Threading the Needle

Imagine that Ron Wyden fails: either PROTECT IP or SoPA / E-PARASITE passes and is signed into law by President Obama. Advocacy groups such as the EFF would launch an immediate constitutional challenge to the bill’s censorship mandates. I believe the outcome of such litigation is far less certain than either side believes. American censorship [...]

How To Encourage Piracy

Major League Baseball has made me a pirate, with no regrets. Nick Ross, on Australia’s ABC, makes “The Case for Piracy.” His article argues that piracy often results, essentially, from market failure: customers are willing to pay content owners for access to material, and the content owners refuse – because they can’t be bothered to [...]

TechDirt on PROTECT IP

Mike Masnick has an article up at TechDirt about my podcast with Jerry Brito, whose Surprisingly Free series is the place to be seen (er, heard) for law geeks. Mike picks up on a major point of Orwell’s Armchair: let’s be transparent. If we intend to censor the Internet, then we should be willing to [...]

Behind the Scenes of Six Strikes

Wired has a story on the cozy relationship between content industries and the Obama administration, which resulted in the deployment of the new “six strikes” plan to combat on-line copyright infringement. Internet security and privacy researcher Chris Soghoian obtained e-mail communication between administration officials and industry via a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request. (Disclosure: [...]

What Do Commons Have In Common?

Thanks to Dan and the Prawfs crew for having me! Blogging here is a nice distraction from the Red Sox late-season collapse. I thought I’d start with a riddle: what do roller derby, windsurfing, SourceForge, and GalaxyZoo have in common? Last week, NYU Law School hosted Convening Cultural Commons, a two-day workshop intended to accelerate [...]

Orwell’s Armchair: Soft Internet Censorship in America

I’ve just uploaded a new paper, Orwell’s Armchair, to SSRN. It is coming out next year in the University of Chicago Law Review. I’d love to have feedback on the piece – my contact information is in the author footnote. Here’s the abstract: America has begun to censor the Internet. Defying conventional scholarly wisdom that [...]

Filtering and the Thin Edge of the Wedge

I’ve long argued that one reason to be cautious about turning to Internet filtering as a means of regulation – of dealing with social problems such as child pornography distribution or IP infringement – is that it inevitably expands. A judge in the United Kingdom is helping me make my point: he has ordered British [...]

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 [...]

Google Warns of Coming Internet Storm

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. [...]

WikiLeaks and the Pentagon Papers

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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