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. [...]

Q&A on Internet Law at Lifehacker

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

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 [...]

Support Open Access to Government-Funded Science

I encourage everyone to sign a petition that asks the administration of President Obama to mandate that publicly-funded scientific research results be available to the public, over the Internet. Here are details: Text: WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO: REQUIRE FREE ACCESS OVER THE INTERNET TO SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL ARTICLES ARISING FROM TAXPAYER-FUNDED RESEARCH We believe [...]

Cary Sherman and the Lost Generation

The RIAA’s Cary Sherman had a screed about the Stop Online Piracy and PROTECT IP Acts in the New York Times recently. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick brilliantly gutted it, and I’m not going to pile on – a tour de force requires no augmentation. What I want to suggest is that the recording industry – or, [...]

Six Things Wrong with SOPA

America is moving to censor the Internet. The PROTECT IP and Stop Online Piracy Acts have received considerable attention in the legal and tech world; SOPA’s markup in the House occurs tomorrow. I’m not opposed to blacklisting Internet sites on principle; however, I think that thoughtful procedural protections are vital to doing so in a [...]

Policing Copyright Infringement on the Net

Mark Lemley has a smart editorial up at Law.com on the hearings at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Viacom v. YouTube. The question is, formally, one of interpreting Title II of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. 512), and determining whether YouTube meets the statutory requirements for immunity from liability. But this [...]

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 [...]

500 Billion Reasons Why A Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing

Eric Goldman points to a highly enjoyable filing by one David Stebbins against Google, claiming he has won an arbitration award of, wait for it, $500 billion. Even with the tax cuts still in effect, I assume that the government’s cut of this award will help the deficit a good deal. How did Stebbins win [...]

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 [...]