The Associated Press, Fair Use, and Counting with Cookie Monster

On reading about the dispute between the Associated Press and the Drudge Retort, I wondered immediately if AP had hired the Count from Sesame Street, and whether Cookie Monster blogs.
Copyright fights with bloggers are nothing new. Heck, they even show up in divorce proceedings occasionally. But this looks like serious overreaching by AP, for three […]

An Open Access Success Story, Just in Time for CALI

I’m traveling to Baltimore tomorrow, where I’ll be speaking later this week at UMD, one of the few law schools that can claim to be older than my own. The occasion is this year’s CALI Conference for Law School Computing, and I’ll be delivering an updated version of my talk on the open access movement.
As […]

Public records, one JPEG at a time?

To its credit, the U.S. government has placed a tremendous quantity of legal information online. You can look up any patent ever issued at the USPTO’s web site and see either the full text (since 1976) or a scanned image (since 1790) of the issued patent. Pending legislation can be downloaded from THOMAS, […]

Ninth Circuit Rules Roommates.com May Be Unlawful Host

The Ninth Circuit has just ruled (en banc) that the Roommates.com Web site is not entitled to immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. (Props to Eric Goldman for the link!) The opinion, by Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, is typically lucid and holds, essentially, that Roommates falls outside the safe harbor because it […]

A Big Day for Open Access, But More Work Remains

Via BoingBoing comes news of another big crop of United States Court of Appeals decisions being scanned and made publicly available by public.resource.org. They are scanning the entire Federal Reporter (First Series), which includes late-19th and early-20th century United States case law. Enormous PDFs (and even more enormous TIFFs) of the scanned volumes […]

Notes on Ubuntu - But Does Anyone Care?

At Lotusphere 2008, IBM announced that Lotus Notes 8.5 will run on Ubuntu Linux 7.0. This shows IBM’s ongoing commitment to Linux - even on the desktop. And any Linux desktop users help IBM in its ongoing competition with Microsoft. (Domino, the server side to Notes, runs on virtually everything. I remember testing it on […]

NYT Fouls Up Fair Use

I start most mornings, especially on weekends, by reading the New York Times. In my household, I get made fun of for reading the Business section first (that’s where the tech stories reside). Sometimes that can be a bad idea, like today, when I read the story on the Harry Potter lawsuit and began yelling […]

Can Crowdsourcing Beat Academic Peer Review?

Interesting piece yesterday at the Chronicle of Higher Ed: Blog Comments and Peer Review Go Head to Head to See Which Makes a Book Better. UCSD communications professor Noah Wardrip-Fruin has written a 300-page book entitled Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, to be published by MIT Press. MIT Press, […]

Facebook Retreats Somewhat on Beacon Privacy

In response to a growing revolt by its members, and particularly an online protest organized by MoveOn.org, on Friday Facebook quietly retreated somewhat in implementation of some of its new privacy-invasive advertising plans.
Apparently the “Beacon” feature, which tells your Facebook “friends” when you buy something from a participating retailer, will shift from an opt-out (and […]

Legal Threats Database Launched

The Citizen Media Law Project has launched what looks like it could be a fantastic new resource: the Legal Threats Database. They plan to chronicle “lawsuits, cease & desist letters, subpoenas, and other legal threats directed at those who engage in online speech” and allow users to “view, search, and comment on entries in […]

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