The Illegal Process and Orwell’s Metaphors

James Grimmelmann and David Post have responses to Orwell’s Armchair up at the University of Chicago Law Review’s Dialogue site. I’m grateful and flattered to have them as partners in the discussion, and I am very excited to read their articles!

Beating Revenge Porn with Copyright

The lawsuit against scumbag Web site Texxxan.com has generated attention to the problem of revenge porn, and to the paucity of legal remedies available to victims of it. Danielle Citron has two excellent posts over at Concurring Opinions analyzing the relevant statutory block, 47 U.S.C. 230, and the few cases that cut through its immunity. [...]

Whereupon I Depress Lifehacker Readers

Because DVD ripping is illegal if you bypass DRM. Which, most of the time, you have to.

Copyright Greenwashing

The Center for Individual Freedom has just published a paper by three RIAA lawyers that purports to develop a natural rights theory and history of copyright. The paper is short (6 pages long), which appears to be its only valuable quality. I’ll set out a brief critique below, but first I want to note that [...]

NZBMatrix Takes the Red Pill

I talked with Lifehacker’s IP guru Adam Dachis about the closure of several Usenet indexing services, including NZBMatrix. NZBMatrix threw in the towel after coming under twin pressures: a flood of DMCA notices related to links pointing to allegedly infringing content, and difficulty navigating the requirements of service providers such as PayPal. It’s the latest [...]

Orwell’s Armchair

The final version of Orwell’s Armchair, 79 University of Chicago Law Review 863 (2012) , is available on-line (and in print, for those of you who roll old-school). Here’s the abstract: America has begun to censor the Internet. Defying conventional scholarly wisdom that Supreme Court precedent bars Internet censorship, federal and state governments are increasingly [...]

The Facebook Post-Mortem

The Daily Illini has a great piece about Jason Mazzone‘s analysis of an underappreciated problem: what happens to your Facebook content when you die? At the moment, the answer depends on an unpredictable hodgepodge of state probate law, private law via the social network’s Terms of Service, and the decedent’s foresight in providing her heirs [...]

Q&A on Internet Law at Lifehacker

I’m answering questions about Internet Law for the next hour or so at Lifehacker. Fire away!

The Obama Administration and Six Strikes

Soon, major ISPs will be rolling out a “copyright education” program intended to deter infringement. The program, colloquially called “six strikes,” was negotiated between ISPs and the content industries – most notably the RIAA and MPAA. In addition, however, the Obama administration was heavily involved in the negotiations – primarily, it appears, on the side [...]

Maps As Commons

Slashdot pointed me to a debate over the relative accuracy and comprehensiveness of TomTom‘s map data, versus that of OpenStreetMap. TomTom is a proprietary system; OpenStreetMap is licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0, and permits users to add data in wiki fashion. TomTom claims its maps are more comprehensive and reliable. An OSM supporter claims that [...]