Cyberwar and Cyberespionage

My paper “Ghost in the Network” is available from SSRN. It’s forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. I’m appending the abstract and (weirdly, but I hope it will become apparent why) the conclusion below. Comments welcomed. Abstract Cyberattacks are inevitable and widespread. Existing scholarship on cyberespionage and cyberwar is undermined by its futile [...]

Protecting Hackers from Lawyers

Oliver Day and I presented the idea behind our article The Hacker’s Aegis (now available from Emory Law Journal – the cite, for law nerds, is 60 Emory L.J. 1051 (2011)) at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School yesterday. The Webcast of the talk should be available soon. We had [...]

Protecting Hackers From Lawyers

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 [...]

Cybersecurity Theory and Myths

David Opderbeck put together a terrific cybersecurity conference at Seton Hall today. I was on a panel discussing cybersecurity policy and legal theory. The audience was primarily law enforcement and practicing attorneys, so I asked, “What are you doing here?” In good academic fashion, I proceeded to (try to) answer my own question – why [...]

Malware, MacOS, and Mayhem

It’s Alliteration Monday here at Info/Law! Ars Technica has a great write-up on the Mac Defender malware that’s been infecting hipsters‘ MacBooks left and right. Apple started by ignoring the problem, and has subsequently woken up and started to use features such as File Quarantine to deal with it. Belated, but laudable. I have three [...]

Google Music, and the Cost of Holdouts

Google is set to debut its cloud-based music service, called (creatively) Google Music. This isn’t revolutionary after Amazon launched its service. What makes it fun for IP nerds like me is that Google initially tried to strike licensing deals with the major music labels, but when they failed, they altered their service (to avoid the [...]

Cybersecurity’s Conundrum

I’ve uploaded my new paper on cybersecurity, Conundrum, to SSRN, and welcome feedback on it. The paper is coming out in volume 96 of the Minnesota Law Review next year. The abstract is below. In addition, the paper makes a few points that are at once common sense and heretical: Experience with natural disasters and [...]

Hackers Are Your Friends

My friend and Berkman colleague Oliver Day and I have just released a new paper, The Hacker’s Aegis. It argues that intellectual property law has been hacked to block socially valuable research on software security. Moreover, we contend that software vulnerability data challenges existing assumptions, and scholarship, on how information about improvements to works protected [...]

Truth in Comics

XKCD has one up that’s painfully funny because it’s true…

Zittrain Warns of the Cloud

Jonathan Zittrain expands on the themes in his must-read book this morning in a must-read New York Times op-ed about the shift toward cloud computing. A taste of the main point: [T]he most difficult challenge — both to grasp and to solve — of the cloud is its effect on our freedom to innovate. The [...]