This is an interesting area to look into as it affects our everyday lives as a consumer.  Cyberlaw is not only for the technopreneur, technophobe, technophile, hackers, cybergeeks and game addicts.  It is used by everyday people to pay bills, transfer funds, buy online, call a family member, send pictures and hear songs.  Cyberlaw is supposed to provide protection against those who abuse such privileges.  Accessing the internet is a privilege to most of us as it enables us to free our time for other more important matters.

Screw my previous comments – the only way I’m going to keep on top of things is by continuing InfoBores more-or-less as they were. Further proof – if it were needed – that blogging is a constant process of revision and learning. Damn, I actually missed doing them.

Cyberspace the Liberator Is Now a Tyrant’s Tool – Bryan Appleyard, Times Online

A Different Slant On Cyber Security – Steven Bucci, Security Debrief

Five Facts About Second Life the BBC Doesn’t Understand – James Wagner Au, New World Notes

Recent Air Force Law Review Discusses Cyberlaw – Carl Bergquist, USAF

China Slams US Report Warning Of Spying By Beijing – AP

Intelligence Agency GCHQ Uses Xbox Live to Attract New Recruits – Daily Telegraph

New GreyLogic Site

Reading:

• Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source, ch. 7.
• Lawrence Lessig, Remix, ch. 9.

(You may try to split the reading among yourselves if it’s too much.)

Additional Reading:

• Lawrence Lessig, Remix, ch. 10.

Reading:

• Yochai Benkler, Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm, 112 Yale L.J. 369 (2002).

Additional Reading:

• Lawrence Lessig, Remix, Part II.

Reading:

• 李界昇，開放原始碼模式下的法律糾紛與風險 (交大科法所碩士論文, 2004) (read ch. 2 & 3).

Additional Reading:

• GPL on Wikipedia

Reading:

• Amelia H. Boss, The Evolution of Commercial Law Norms: Lessons to Be Learned from Electronic Commerce, 34 Brook. J. Int’l L. 673 (2009).
• Youseph Farah, Electronic Contracts and Information Society Services Under the E-commerce Directive, 12 No. 12 J. Internet L. 3 (2009). (Skim the 1st part.)

Additional reading:

• Thomas J. Smedinghoff, The Seven Legal Requirements for Creating Enforceable Electronic Contracts (2005). (Google it.)
• Margaret Jane Radin, Humans, Computers, and Binding Commitment, 75 Ind. L.J. 1125 (2000).
• Jean Braucher, The Failed Promise of the UCITA Mass-Market Concept and Its Lessons for Policing of Standard Form Contracts, 7 J. Small & Emerging Bus. L. 393 (2003).

Reading:

• Neal Kumar Katyal, Digital Architecture as Crime Control, 112 Yale L.J. 2261 (2003).
• Declan McCullagh, Perspective: Fuzzy logic behind Bush’s cybercrime treaty, CNet News, Nov. 28, 2005.

Additional reading:

• United States v. Morris, 928 F.2d 504 (1991).
• United States v. Riggs, 743 F.Supp. 556 (N.D. Ill. 1990).
• USDOJ, Computer Crime Legal Resources.

Reading:

• Lou Dzierzak, Does an Advertiser Know You Clicked on This Story?, Scientific American, August 19, 2008.
• Benjamin R. Sachs, Note, Consumerism and Information Privacy: How Upton Sinclair Can Again Save Us from Ourselves, 95 Va. L. Rev. 205 (2009).

Additional reading:

• Text, ch. 11 (excellent overview on both surveillance and data aggregation issues).
• In re DoubleClick Inc. Privacy Litigation, 154 F.Supp.2d 497 (S.D.N.Y., 2001). (To ease your reading load, links are to summaries made by Martin Samson, an attorney at Phillips Nizer. You should know where to locate the full text.)
• Larry Greenemeier, International Report: What Impact Is Technology Having on Privacy around the World?, Scientific American, Aug. 18, 2008.
• Herbert H. Thompson, How I Stole Someone’s Identity, Scientific American, Aug. 18, 2008.
• The entire 2000 Stanford Law Review symposium — “Cyberspace and Privacy: A New Legal Paradigm?”
• The entire 2001 Georgetown Law Journal symposium — The Unwanted Gaze, by Jeffrey Rosen”.
• Sonia K. Katyal, Privacy vs. Piracy, 7 Yale J. L. & Tech. 222 (2005).

Reading:

• Text: ch. 1-4. (It would be great if you can get to ch.5.)

Just a quick post to highlight the new semester I’m in. It’s going to be a bit of a bear, but interesting.

Currently, we’re in planning stages for the development of my team’s social community. The name has been nailed down, it will be called ArtStarters.org

The first steps were outlining our project scope (who will use it? what problem are we helping them solve? what tools will we give them?). Next is to take our list of tools and give them greater depth, outlining in detail what they have to do (input first name, if no first name upon ’submit’, refresh page with error note) that kind of thing.

Next steps will be to begin shopping for developers. Additionally, we’re taking an internet law class so we understand how to write terms & conditions, what’s legal to ask users to undertake, what we open ourselves up to legally by hosting the sites, etc.

My third class for the semester is my one and only elective and is outside the Annenberg Communications school. I’m in a class in the business school looking at the business of the networked digital industry; how is the internet and the demand for ‘always on’ going to affect companies like Nike or General Mills? What do the hardware companies need to do to keep up? Just how far behind IS the U.S. in terms of internet speed and connectivity (umm, way far; we’re about to go 4G which I vaguely recall is like 10MB and South Korea is consistently at 40MB, um, yeah, bad news bears). It should give me a wider global perspective on how networks are changing business cases.

Finally, I’m going to be writing a little eBook, so keep your eyes open for more info on that one!

http://eppleylawsuit.blogspot.com/

Dr. Barry Eppley’s illegal, unethical attempt to silence the truth.

Visit this link to read medical reports and view photos of injurious results of Dr. Barry Eppley’s operation

Visit this link to read more about plastic surgeon Dr. Barry Eppley

Visit  this link to view all documents regarding Dr. Barry Eppley and his unethical, illegal actions against the victim of his botched operation.

Dr. Barry Eppley doesn’t want to just keep “dirt under the carpet”.   He’s trying to “eliminate” the cleaning lady!   The dirt is no secret.  Dr. Eppley has a rather substantial malpractice history.  Some of his patients  published photos of their botched faces online.  The photos and these patients stories have been online for years.   So why has he suddenly decided, after EIGHT YEARS, to sue one of these former patients for sharing her surgical experience online?

The court documents reveal a travesty of justice and violation of First Amendment Rights.  This is MONEY silencing TRUTH.. the very root of all corruption in every society.

Read the court documents and decide for yourself.. who the real victim is in this scenario.

Much ado has been made already about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s qualifications and experiences, but little attention has been paid to one of the more unique elements of her legal background: as Wired points out, Judge Sotomayor will become the first justice to have decided cyberlaw cases prior to joining the Court.

There’s no telling how much she knows about things like Facebook (I’d be willing to bet that she doesn’t have an account), but it’s great to see a generation of judges who actually might understand all these new-fangled technologies making it to the high court. If confirmed, she would join Chief Justice John Roberts (also 54) as the only justices under 55, a decade and a half under the Court’s average age. That generational gap could make all the difference.

Whereas most subject areas can, for the most part, be taught to a judge in a well-written brief, there’s some element of cyberlife that makes it an area that you either “get” or don’t. In some cases (1-800 Contacts is a personal choice), an understanding (or misunderstanding) of how technology works can make all the difference in the court’s decision. As the law increasingly tries to make sense of cyberspace, it’s essential to have judges who can make sense of the realities of the Internet in the face of a confusing and piecemeal statutory scheme. Since it is likely that the next few years will contain a number of precedent-setting cyberlaw opinions, that ability becomes all the more important.

Sotomayor’s views on the Internet haven’t been showcased in her cyberlaw rulings, as they have not had to be particularly theoretical, but her decision in Netscape hints at an exceptionalist position (although it’s possible that she “hates bloggers“). Additionally, her nomination out of a process that aimed to focus on judicial “empathy” could mean that she’ll be willing to consider the shortfalls in the current cyberlaw as she arrives at her opinions. All things told, Sotomayor’s nomination is a good first step in the eventual progression towards a tech-savvy judiciary.

– Steven Reilly

Image source

IP Mall at Pierce Law has Congressional Research Service reports on IP, cyberlaw and e-commerce from 1993 forward.  Check it out.

Dozier Internet Law runs into many web developer/client disputes. Oftentimes the problems are governed by the terms of the contract in place. However, Virginia has passed Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA), which requires web designers and developers to design, build and deliver a project “in accordance with industry standards and practices.”

A Virginia jury recently award $1,138,500 to Blue Line Media, Inc. against its web developer, Redmon Group, for violating this standard of care. At Dozier Internet Law we regularly counsel clients on how to establish appropriate performance standards and measurement benchmarks with an eye towards preventing a project failure.