On Friday, March 19, Brooklyn Law School hosts a symposium on data security and data privacy in the payment system. There’s a terrific lineup of speakers, including James Grimmelmann of NYLS, Chris Jay Hoofnagle of Berkeley, Sarah Jane Hughes from Indiana-Bloomington, Adam Levitin of Georgetown, Juliet Moringiello from Widener, Frank Pasquale of Seton Hall, and [...]
My friend and Berkman colleague Oliver Day and I have just released a new paper, The Hacker’s Aegis. It argues that intellectual property law has been hacked to block socially valuable research on software security. Moreover, we contend that software vulnerability data challenges existing assumptions, and scholarship, on how information about improvements to works protected [...]
Here’s a jaw-dropping accusation of privacy invasion, and another example of some major gaps in privacy law. A complaint filed in federal court in Philadelphia claims that officials at suburban Harriton High School remotely turned on the cameras in laptops issued to students and captured images, including at their homes. The school denies the allegations [...]
I had been hoping to read Bill Patry’s new book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, over the winter holidays, but, thanks to a combination of short-fuse writing projects (about which I’ll have more to say soon) and a fairly grueling committee schedule (about which the less said, the better), that probably will not happen [...]
Domino’s has just started a new ad that makes fun of Papa John’s for its defense in a false advertising case: challenged by Pizza Hut over its claim that “Better Ingredients” mean Papa John’s has “Better Pizza,” PJ responded that the statements were “puffery.” Puffery sounds like something related to the Big Bad Wolf, but [...]
The class action lawsuit against the Google Books program has receded from its former prominence in news reports, but there has still been a lot of activity. The parties retreated into seclusion to negotiate a settlement last fall and then, faced with objections from the Department of Justice, negotiated some more and reached a new [...]
An anonymous student at BLS has started a great blog, You Can Wordify Anything If You Just Verb It. It collects the more… interesting… things said by both profs and students. I’m already spending significant cycles trying to guess the provenance of some of these quotes. Given that certain of them mention Internet Law, I [...]
The Harvard Crimson’s Xi Yu has a good article today about the Tenenbaum case and its prospects on appeal. She kindly asked me for my thoughts on the case’s future. I want to expand a bit on how I see fair use. (Ah, yes, a “clarification” – I haven’t felt so much like a politician [...]
The Joel Tenenbaum – RIAA case has produced a terrific opinion by Judge Nancy Gertner of the District of Massachusetts. (Hat tip: Ray Beckerman.) This is the most thoughtful, balanced, and insightful copyright opinion I’ve read in years. Its treatment of fair use is nuanced and careful, and it is required reading for anyone who [...]
The net neutrality fight is on, as FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s proposal for new rules moved on to a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. Now, the two sides are digging in: AT&T, telcos, and unions on one side; Google and content providers on the other.
I tend to favor protecting end-to-end in the Internet context, but I’m [...]