May 23rd 2008
Prosecutors in Los Angeles have brought criminal charges against Lori Drew, the 44-year-old woman who was the focus of outrage around the tragic death of Megan Meier. Since there is no law against cyberbullying, the prosecutors construed that when Drew registered under a false name, she was essentially making unauthorized use of MySpace’s computer system […]
May 22nd 2008
A U.S. District Judge in Los Angeles has ruled that “spam king” Sanford Wallace and his accomplice Walter Rines are liable to pay MySpace $230 million in damages. This is significant both for the verdict’s size, and because the spam happened entirely within MySpace rather than through traditional ISP based email.
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 20th 2008
Floyd Abrams published an Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal describing how plaintiffs seeking to suppress protected speech in the US are gaining libel judgements in England. Rachel Ehrenfeld’s book Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Funded and How to Stop It, had sold only 23 copies in England. But that was enough for a UK […]
May 20th 2008
Hello from Toronto, where its light until almost 10pm. The good people at ExactTarget invited me to join their 1:1 marketing conference as a speaker on email marketing best practices. I’ll be singing the praises of email newsletters as a means to personally address customers while generating and nurturing leads.
May 19th 2008
Whenever a governmental body makes a statement that voices support for an ethical principle, you should look for the real underlying reason: money. In a recent meeting, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors stated that copyright infringement “substantially interferes with the interest of the public in the quality of life and community peace, lawful […]
May 16th 2008
Who controls the software you use: you, or the software’s producer? That’s the question at the heart of a lawsuit by Blizzard, creator of World of Warcraft (WoW), against MDY Industries. Apparently, MDY has developed software called Glider that allows a WoW player to cheat by having their computer play for them in their stead. […]
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 […]
May 14th 2008
China’s State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) and the China Patent Information Center (CPIC) have developed a Chinese-to-English translation engine. China’s patent office is the fifth largest in the world in terms of volume, processing about a half million requests for invention patents, utility models, and design patents in 2006. The Japan and Korean offices have […]
May 13th 2008
It seems the RIAA is trying a surge of their own by increasing the number of take-down notices to universities, estimated to be up by a factor of 20. According to Wired.com: University of California at Berkeley’s chief information officer Shel Waggener confirmed he’d heard of the spikes and suggested there was a political purpose […]
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