LibertyVoice

Freedom and internet

Is $22,500 Per Song Unconstitutional?

The guns in RIAA v. Tenenbaum have gone temporarily silent; now, there’s post-game analysis and preparations for the next phase: challenging the jury’s award of $675,000 in damages ($22,500 per song, at 30 songs). Ben Sheffner’s Billboard column gives a great summary of the fight. Tenenbaum’s side will claim that the Copyright Act’s statutory damages [...]

Did the Tenenbaum Judge Botch It?

As you know, Joel Tenenbaum lost against the RIAA and is now on the hook for $675,000, pending a hearing on the constitutionality of those damages. Several lawyers I’ve talked with have suggested that Judge Nancy Gertner, who presided over the trial, committed reversible error by issuing a directed verdict on the question of infringement. [...]

@LibelGirl: Call yr atty ASAP

In an astonishing overreaction, Horizon Realty Group, a large Chicago landlord, has filed a defamation lawsuit against a former tenant, Amanda Bonnen, over this tweet sent on her (now defunct) Twitter account:
@JessB123 You should just come anyway. Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s ok.
Assuming the [...]

NYLS Launches Google Book Settlement Wiki

James Grimmelmann and a team of students at New York Law School have launched an elaborate web site called “The Public Index” to facilitate conversation about the proposed settlement of the Google Book litigation. As the site’s home page explains:

Here, you can browse and annotate the proposed settlement, section-by-section. … In addition, you can:

Study our [...]

Zittrain Warns of the Cloud

Jonathan Zittrain expands on the themes in his must-read book this morning in a must-read New York Times op-ed about the shift toward cloud computing. A taste of the main point:
[T]he most difficult challenge — both to grasp and to solve — of the cloud is its effect on our freedom to innovate. The crucial [...]

Canadian Privacy Commissioner: Facebook Violates National Law

The Privacy Commissioner of Canada, a federal regulator responsible for overseeing compliance with that country’s broad data protection statute, has issued a long-awaited report on Facebook’s privacy practices. The investigation was triggered by a formal complaint filed by students at the University of Ontario’s cyberlaw clinic. The result is a comprehensive and sophisticated analysis that [...]

Mickey Kaus Discovers Section 230

Yep, it’s all Section 230, all the time here at Info/Law! Makes for a nice change from filtering. Mickey Kaus writes about the threat by Sarah Palin’s attorney to sue anyone defaming her, and also those who republish such defamation. He’s astonished to learn that Section 230 could shield him and other bloggers. (I’d presume [...]

Celebrity Impersonation and Section 230

Cyberprof Michael Risch has posted some interesting thoughts on the emerging complexity of Section 230. We’ve talked about this provision on the blog many times before. And Mark Lemley wrote a good paper on it a while back. The provision pretty much immunizes web sites and other internet providers from liability for a host [...]

Australia to Filter Online Games

One beneficial side effect of Internet filtering is that it points up quirks in how countries make content decisions: what’s blacklisted, and why? The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Australia’s proposed Internet censorship system (currently in its second phase of testing) will block access to on-line and downloadable games that aren’t MA-15 or milder. This [...]

Bradford and Hautzinger on Digital Statutory Supplements for Legal Education

One of the many interesting presentations I attended at the just-concluded 2009 CALI Conference was a tag-team primer on creating digital statute books and casebooks.  Now, I see that one of the presenters, Professor Steve Bradford of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, has posted on SSRN the paper he discussed at CALI.  Here’s the pithy abstract:
Law students [...]

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