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Retention of transactional Web browsing data
The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years.
February 2010 / 3 min.
Does an open WiFi signal reduce your 4th Amendment protections?
A federal trial court in Oregon ruled that a suspect’s rights were not violated when police – tipped by a neighbor – accessed his unprotected WiFi network and saw child pornography shared via his iTunes library.
February 2010 / 3 min.
Escaping the Kindle lock-box is now easier for authors and publishers
Purchasing books on the Kindle has always struck me as a bit of a Faustian bargain: once you enter the Kindle ecosystem and purchase some books, those books are forever locked to Amazon’s e-reader. Now Amazon has made it easier for small-scale publishers and authors to opt-out.
January 2010 / 2 min.
DECE seeks complex DRM that approximates the simple first-sale doctrine that consumers expect
Consumer electronics manufacturers and Hollywood studios have a problem: when customers purchase a movie online, they expect to be able to watch it anywhere – but, thanks to DRM, they can’t easily do it (unless they bought a physical DVD and rip it, or otherwise remove the DRM, which is what Hollywood is desperate to prevent). The DECE wants to change that.
January 2010 / 3 min.
Making a personal site more dynamic
As part of a recent attempt to update my personal information online, I decided to update my personal site to better reflect my current activities and background. As part of my content update, I ideally wanted my site to be more dynamic, so that I did not need to touch it very often, yet to still have it be more up-to-date and fresh. My idea was to rely on updates I would make to other sites anyway, and to leverage those updates to drive my personal site too.
December 2009 / 4 min.
Applying Robert Merton’s “The Normative Structure of Science” to the law
Robert Merton, in “The Normative Structure of Science” (from The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations), posits four sets of “institutional imperatives” that together “comprise the ethos of modern science”: universalism, communism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. How well do these four sets of imperatives describe the “ethos of modern law”?
December 2009 / 4 min.
Moving away from traditional publishers
As I noted a few days ago, there has been increasing attention to the idea of authors moving away from traditional publishers when it comes to e-books. Here’s more from the New York Times about one author doing just that: Ever since electronic books emerged as a major growth market, New York’s largest publishing houses […]
December 2009 / 1 min.
A dispute over the rights to e-book editions
That publishers and authors (or their estates) should be arguing over rights to production electronic editions is no surprise. This sort of dispute is a standard part of contract law, and comes up anytime a new market not anticipated in a contract opens up. Can traditional publishers fend off this move through litigation and forceful contract negotiations? Or will we see increasing alternatives to traditional publishers in the e-book realm?
December 2009 / 3 min.
Trademarks and the Apple App Store
Apple’s “app store” continues to generate controversy through its rejections. I must agree with the following analysis that use of icons-especially as provided through an API expressly for that purpose should not violate trademark law (or copyright for that matter).
November 2009 / 2 min.
Microsoft update leaves Firefox users unexpectedly vulnerable
An add-on that Microsoft silently slipped into Mozilla’s Firefox last February leaves that browser open to attack, Microsoft’s security engineers acknowledged earlier this week.
October 2009 / 1 min.