Cross posted from The Faculty Lounge.

I was asked for comment today about defamation and Twitter and, in particular, whether the laws of defamation should apply differently in this new medium.  Over the last year or so, there have been a number of cases involving defamation via Twitter, including a high profile situation involving Courtney Love [...]

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Via the BBC News:
BrewDog was previously branded irresponsible for an 18.2% beer called Tokyo, which it then followed with a low alcohol beer called Nanny State.
Managing director James Watt said a limited supply of Tactical Nuclear Penguin would be sold for £30 each.
He said: “This beer is about pushing the boundaries, it is about taking [...]

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Overview page here. Messages here. It will be interesting to see what (if any) important new information is disclosed.

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Earlier this month I had a great time at the conference “The Internet as Playground and Factory.” I focused on the “factory” presentations, and I’ve had a bit of trouble digesting the “play” side of the conference (such as the Bureau of Workplace Interruptions). At first some of the interventions reminded me of the [...]

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Although I have used this space to question the Google Book Deal, I do not think that all The Google does is bad. Indeed, the fundamentals of where the Google Book Deal began were good. And now, as some of you may know (and Greg helped with that), Google is trying to go where no [...]

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Today, I participated in a terrific symposium at the Denver University School of Law based on Danielle Citron’s work on Cyber Civil Rights.  Two aspects of this symposium are particularly noteworthy, outside of the extremely interesting substance and the great group of speakers collected together by Danielle and the editors of the Denver University Law [...]

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Today’s Charlotte Observer reports the story of Clair Watkins, a senior basketball player who got one of those coveted “early commitments” from basketball powerhouse Duke. According to the story, Duke offered Ms. Watkins a promise of admission to Duke and a full basketball scholarship, a scholarship that Duke planned to honor for 4 years. [...]

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Ann Bartow’s post about Paul Zukofsky, son of Louis and Celia Zukofsky, and his attempt to exert extreme control over his parents’ work reveals that heirs are problem for copyright. Mr. Zukofsky asserts some untenable points about his power over the material and the need for academics to seek his approval. The full letter is [...]

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Given that the Twilight sequel, New Moon, opens this week, I just have to blog about something Twilight-related.  I’ve been writing lately about celebrity privacy rights, and the right of publicity – and considering the extent to which celebrities should be legally protected against paparazzi intrusions.  Of course, there are other ways for them to [...]

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Clay Shirky characterizes “algorithmic authority” as “the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying ‘Trust this because you trust me.’” For Shirky, “authority is a social agreement, not a culturally independent fact.” He mentions the poor performance [...]

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Clay Shirky has recently written “A Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic Authority,” based on a talk at Yale’s recent conference on Journalism & The New Media Ecology. Shirky noted that “people trust new classes of aggregators and filters, whether Google or Twitter or Wikipedia (in its ‘breaking news’ mode),” and calls “this [...]

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Our Rutgers-Camden librarian, John P. Joergensen, tipped me off to this. Paul Caron has some details.  Here’s what comes up for Kremen v. Cohen.  More open access to law is always a good thing, imho.

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This morning’s Politico.com features a story entitled “Who Gets Whacked?” – a guide to Sarah Palin’s recent “Going Rogue” memoir summarizing how Palin treats various Washington players. The story features fairly extensive quotation from the book, which the authors of the story got in advance of today’s release.
Reading the story made me think Harper [...]

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Details here.

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Biographical information about Louis and Celia Zukofsky is available here. Paul is their son, and he posted the following at this site:
from Paul Zukofsky
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
Far too many people, especially perhaps-innocent grad. students, have been misled into thinking that, in terms of quoting LZ or CZ, they may do what they want, and [...]

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You be the judge.
1976

Pastime Paradise – Stevie Wonder
1995

Gangstas Paradise – Coolio
1996
By the way, I suggest that anyone wanting a great album acquire Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life.

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