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, [...]

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. [...]

The Facebook Post-Mortem

The Daily Illini has a great piece about Jason Mazzone‘s analysis of an underappreciated problem: what happens to your Facebook content when you die? At the moment, the answer depends on an unpredictable hodgepodge of state probate law, private law via the social network’s Terms of Service, and the decedent’s foresight in providing her heirs [...]

Q&A on Internet Law at Lifehacker

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

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 [...]

Censorship at Yale

The first rule of censorship conferences is… do not talk about censorship conferences. Ignoring that, I encourage you to tune in to Yale’s Global Censorship Conference – it is an awesome group of speakers and topics. You can catch the livestream here. For those of you willing to get up on Sunday morning, you can [...]

A Final Report, But Just a Start

The Federal Trade Commission today released its “final report” on consumer data privacy, updating a preliminary staff report from 2010. (Here’s a PDF of all 112 pages). The word “final” should be taken with several metric tons of salt, however — there is nothing final about this report, by its own admission. The report does [...]

Wired, and Threatened

I have a short op-ed on how technology provides both power and peril for journalists over at JURIST. Here’s the lede: Journalists have never been more empowered, or more threatened. Information technology offers journalists potent tools to gather, report and disseminate information — from satellite phones to pocket video cameras to social networks. Technological advances have [...]

Cyberbullying and the Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys

(This post is based on a talk I gave at the Seton Hall Legislative Journal’s symposium on Bullying and the Social Media Generation. Many thanks to Frank Pasquale, Marisa Hourdajian, and Michelle Newton for the invitation, and to Jane Yakowitz and Will Creeley for a great discussion!) Introduction New Jersey enacted the Anti-Bullying Bill of [...]

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 [...]