Following my contrarian post about how to read the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, I thought I would write about the Communication’s Decency Act. I’ve written about the CDA before (hard to believe it has been almost 3 years!), but I’ll give a brief summary here.
The CDA provides immunity from the acts of users of [...]

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Hey! Bing is innovating! It has added social to search based on its relationship with Facebook. Oh wait, Google did that with Google+. So is this innovation or keeping up with the Joneses, err Pages and Brins? I thought this move by MS would happen faster given that FB and MS have been in bed [...]

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Do you want everyone to know what book you read, film you watch, search you perform, automatically? No? Yes? Why? Why Not? It is odd to me that the ideas behind the Video Privacy Protection Act do not indicate a rather quick extension. But there is a debate about whether our intellectual consumption should have [...]

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I am excited to announce that Oxford University Press has published my book, Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources. I owe a huge debt to my Madisonian colleagues for their support along the way. I will post more about the book in the next few weeks, but here are some links and a short [...]

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News here. The bloggers claim that they should have been paid for their posts, and the court basically said, “If you wanted to get paid, you should have asked before you were a guest poster.” I haven’t read the opinion yet, but it seems like the right outcome to me. I guess the folks at [...]

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Cross-posted at Concurring Opinions for a symposium on Julie Cohen’s important new book, Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice (Yale University Press 2012).
Julie Cohen’s book is fantastic. Unfortunately, I am late to join the symposium, but it has been a pleasure playing catch up with [...]

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Blog: A new book by Madisonian Brett Frischmann is on the cusp of release. “Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources” now has its own page at Amazon.com.
Its timing couldn’t be better. Passions over the proposed SOPA (and Protect IP/PIPA, and OPEN, and related) legislation have barely cooled, but debates will certainly continue over Internet [...]

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RIAA:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/opinion/what-wikipedia-wont-tell-you.html
Mike Masnick’s line-by-line reply:  http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120208/01453517694/riaa-totally-out-touch-lashes-out-google-wikipedia-everyone-who-protested-sopapipa.shtml
 
Hat tip to Lauren Gelman.

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With thanks to Andrea Matwyshyn for bringing this to my attention, here’s an interesting article from the Seattle Times suggesting that teens are spending less time on Facebook and more on Twitter because of concerns about privacy (too many friends of friends) and the chance of unexpected communications with idols.  Interesting reading.
(URL: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2017372375_tweetingteens30.html in case [...]

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Last April, I blogged about the Nosal case, which led to the scary result that just about any breach of contract on the internet can potentially be a criminal access to a protected computer. I discuss the case in extensive detail in that post, so I won’t repeat it here. The gist is that employees [...]

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I feel like I’m scooping Jacqui here, since she’s the Madisonian Twilight expert, but I was so bothered by the recent district court decision in the Bella’s Jacket Brouhaha that I’m chiming in on the intersection of intellectual property and teen vampires.
Twilight is probably part of basic 21st century cultural literacy, so I’ll presume [...]

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Pitchfork has an article about the Tesla Orchestra, a group of people looking to share their love of Tesla coils by using them to play musical tracks.  Tesla coils, to refresh your memory of high school physics class, are disruptive discharge transformer coils that shoot out bolts of electricity.   In its Open Spark Project, The [...]

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The E.U. Parliament has just adopted a Directive that is intended to better protect consumer rights in relation to digital content.  The text of the Directive is available here.  There is also a summary by Natali Helberger here.

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But I don’t have any interest in “liking” or “friending” TUMS on Facebook, unlike over 45,000 other Facebook users (at last count). I am not going to help TUMS further monetize indigestion via “a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers.”
TUMS is also on Twitter.

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Despite the ubiquity of the Internet, people still do a lot of traveling in meet space, and we aren’t always happy about that. Today I ran across a list of The 19 Most Hated Companies in America. If you fly often, or at all actually, it will not surprise you to learn that four of [...]

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On June 20, ICANN announced that it would be opening up the domain space for new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs),  meaning that anyone will be able to register virtually any word or phrase in almost any language or script as a gTLD.  Up until now, there have been 22 available gTLDs (eg .com, .net, [...]

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Musician Jonathan Coulton made over $500,000 last year by cutting out the middleman and selling his songs directly online. (The zombie ballad “re: Your Brains” is one of his classics.) The NPR Planet Money team featured a debate on whether Coulton’s success was a fluke, or presaged a new golden age for [...]

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I have just finished reading John Tehranian’s new book, Infringement Nation:  Copyright 2.0 and You, which I mentioned in a previous post.
While there are a lot of books about digital copyright law already out there, this one is definitely worth a read as it tackles a number of issues differently – or with a [...]

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A divided 9th Circuit panel decided U.S. v. Nosal today. The case initially looks like a simple employee trade secret theft case, but the Court’s interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act has potentially far reaching ramifications. Here’s the thing – the court (in my view) reached the right ruling with the right statutory [...]

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Eric Johnson has some excerpts and nice commentary about Jonathan Tasini’s lawsuit against the Huffington Post.
For those who haven’t seen it, the argument is that those who have voluntarily submitted published content are now entitled to unjust enrichment damages. This case looks like a loser, and even if it’s not, it should be.

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