As the election seasons ramps up, so do the inevitable cease and desist letters from music stars who don’t like the use of their songs by politicians at campaign events. The most recent dispute concerns Tom Petty’s objection to Michele Bachmann’s use of his song “American Girl.” Look, I kind of like Petty and I [...]
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Filed under: Copyright, Music, Voting
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt notes that censorship is on the rise worldwide, as covered by TechNewsWorld. The alarming thing, as I note in the story, is that this is not a trend confined to authoritarian countries – it’s happening here in the U.S. as well. There is going to be an interesting clash between U.S. [...]
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Filed under: Anonymity, Digital Media, Filtering, First Amendment, Intermediaries, international, Internet & Society, Law School, Media, Open Access, RIAA, Scholarship, Search Engines
The final morning of the Supreme Court’s session is always dramatic, and this morning was not an exception. But there was a lot more info/law on the menu than usual. Most obviously, the Court struck down California’s ban on the sale of violent video games to minors, 7-2. (Opinion here.) The dissenters were Justice Thomas, [...]
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Filed under: Court Decisions, Digital Media, First Amendment, Privacy, Virtual Worlds, Voting
For those interested in whistleblowing, WikiLeaks, and the role journalists can play as the Internet saps traditional media, I shamelessly recommend Consider the Censor, an essay I wrote in the Wake Forest Journal of Law & Policy that is now available on-line.
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Filed under: Anonymity, Computer crime, Court Decisions, Digital Media, Encryption, Filtering, First Amendment, Intermediaries, Internet & Society, Law School, Media, national security, NSA, Open Access, Peer Production, Scholarship, Security
Oliver Day and I are giving a talk at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School (our former home) on our proposed shield law to protect software security research. (The longer version is in our Emory Law Journal article.) The talk is on Tuesday, July 19, at 12:30PM, and it’ll be [...]
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Filed under: badware, Berkman, Computer crime, Encryption, Intermediaries, Internet & Society, Law School, Microsoft, Scholarship, Software
Back in 2008, I wrote in Cybersieves that “online censorship is sharply on the rise worldwide—in democratic states as well as in authoritarian ones.” Sometimes it is depressing to be right. CNET reports that major broadband ISPs in the United States are on the cusp of agreeing to a plan that would limit the on-line [...]
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Filed under: Anonymity, Copyright, Digital Media, Filtering, First Amendment, Intermediaries, international, Internet & Society, ISP, Law School, Media, Network Neutrality, RIAA, Scholarship
(Guest post by Jane Yakowitz, Visiting Assistant Professor at Brooklyn Law School. Jane wrote an amicus brief in IMS v. Sorrell, on behalf of IMS.) Earlier today, the Supreme Court issued an opinion in Sorrell v. IMS Health that is likely to incense a lot of people that were familiar with the suit as a [...]
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Filed under: Anonymity, Blogging, Corporate Law, Court Decisions, First Amendment, Health Law, Intermediaries, Open Access, Privacy, Scholarship
This morning the Supreme Court issued its 6-3 decision (PDF here) in a strange case that many privacy scholars had watched closely, Sorell v. IMS Health Inc. In my view, there are a few unfortunate signals in the case, mostly in dicta, but I’m not sure it’s terrible given its odd facts. (For more background, [...]
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Filed under: Court Decisions, First Amendment, Health Law, Privacy
Perhaps lost in all the understandable attention to yesterday’s Supreme Court decision in the Wal-Mart class action case, the Court also granted cert. in a potentially significant privacy law case, FAA v. Cooper. SCOTUSBlog has collected the documents in the case here. The formal question presented in the case is: Whether a plaintiff who alleges [...]
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Filed under: civil procedure, Court Decisions, Privacy
Update: I’ve quickly read the Flyonthewall opinion. It’s complicated, and deserves a close read. So far, I think it is well-reasoned. In particular, it does several helpful things: INS v. AP – The case smartly inters INS v. AP, the turgid Supreme Court case that generated the “hot news” misappropriation tort. The Second Circuit rightly [...]
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Filed under: Copyright, Court Decisions, Digital Media, Education & Copyright, First Amendment, Intermediaries, Internet & Society, Media, Open Access, Peer Production, Search Engines