The decision is Vesely v. Armslist, LLC (N.D. Ill. July 29, 2013) (thanks to the Media Law Resource Center for the pointer). Here’s the Brady Campaign’s theory: On April 13, 2011, Jitka Vesel, a 36-year-old immigrant from the Czech Republic was shot and killed by Demetry Smirnov, a Russian immigrant residing in Canada who had […]
Archive | Cyberspace Law
I Should Not Have Opined About Facebook’s TOS and its Relationship to the CFAA
Some commenters on Stewart Baker’s, Orin Kerr’s, and my own recent posts on the Obama 2012 campaign’s possible violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act argue that, even if the CFAA does criminalize use of websites in violation of their terms of service, the Obama campaign did not in fact violate Facebook’s TOS, as […]
What (Legally) Happens to Our Social Media Accounts When We Die?
Not all legal scholarship is irrelevant twaddle; some of it addresses emerging legal questions that will indeed require answers in the real world. This student Comment, “What Happens to Our Facebook Accounts When We Die?: Probate Versus Policy and the Fate of Social-Media Assets Postmortem,” by Kristina Sherry, appears in the December 2012 Pepperdine Law Review […]
The Hacker Protection Act of 2012
The latest draft cybersecurity bill contains information sharing provisions that were heavily negotiated between the Obama administration and privacy groups. This effort at compromise has yielded the usual ambiguous praise from privacy groups. The Electronic Frontier Foundation pronounced itself “pleased” but then complained that the measure still “contains broad language around the ability for companies […]
Viacom v Youtube Decision – Not as Bad as All That
The Second Circuit has finally released its long-awaited decision in the appeal of the Viacom v. Youtube lawsuit, about which I’ve blogged a great deal [starting here, here, here, and here] over the past couple of years. Viacom “won” — in that they got the reversal of the district court’s comprehensive judgment in YouTube’s favor […]
Viewpoint Discrimination in K-12 School Library Filtering
By Eugene Volokh on February 16, 2012 5:21 pm in Cyberspace Law, Freedom of Speech at K-12 Schools, Freedom to Gather Information, Gay Rights, Sexual Orientation
As I’ve said before, the Supreme Court has never decided whether K-12 schools may remove books from school libraries based on their viewpoints, or may filter out Web sites based on their viewpoints. The Court’s cases dealing with this question, Board of Ed. v. Pico and U.S. v. American Library Ass’n were badly splintered and […]
Testifying on Cybersecurity Legislation
The Senate’s big cybersecurity bill has finally surfaced officially, and the hearing will be tomorrow at 2:30 DC time in front of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. After Sen. Rockefeller and Sec. Napolitano, I’ll be part of a panel that includes Gov. Tom Ridge, Scott Charney of Microsoft, and Jim Lewis of the […]
Court of Appeals Approves Prosecution of Man for Reading Estranged Wife’s E-Mail Without Her Authorization
I blogged about the case a year ago, and now there’s an appellate court decision in it, People v. Walker (Mich. Ct. App. Dec. 27, 2011). An excerpt: [T]he charge against defendant arises from his alleged unauthorized access to the password-protected email account of his estranged wife, Clara Elizabeth Walker, from July 2009 through August […]
Will Jeff Bezos Bring Feudal Security to the Net?
The Kindle Fire is a remarkable innovation in the Apple mold: taking a bunch of components that are pretty well known and combining them into a powerful new experience. But unlike Apple, Amazon’s integrating vision isn’t visual design or even user delight. Instead it’s far more ambitious — a new vision of the entire Internet […]
“Not Much Good Takes Place at Slumber Parties for High School Kids, and This Case Proves the Point”
So begins T.V. v. Smith-Green Community School Corp. (N.D. Ind. Aug. 10), which (1) holds that a high school violated plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights when it suspended them from the volleyball team because they had posted a raunchy video of themselves on the Internet, and (2) holds that the school’s code of conduct allowing suspensions […]
Federalist Society Symposium on Cybersecurity
Last week, the Federalist Society hosted a symposium on cybersecurity that you can watch here (morning panel, focused on national security issues), here (lunch address), and here (afternoon panel, focused on business and criminal law issues). Two VC bloggers participated in the symposium. Stewart Baker gave the lunchtime keynote address, which you can watch here: […]
E-Mail Accounts, The Warrant Requirement, and the Territorial Limits of Court Orders
My friend Jennifer Granick points me to an interesting new case, Hubbard v. Myspace (S.D.N.Y. June 1, 2011), that touches on a fascinating Fourth Amendment question: What are the territorial limits of search warrants for Fourth Amendment purposes? To be clear, the Hubbard case itself involved a statutory challenge, not a constitutional one. The plaintiff […]
Applying the Rules of Evidence Related to Authentication to Online Sources
Evidence law has special rules that require someone who wants to introduce a document to first introduce “foundation” evidence that shows the document was indeed written by the person who supposedly wrote it; this is called “authentication.” Griffin v. State, decided by Maryland’s highest court on April 28, has an interesting discussion of how those […]
Forwarding a Sentence-Long Message from a Listserv = Copyright Infringement?
So argued Kenneth M. Stern, a California lawyer; no dice, said the district court in Stern v. Does (C.D. Cal., decided Feb. 10, 2011 but just now made available on Westlaw). No dice, said the court, concluding that the message lacked the modicum of creativity required for copyright protection — because it was so short […]
Is Israel Behind the Stuxnet Cyberattack on Iran?
I’m going to leave it to Co-Conspirator Stewart and other cybersecurity legal experts to discuss the legal issues, but regarding the recent Stuxnet worm that Iran reports infected its computers and, we are told, particularly its nuclear program, the New York Times says … Experts dissecting the computer worm suspected of being aimed at Iran’s […]