Data Security and Data Privacy in the Payment System

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 [...]

The Hacker’s Aegis

My friend Dave Levine, who teaches IP and Internet law at Elon University School of Law, has posted an episode of his cool podcast, Hearsay Culture, where he talks with me and Oliver Day (a Berkman friend who is a hacker) about how IP law gets in the way of software security research. Oliver and [...]

The Myth of Anonymization

Paul Ohm has a terrific new paper out on SSRN, Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization (forthcoming in UCLA Law Review). It discusses how statistical techniques have made it increasingly easy to re-identify anonymized data sets, and to apply that information to other identification problems (for example, taking information from [...]

Death Knell for Google Books Settlement?

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 [...]

Reasons I’ll Be Fired

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 [...]

Sharing the Blame: The Law and Morality of Punishing Collective Entities

BLS is having a great symposium that bears directly on infolaw issues such as cyber-harassment, defamation, illicit file-sharing, and so forth. My friends Mike Cahill and Miriam Baer are co-hosting, and my friend Peter Henning is a panelist in the afternoon. Best of all, it’s free!
When: Friday, February 5, 2010, 9:00AM — 4:15PM
Where: Subotnick Center, [...]

Google’s Bombshell

Update (1/14/2010): Verisign’s iDefense Labs traced the cyber-attacks on Google to a “single foreign entity consisting either of agents of the Chinese state or proxies thereof”. In response to Google’s statement and claims of hacking, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said, “China’s internet is open… China administers the internet according to the law. We have an [...]

Cybersieves Podcast

Harold O’Grady, who writes the BLS Library Blog, has a podcast up where we discuss Cybersieves. Bonus: mention of Bambauer’s Law of Sandwiches!

Juries and Fair Use

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 Fair Use Hammer

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 [...]