Posted on February 24th, 2010 by Derek Bambauer
My friend and BLS colleague Anita Bernstein has a thought-provoking blog post at TortsProf on how to integrate tenets of lawyers’ professional responsibility obligations – and dilemmas – into a Torts class. The six issues she raises are ones that we should be sensitive to in teaching law generally, and I’m going to try to [...]
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Filed under: Blogging, Law School, Scholarship
Posted on February 22nd, 2010 by Derek Bambauer
My friend Catherine Crump, staff attorney at the ACLU, has an excellent op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer about whether police must obtain a warrant before engaging in geo-location of cell phones. The case at issue, in front of the Third Circuit, offers an important opportunity to clarify privacy rights at a time when our physical [...]
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Filed under: Anonymity, Blogging, Court Decisions, Internet & Society, Media, Privacy
Posted on February 19th, 2010 by William McGeveran
Here’s a jaw-dropping accusation of privacy invasion, and another example of some major gaps in privacy law. A complaint filed in federal court in Philadelphia claims that officials at suburban Harriton High School remotely turned on the cameras in laptops issued to students and captured images, including at their homes. The school denies the allegations [...]
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Filed under: badware, Digital Media, Privacy, Video
Posted on February 19th, 2010 by Tim Armstrong
I had been hoping to read Bill Patry’s new book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, over the winter holidays, but, thanks to a combination of short-fuse writing projects (about which I’ll have more to say soon) and a fairly grueling committee schedule (about which the less said, the better), that probably will not happen [...]
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Filed under: Copyright, Digital Media, Music, Video
Posted on February 18th, 2010 by Derek Bambauer
My friend Dave Levine, who teaches IP and Internet law at Elon University School of Law, has posted an episode of his cool podcast, Hearsay Culture, where he talks with me and Oliver Day (a Berkman friend who is a hacker) about how IP law gets in the way of software security research. Oliver and [...]
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Filed under: badware, Berkman, Computer crime, Intermediaries, Internet & Society, Law School, Media, Scholarship, Security, Software
Posted on February 11th, 2010 by Derek Bambauer
Domino’s has just started a new ad that makes fun of Papa John’s for its defense in a false advertising case: challenged by Pizza Hut over its claim that “Better Ingredients” mean Papa John’s has “Better Pizza,” PJ responded that the statements were “puffery.” Puffery sounds like something related to the Big Bad Wolf, but [...]
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Filed under: civil procedure, Court Decisions, Digital Media, First Amendment, Internet & Society, Media, Trademarks, Video
Posted on February 8th, 2010 by Derek Bambauer
Paul Ohm has a terrific new paper out on SSRN, Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization (forthcoming in UCLA Law Review). It discusses how statistical techniques have made it increasingly easy to re-identify anonymized data sets, and to apply that information to other identification problems (for example, taking information from [...]
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Filed under: Filtering, First Amendment, Health Law, Intermediaries, Internet & Society, Law School, Privacy, Scholarship, Social Networking
Posted on February 5th, 2010 by William McGeveran
The class action lawsuit against the Google Books program has receded from its former prominence in news reports, but there has still been a lot of activity. The parties retreated into seclusion to negotiate a settlement last fall and then, faced with objections from the Department of Justice, negotiated some more and reached a new [...]
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Filed under: civil procedure, Copyright, Digital Media, Intermediaries, Minnesota, Search Engines
Posted on February 4th, 2010 by Derek Bambauer
An anonymous student at BLS has started a great blog, You Can Wordify Anything If You Just Verb It. It collects the more… interesting… things said by both profs and students. I’m already spending significant cycles trying to guess the provenance of some of these quotes. Given that certain of them mention Internet Law, I [...]
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Filed under: Anonymity, Blogging, Blogroll, Digital Media, Intermediaries, Internet & Society, Law School, Media, Music, Peer Production, Privacy, Video