemley wrote a good paper on it a while back. The provision pretty much immunizes web sites and other internet providers from liability for a host of [...]
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Filed under: Anonymity, Digital Media, First Amendment, Intermediaries, Internet & Society, Privacy, Social Networking, Trademarks
Posted on June 25th, 2009 by Derek Bambauer
One beneficial side effect of Internet filtering is that it points up quirks in how countries make content decisions: what’s blacklisted, and why? The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Australia’s proposed Internet censorship system (currently in its second phase of testing) will block access to on-line and downloadable games that aren’t MA-15 or milder. This [...]
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Filed under: Blogging, Digital Media, Filtering, Intermediaries, international, Internet & Society, ISP, Media, Software, Virtual Worlds
Posted on June 24th, 2009 by Tim Armstrong
One of the many interesting presentations I attended at the just-concluded 2009 CALI Conference was a tag-team primer on creating digital statute books and casebooks. Now, I see that one of the presenters, Professor Steve Bradford of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, has posted on SSRN the paper he discussed at CALI. Here’s the pithy abstract: Law [...]
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Filed under: Books, Digital Media, Education & Copyright, Internet & Society, Law School, Open Access
Posted on June 22nd, 2009 by Derek Bambauer
Iranian demonstrators protesting the recent election results (which look dicey) – and their opponents – are using networked technologies to communicate and organize, including Twitter, blogs, SMS, and the like. John Palfrey, Rob Faris, and Bruce Etling point out, though, that these capabilities, while empowering, won’t carry the day. Whether the demonstrations succeed depends on [...]
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Filed under: Berkman, Blogging, Digital Media, Filtering, Intermediaries, international, Internet & Society, Media, Peer Production, Scholarship, Social Networking, Software, Video, Voting
Posted on June 19th, 2009 by Tim Armstrong
I delivered my “Crowdsourcing and Open Access” presentation earlier today at CALICon09. A huge thank-you to all who attended; I learned a good deal from the comments and questions (as always happens at these things) and it was a very enjoyable experience. I spent a good part of the presentation talking about how crowdsourced proofreading [...]
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Filed under: Copyright, Law School, Open Access, Peer Production, Scholarship, Search Engines
Posted on June 18th, 2009 by Tim Armstrong
Last year, the trial judge who presided over the trial of accused file-sharer Jammie Thomas suggested that the jury’s award of $222,000 in statutory damages in the first trial may have been excessive. So it’s interesting to speculate what the judge might make of the damages a jury just awarded to the record label plaintiffs [...]
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Filed under: Copyright, Court Decisions, Digital Media, Internet & Society, Media, Minnesota, Music, RIAA
Posted on June 18th, 2009 by Derek Bambauer
Nope, not a post about the World Cup – these are three countries that have been in the news for government-mandated Internet censorship. It’s a bit weird to see that grouping, but as I’ve argued elsewhere, filtering is becoming ubiquitous – no longer limited to “bad states” like Burma. In Germany, the major parties in [...]
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Filed under: Blogging, Filtering, Intermediaries, international, Internet & Society, ISP, Media
Posted on June 18th, 2009 by Tim Armstrong
I’m in scenic Boulder, CO for this year’s CALI Conference for Law School Computing. John Palfrey is delivering this morning’s keynote. He’s the perfect choice for the CALI crowd, a group that straddles legal academia, law libraries, and information technology. Palfrey’s well regarded in all three of those camps and it’ll be great to hear [...]
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Filed under: Berkman, Internet & Society, Law School, Open Access, Peer Production
Posted on June 16th, 2009 by Derek Bambauer
The Washington Post covers a letter by security researchers and academics urging Google to adopt encryption (HTTPS) as the default for all of its services. (Disclosure: I signed the letter.) The letter makes the case convincingly: Google uses industry-standard Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) encryption technology to protect customers’ login information. However, encryption is not [...]
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Filed under: badware, Computer crime, Digital Media, Encryption, Intermediaries, Internet & Society, ISP, Law School, Media, Privacy, Security