July 9th 2008
The Senate today voted 69-28 to immunize lawbreaking telecoms, terminate the pending lawsuits against them, and to grant new warrantless eavesdropping authority to the President. Senators Dodd, Feingold, Leahy, Bingaman and Specter offered amendments to strip the immunity provision, or delay it pending legal reviews or investigations. Glenn Greenwald notes in Salon: “What is most […]
July 4th 2008
In its $1 billion copyright lawsuit, Viacom sought to force Google to turn over what many would consider to be trade secrets and private user records as part of discovery. Yesterday, US District Judge Louis L. Stanton agreed with Google that requiring it to disclose its search algorithms would unnecessarily put its trade secrets at […]
June 17th 2008
Keep reading: it keeps getting stranger. But there may be something to like here, too. On Thursday, Judge Alex Kozinski, the Chief Judge for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, called on Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to convene an ethics panel to investigate his own conduct. Judge Kozinski was presiding over a high-profile obscenity […]
June 16th 2008
A giant legal dope slap seems headed from Barbie to the makers of The Bratz. As you may know, Mattel accused the manufacturer of the Bratz line of dolls, MGA, of essentially stealing the idea for the Bratz from Mattel. The Bratz are estimated to generate 2 billion dollars of revenue for MGA annually. The […]
June 15th 2008
Jonathan Zittrain had been serving as Oxford University’s Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation, until this week, when he agreed to return to Harvard Law as its newest tenured Professor. A ’95 grad of Harvard Law, Zittrain co-founded Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, which makes him a key thinker about the kinds of topics I […]
June 9th 2008
North Oaks, Minnesota, population 4,500, has sent Google Maps a big message: “Go away, and don’t come back.” You see, in North Oaks the roads are privately owned by the residents. So when the Googlemobile toured North Oaks and photographed people’s homes from the street, it was technically trespassing. That’s what the North Oaks City Council […]
June 6th 2008
Israeli surveillance software is being used on US billboards to gauge who is looking at an advertisement and customize its content. The billboards provide analytics on the number of ad viewers, the duration of views, and (perhaps most worrying) viewer demographics.
June 4th 2008
Inspired by the hideous and tacky mascots of the Beijing Olympics, the Internet Surveillance Division of the Public Security Bureau in Shenzhen and the Beijing Police have adopted animated, noseless “censor-mascots” of their own, Jingjing and Chacha. Note the play on words: jing cha means “police” in Chinese. Even as Chinese citizens use the Internet […]
May 21st 2008
ISP Charter Communications is about to start spying on its customers surfing habits in order to build profiles for advertisers. Charter is partnering with a company called NebuAd, which provides the packet-sniffing technology that knows which websites you’re visiting. And though Charter claims its customers can opt out, a review of NebuAd’s patent indicates otherwise. […]
May 15th 2008
Wendy Davis posts that the FBI has been persuaded by privacy rights organizations to back down from a National Security Letter they had served to gain intelligence about a user of the nonprofit digital library Internet Archive. This extends a pattern of recent privacy victories noted in recent posts. You’ll recall the Internet Archive is […]
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