Physicists Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson have written an article on their research searching for time travelers on the internet. This could turn out to be the scientific paper of the year! But, sadly, no evidence of time travelers was found. Slate summarizes the study here: In a paper pre-published on arXiv, a pair of […]
Archive | Internet
Some Important Thoughts About Internet Governance
David Bollier and John Clippinger have an extremely interesting short essay on “The Next Great Internet Disruption: Authority and Governance” that is well worth reading. They start from Reed’s Law: When we look back on the past twenty years of Internet history, we can more fully appreciate the prescience of David P. Reed’s seminal 1999 […]
Disparaging Those Who Deserve To Be Disparaged
Ken at Popehat takes on the Supervisors of Vernon County, Wisconsin (and my bet’s on Ken).
Top 50 Law Professors on Twitter
The list was compiled by Clare Kaufman, for WorldwideLearn.com. She explains: “The following top law professors dominate the Twitter-verse, either through the wit, volume or audience. Criteria for selection for this list include the quality of the tweets, the number of followers and the most active users.” For whatever reason, I’m not on the list, […]
Are Search Engine Providers Like Internet Service Providers?
Today’s NYT reports on the white paper Google commissioned from our host, Eugene (about which Eugene blogged here). I don’t know this area nearly as well as Eugene does, but I found this portion of the article particularly interesting: there is a bit of a rub for Google, some scholars say. The kind of reasoning […]
Pew Report on Politics and Social Media
The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released a new report on social networking sites and politics. Among its main findings are that most Americans use social networking sites but that liberals are more likely to use such sites than are conservatives. It also finds that many people are surprised by what they learn about […]
A Milestone Week for the Net
Well, that was interesting! Wednesday’s day of protest marks, I believe, a profoundly important turning-point in the history of the Net and of its place in human society. Several months ago, in one of my many periodic rants about the dreadful, unconstitutional, and repellant features of the intellectual property laws introduced into this session of […]
Stopping the Stop Online Piracy Act
In several recent postings (here and here, for example) I called on all interested persons to come to the Internet’s defense against a spate of truly dreadful bills now making their way through Congress (the “Protect IP Act” and SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act”). Larry Downes, always a thoughtful voice on tech matters, has […]
Second-Hand Music?
Here’s an interesting development: the ReDigi Used Digital Music Store. Application of copyright law’s “first sale doctrine” — which allows you to re-sell or give away copies that you have purchased of books, records, or other copyrighted works without the copyright holder’s permission (the doctrine that allows, for instance, used book stores or video rental […]
How About Occupy Hollywood?
One of the obvious dangers of the Internet Age is that we’ll be so distracted by everything going on around us – lots of it interesting, complicated, and even important (not to mention all the stuff that’s idiotic and unimportant and fundamentally uninteresting) — that we will fail to recognize the truly important stuff when […]
It’s “the Internet.” Please.
I’m losing my battle to keep the initial capital “I” in “the Internet.” I’m starting see references to “the internet” everywhere; the latest to fall seems to be The Economist (see headline from July 30: “An internet with Chinese characteristics” – I’m quite certain that it was “the Internet” up until quite recently). It actually […]
New Internet Top-Level Domains Coming:
After many, many years of debate and discussion, ICANN — the rather peculiar hybrid policy/technology private/public institution that manages the Internet’s naming system — has finally approved a process to open up the Internet’s list of “top-level domains” (TLDs) [Stories here and here and here give some of the details] ICANN will begin accepting applications […]
More on DHS and Copyright Enforcement:
Fellow Blogger Orin Kerr, in several comments on my posting yesterday, has asked some questions deserving a response: David, If DHS is just making a request and has no legal authority to enforce its request, then of course Mozilla is free to ignore the request. At the same time, I wonder: If you were in […]
Homeland Insecurity, At It Again:
The Dep’t of Homeland Security is indeed at it again. I’ve blogged about their campaign on behalf of US copyright holders to “seize” the domain names of websites (irrespective of the actual location of the site, provided that it is registered in one of the databases of a US domain name registrar or registry). It’s […]
Copyright Tail Trying to Wag Internet Dog, Take 153:
As I’ve noted before on a number of occasions, a possible landmark copyright case is now before the 2d Circuit, Viacom et al. v. YouTube. On behalf of 44 co-signatory law professors, Annemarie Bridy and I wrote an amicus brief urging the court to affirm the lower court’s decision that YouTube is immune from copyright […]