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 20th 2010
The uniformly wonderful Georgetown Law prof, Rebecca Tushnet, notes in her 43(b)log a recent opinion of the South Carolina Ethics Bar that is somewhat dismissive of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. State bars are struggling to figure out how to regulate everything from keyword advertising to chat-room participation to marketing done by intermediaries. There […]
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 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 […]
February 2nd 2010
The parking lot next to my daughter’s daycare warns, “You are under constant video surveillance.” I don’t think they mean that in the universal sense, but the increasing use of mobile devices, smart cards, and databases draws the reality of constant surveillance closer. As technologies start to share information, location privacy has the potential to […]
February 1st 2010
Last week I asked UsefulArts.us readers what they think may online law trends for 2010. Here’s the first of what looks like a half dozen responses to that question. The Coulrophobia Epidemic of 2010: trademark owners’ fear of clowns may be rational. When a competitor uses your mark and pretends to be your company, that’s […]
January 31st 2010
I don’t need to tell you, its a tough time to be a young lawyer. This dark send-up of lawyer advertising suggests that the economy may bring our best and brightest to promote themselves using desperate measures. This sketch is from Almost Live a local comedy show based in Seattle. As you can imagine, Aurora […]
January 26th 2010
AdAge proclaimed Clorox’s move to hire a social media attorney as “Testament to the Importance of Twitter and Facebook“. Like much of traditional ad media, AdAge is rushing to show it gets social media and is relevant. This made quite a forward-looking headline, but the joke is on AdAge. Clorox scored some free ink, while […]
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