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.

Information Is Not Beef Jerky

(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 [...]

Flyonthewall Not Squashed

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 [...]

Why Verizon Sucks, Or, Lessons in Broadband Competition

I’ve been learning firsthand about why we need more broadband options in the U.S. On moving to a new apartment in Brooklyn, I realized I had four broadband options: Time Warner Cable (known to be atrocious – ask Eugene Mirman), AT&T (I’ve made that mistake before), satellite (the landlord isn’t enthusiastic about the dish), and [...]

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 [...]

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