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 [...]
My friend Catherine Crump, staff attorney at the ACLU, has an excellent op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer about whether police must obtain a warrant before engaging in geo-location of cell phones. The case at issue, in front of the Third Circuit, offers an important opportunity to clarify privacy rights at a time when our physical [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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!
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 [...]