via Reddit.

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A recent decision by Magistrate Judge Ryu of the Northern District of California prompts me to write about what should be a basic requirement of any lawsuit against users alleged to have participated in the exchange of copyright protected works using the BitTorrent peer to peer technology: that the defendants have participated in the same [...]

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VentureBeat reports that Microsoft techs, working with US Marshalls, have taken down the Rustock spam botnet:
Rustock was one of the biggest botnets in the world, producing more e-mail spam than any other network. But early yesterday, it ceased sending spam.
One more step in the technological arms race that is the Internet.

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There has been a lot of discussion lately about the “Internet Kill Switch” proposal in the US (yes, I know Lieberman doesn’t want us to call it that). Lots of information, counter-information, and discussion. One thing that is missing, at least in what I’ve seen, is the question of why some of the “infrastructure” that [...]

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I’ve recently signed up for — rather hesitantly, I might add — a twitter account (@robheverly). In adding people to follow (ie, read), I’ve taken the time to read some pretty interesting stuff I probably would not have seen otherwise, and I’m starting to get the point of twitter. I’ve found a lot that I’d [...]

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Facebook has announced security changes at its site. First, it is enabling secure browsing over https for its site, including a setting in your account settings to make this your Facebook default. According to the Facebook blog post:
Facebook currently uses HTTPS whenever your password is sent to us, but today we’re expanding its usage [...]

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The LA Times Technology Blog reports that Facebook has the newest use for its users’ data, postings, and “content”: let advertisers use that content to advertise to users’ friends (Facebook calls them “sponsored stories”). According to the paper:
Facebook’s new Sponsored Stories feature will allow companies to take any user content — such as status [...]

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I’ve written here a couple of times about the idea of “pernicious persistence”: the idea that the media that is created today may persist in ways that “old” media artifacts — newspaper stories, photographs, home videos — did not (mainly because of the “new” creation, distribution and search abilities enabled by the Internet). In my [...]

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There is a lot of discussion these days of new media and what new media mean to old media. In some cases, existing (or mainstream) media have attempted to adapt to the new technologies of distribution. Sometimes they do a good job. At other times, not so much. And sometimes, it’s just plain strange.
Case in [...]

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Prior to widespread use of the Internet, someone who had a poor experience with a provider of goods or services could do little more than sue and spread word of their experience to friends and colleagues. Reports to the local Better Business Bureau or a state Attorney General’s office might also follow, but there was [...]

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A school district in California has banned Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (10th Edition) after a child found the definition for “oral sex” in its pages. The initial story made the decision seem a fairly done deal, but a later issued story indicates that the decision is under review. I wonder about the decision to first [...]

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Much is made of the fact that copyright attaches at the time expression is fixed in a tangible medium. To bring us (partially) in line with the Berne Convention, which convention the US joined in 1989, “formalities” of copyright protection — the requirement to give notice by putting the © symbol on the work [...]

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I’m guessing quite a few of us media/ip/tech law professor-type-folks can make use of this new site from Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped:
The site features a browsable and searchable gallery of over 100,000 print ads which I’ve categorized into tags and years, where available, cropped, scanned from books (mostly with the help of [...]

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The NY Times runs a story today entitled, “How to Train the Aging Brain.” As someone with an aging brain, I was intrigued. According to the story, neural connections in your brain — those things that receive, process and transmit information — weaken with disuse and age. Is there anything that can be done? The [...]

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For the second time in two days, Google has shown up on my “hmm, what’s going on there?” radar. Today I want to put search behind me and look at how Google is alleged to have leveraged its video content position by changing the terms of service for YouTube’s APIs (application programming interfaces) to [...]

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This is being widely reported elsewhere, most notably by Michael Geist (who includes a copy of the 47 page decision) and ArsTechnica, among others, but the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of California has granted summary judgment to the film industry in its suit against Gary Fung and isoHunt, a BitTorrent search site. [...]

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I appreciate Frank’s addition to the discussion here, started by Greg and based on Frank Raff’s NY Times Op-Ed. That said, I think we’re at least somewhat talking around each other, and the major reason is that the primary legal structures designed to handle the problems that Raff is really upset about — Google’s dominant [...]

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Greg usefully started the conversation on today’s NY Times Op-Ed by Adam Raff, founder of “foundem.co.uk,” a UK price comparison site, by asking, “What is search engine neutrality?” I was drafting a too-long post about this when I noticed Greg’s was already up, so thought I would shorten mine considerably. My short answer is to [...]

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The Sixth Circuit decided on Thursday that someone who paid nearly $80 to join a child pornography site can have that fact used against them as part of the facts justifying a finding of probable cause for a search warrant related to child pornography on his computer. This is probably not surprising when put this [...]

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Needles, Haystacks and Stuff (from Indexed)

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