Search and the First Amendment

Jane and I are in Arlington, Virginia, for a conference on Competition Policy in Search and Social Media at George Mason University. Jane, Neil Richards, Dawn Nunziato, and Stuart Benjamin will discuss the interplay of the First Amendment, regulation, and search / social media. I expect an entertaining fight over whether search results are speech, [...]

NZBMatrix Takes the Red Pill

I talked with Lifehacker’s IP guru Adam Dachis about the closure of several Usenet indexing services, including NZBMatrix. NZBMatrix threw in the towel after coming under twin pressures: a flood of DMCA notices related to links pointing to allegedly infringing content, and difficulty navigating the requirements of service providers such as PayPal. It’s the latest [...]

Orwell’s Armchair

The final version of Orwell’s Armchair, 79 University of Chicago Law Review 863 (2012) , is available on-line (and in print, for those of you who roll old-school). Here’s the abstract: America has begun to censor the Internet. Defying conventional scholarly wisdom that Supreme Court precedent bars Internet censorship, federal and state governments are increasingly [...]

Censorship v3.1

I have a new essay up on SSRN, titled Censorship v3.1. It’s under consideration by the peer-reviewed journal IEEE Internet Computing. Here’s the abstract: Internet censorship has evolved. In Version 1.0, censorship was impossible; in Version 2.0, it was a characteristic of repressive regimes; and in Version 3.0, it spread to democracies who desired to [...]

Hollywood Comes to Brooklyn

Catchy title, no? Today, Al Perry, Vice President of Worldwide Content Protection and Outreach at Paramount Pictures, came to BLS to talk about movies, piracy, and the Internet. He spoke for about 40 minutes, and then Jason Mazzone offered comments. Next, we had about 30 minutes of spirited discussion with BLS students. I’m writing up [...]

Santorum: Please Don’t Google

If you Google “Santorum,” you’ll find that two of the top three search results take an unusual angle on the Republican candidate, thanks to sex columnist Dan Savage. (I very nearly used “Santorum” as a Google example in class last semester, and only just thought better of it.) Santorum’s supporters want Google to push the, [...]

Lifehacker on Ubiquitous Infringement

Lifehacker‘s Adam Dachis has a great article on how users can deal with a world in which they infringe copyright constantly, both deliberately and inadvertently. (Disclaimer alert: I talked with Adam about the piece.) It’s a practical guide to a strict liability regime – no intent / knowledge requirement for direct infringement – that operates [...]

The Memory Hole

On RocketLawyer’s Legally Easy podcast, I talk with Charley Moore and Eva Arevuo about the EU’s proposed “right to be forgotten” and privacy as censorship. I was inspired by Jeff Rosen and Jane Yakowitz‘s critiques of the approach, which actually appears to be a “right to lie effectively.” If you can disappear unflattering – and [...]

Censorship on the March

Today, you can’t get to The Oatmeal, or Dinosaur Comics, or XKCD, or (less importantly) Wikipedia. The sites have gone dark to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act, America’s attempt to censor the Internet to reduce copyright infringement. This is part of a remarkable, distributed, coordinated protest effort, both [...]

The Fight For Internet Censorship

Thanks to Danielle and the CoOp crew for having me! I’m excited. Speaking of exciting developments, it appears that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is dead, at least for now. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has said that the bill will not move forward until there is a consensus position on it, which is to [...]