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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Taking fan-fic/fan-film to a new level, the creative minds behind the Emmy Award winning Star Wars Uncut have created a crowd-sourced film-making project that has recreated the first Star Wars movie (ie Episode IV:  A New Hope) in 15 second clips contributed by different amateur film-makers.   The project was the brainchild of Casey Pugh [...]

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I wanted to address and post a couple of links about the future of books and news reporting. How are they related? I think they are both about the transition from print to online format, and they both make me wonder what to do about it.
The first is the court’s rejection of the Google books [...]

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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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Facebook is the site many of us love to hate – at least privacy-wise. The reason is simple – it skirts the many lines that appear when a site is designed to share information with others, exploit large membership numbers for revenue, yet supposedly give users some control over what gets shared.
There are a lot [...]

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