February 24th 2010
Do you remember conservative radio talk-show host Michael Savage? He sued a Muslim advocacy group for copyright infringement because it dared to quote what he said on the radio as part of an advertiser boycott. A U.S. District judge tossed the suit, and supported the doctrine of Fair Use, saying that anyone who listens to […]
February 23rd 2010
As the case of the Pennsylvania school system that allegedly spied on their students gains broader attention, the Lazy Man and Money blog raises a provocative question…why sue a school? Lawyers and lawsuits are controversial, especially as we debate health care and malpractice reform. I’d like to hear what you think about this. The more […]
February 22nd 2010
This week the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Boston Police Department for using “wiretapping” laws to prevent citizens from taking video footage of police arrests. Some would naively think such laws were passed to protect the people from the authorities, not vice versa. (details in Law.com) Following Training? Boston police spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll rejected […]
February 19th 2010
According to a class action lawsuit, a Pennsylvania school district used laptops it issued to high school students to regularly spy on them at home via the built-in webcams. In a court filing (Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District), the parents of student Blake Robbins are suing the school district for: invasion of […]
February 17th 2010
Your Digital Papers, Please? Last week at the Davos World Economic Forum, Microsoft’s chief research and technology officer floated what to date has been an obviously bad idea: that Internet users should be licensed. The suggestion is covered and advanced in a Time Magazine article that takes the familiar dystopic theme of the Net as the […]
February 16th 2010
Hungry investors stake their claim in digital marketing IPOs. Back in December I suggested that 2010 will be a big year for digital IPOs. We’ve already seen this playing out in the FriendFinder IPO. New theme: concern over foreign ownership of social networks. As social networks become investment targets, international ownership may fuel new concerns […]
February 15th 2010
Presidents Day and Valentine’s Day came together in Fortune Magazine’s feature story. This cover featured an inspired visual melding of brands, and the title promises something juicy along with tech policy. The article chronicles Google’s shift, like much of Silicon Valley, from being blind to government policy to building a lobbying arm to participate in politics […]
February 13th 2010
Romantic-Sounding Case Law In celebration of Valentines Day the hopeless romantics at Legal Blog Watch have launched a survey on the most romantic-sounding Supreme Court cases. My vote of course is for Loving v. Virginia. After all its about marriage, equality, and it inspired that ad campaign “Virginia is for Lovers“, right? Not Cool as […]
February 11th 2010
The most frequent response to my question about what online law issues our readers are most concerned about centered on the still undetermined law around the use of trademarks as to trigger advertising in search engines. The issue is both prominent and vexingly permanent in the minds of both IP layers and and search marketers. […]
February 10th 2010
Last year I wrote about Latanya Sweeney, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor, who took anonymous data from medical records and used it to identify real patients. She in fact did so on the medical record of the governor who released the data. In the video below, Cory Doctorow (of EFF and boing boing […]
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