Source: Ars Technica
1/24/2012
Ars Technica interviewed Professor
James Grimmelmann of New York Law School to understand the legal issues in the Megaupload case.
Discussing Copyright Infringement:
"I think it's a pretty slam-dunk case on inducement," Grimmelmann told Ars. He said no one e-mail is damning, but the totality of the evidence in the indictment paints "a pretty clear portrait of a group that knows infringement is happening, knows it's a major source of revenue, trying to make sure that it happens."
On the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA):
Megaupload has long claimed that it qualifies for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "safe harbor" for websites that comply with takedown requests. But Grimmelmann expressed skepticism that Megaupload was in fact safe.
To start with, he pointed out that the DMCA requires sites who wish to qualify for the safe harbor to register a "designated agent" with the Copyright Office. Megaupload didn't do this until 2009, several years after the site began operation. Grimmelmann said that this fact by itself could disqualify the site from the safe harbor for any infringements committed before 2009.
more
Source: Ars Technica
1/19/2012
Article examines the United States case against the file-sharing site Megaupload for copyright infringement and profiting from the distribution of pirated music, movies, and software.
Professor James Grimmelmann of New York Law School is quoted:
If proven at trial, there's easily enough in the indictment to prove criminal copyright infringement many times over. But much of what the indictment details are legitimate business strategies many websites use to increase their traffic and revenues: offering premium subscriptions, running ads, rewarding active users. I hope that if this case goes to trial and results in convictions, that the court will be careful in sorting out just what Megaupload did that crossed the line of criminality.
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Source: The New York Times
1/10/2012
Article discusses reactions to Google’s announcement that it was integrating material from Google Plus into its search results.
Professor James Grimmelmann, New York Law School, was interviewed for this piece.
I don’t like it. I don’t like it for its effect on competition, and I don’t like it for what it does to people’s privacy,” Mr. Grimmelmann added in a phone interview. “It breaks down a very clear conceptual divide between things that are private and things that are public online.” He added that many Google users would find the integration confusing, and that the updates would lead to a “sense of erosion of their privacy.
The article closed with this quote from Professor Grimmelmann:
In Google’s own interest, they should continue to focus on building a really great search platform, and not trying to prop up a not very great social network by roping it to a search engine.
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Source: The New York Times
1/10/2012
Article discusses reactions to Google’s announcement that it was integrating material from Google Plus into its search results.
In a phone interview, Professor Mark Lemley, Stanford University School of Law, said: “There is a lot of concern on various fronts about Google favoring Google in its own search results, and I think this will add to that concern.”
more
Source: Stanford Law Review
12/19/2011
This article, co-authored by Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, and David G. Post, examines the Protect IP and SOPA acts. They wrote, “Although the bills differ in certain respects, they share an underlying approach and an enforcement philosophy that pose grave constitutional problems and that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet’s addressing system.”
The authors emphasize their opposition to both these bills:
These bills, and the enforcement philosophy that underlies them, represent a dramatic retreat from this country’s tradition of leadership in supporting the free exchange of information and ideas on the Internet. At a time when many foreign governments have dramatically stepped up their efforts to censor Internet communications, these bills would incorporate into U.S. law a principle more closely associated with those repressive regimes: a right to insist on the removal of content from the global Internet, regardless of where it may have originated or be located, in service of the exigencies of domestic law.
In closing, the authors stress:
Copyright and trademark infringement on the Internet is a very real problem, and reasonable proposals to augment the ample array of enforcement powers already at the disposal of IP rights holders and law enforcement officials may serve the public interest. But the power to break the Internet shouldn’t be among them.
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Source: Forbes
12/13/2011
Article discusses the use of drones within the United States, and the issues raised by this new technology. These concerns are primarily: crowded airspace, safety, and privacy. On the latter point, this Forbes article calls out a recent paper by
M. Ryan Calo, Director of Privacy and Robotics at the Stanford Center for Internet & Society.
On the last point, legal scholar Ryan Calo
theorizes that, rather than eroding our and Bieber’s privacy, drones buzzing around may actually be a catalyst for greater privacy protection. “People would
feel observed, regardless of how or whether the information was actually used,” writes Calo in the
Stanford Law Review. “The resulting backlash could force us to reexamine not merely the use of drones to observe, but the doctrines that today permit this use.”
more
Source: The Huffington Post
12/13/2011
In this article,
M. Ryan Calo examines the first time a military drone has been used to assist in surveillance for a law enforcement case in North Dakota. Calo goes on to discuss the impact of drone use within the United States, and specifically the privacy implications of drone surveillance.
Here are a few excerpts from Calo’s article:
Although the FAA's rules stand in the way of many uses of drones, United States privacy law does not. There is very little in our Constitution, statutes, or case law that would prohibit the use of drones for surveillance within our borders.
It may be tempting to conclude on this basis that drones will further erode our individual and collective privacy. Yet the opposite may happen. Drones may help restore our picture of a privacy violation. They could be just the visceral jolt society needs to drag privacy law into the 21st century.
Technology has been changing at a rapid pace; privacy law has not.
We are still using
a statute from 1986 to govern the circumstances under which law enforcement can intercept or access electronic communications. Computers, the Internet, RFID, GPS, biometrics, facial recognition -- none of these developments have created the same sea change in privacy thinking.
M. Ryan Calo is the Director of Privacy and Robotics at the Stanford Center for Internet & Society.
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Source: The Harvard Crimson
12/5/2011
“There’s no getting ideology out of policy-making, but it would help to have a sense of what’s really going on out there—and what a proposed policy or action will likely do, both directly and in its side effects. Data helps,” Zittrain wrote in an email.
“Nearly every aspect of life today in a wired society involves the Internet and digital media one way or another,” Palfrey wrote in an email. “The way in which the space is regulated matters to all of us.”
“With better data, we believe that we can have a better Internet,” Palfrey wrote. “We think the environment can be better for civic activism, for learning, and for innovation.”
more
Source: Ars Technica
12/2/2011
Discusses recent article (“
Better Data for a Better Internet”) by Harvard's
Jonathan Zittrain and
John Palfrey about the current state of research on the Internet. Professors Zittrain and Palfrey state that we don't currently have enough decent data to make intelligent decisions about what sorts of regulations are either needed or effective. From the article:
But even as the need and desire to enact some degree of Internet regulation has increased, we haven't gotten much better at understanding what is actually happening online, which would be a cornerstone of intelligent regulation. This situation is compounded by "the extent to which policy-makers ignore the good data we do have," in favor of a tendency to act out of fear and inspired by anecdotes. "A few million dollars' worth of research infrastructure," Palfrey and Zittrain suggest, "could help prevent billion-dollar policy mistakes."
Zittrain and Palfrey are further quoted: "In order to have a more complete and dynamic picture, we need to identify public way-stations on the network that transparently monitor usage—anonymized, so as not to exacerbate the growing problem of privacy on the Internet—and report statistics to a common, open source for all to analyze."
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Source: CNN
12/1/2011
Article looks at a current case before the Supreme Court in which a private pilot who is living with HIV found his medical status shared amongst federal agencies – a violation of the Privacy Act.
Daniel Solove, a privacy expert and law professor at George Washington University, says the government will make a simple argument before the high court.
No harm, no foul, that's kind of what the government's trying to say, even though it very well is saying we might have committed a foul but guess what -- you can't show a harm and therefore you can't prevail in this case. No matter where we turn, the law is in fact lagging behind the technology. I think it does need to catch up, and I think the way it can catch up is by making the right holding in this particular case, because this really goes to an understanding of what privacy is all about and the nature of what a privacy injury is about. And if the Supreme Court gets this right, I think that's an important step for privacy law more generally.
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Source: Politico
11/17/2011
In this
Politico article,
James Bessen from the Boston University School of Law, discusses findings from his recent report on the impact of patent trolls on the economy. “We wanted to understand what’s going on in the landscape. It’s a new business model and it’s important to understand what this new model means to the country.”
To sum up the findings in the report, Bessen told Politico: “The trolls are doing a lot of damage. The magnitude of the losses reveals that there is very little socially redeeming value to their actions.”
Note: subscription required to access Politico article.
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Source: The Wall Street Journal
11/15/2011
In this article,
The Wall Street Journal asked a diverse group of panelists how much people should worry about the vast array of privacy threats. Among them is TAP scholar
danah boyd. Below are a few of the thoughts she shared.
Positioning privacy and publicness in opposition is a false dichotomy. People want privacy, and they want to be able to participate in public. This is why I think it's important to emphasize that privacy is not about controlling information, but about having the ability to control a social situation. People want to share and they gain a, lot from sharing. But that's different than saying that people want to be exposed by others.
Protecting privacy is about making certain that people have the ability to make informed decisions about how they engage in public. I do not think we've done enough here.
In our efforts to protect youth, we often exclude them from public life. Nowhere is this more visible than with respect to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). This well-intended laws was meant to empower parents. Yet, in practice, it has prompted companies to ban any child under the age of 13 from joining general-purpose communication services and participating on social-media platforms.
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Source: TheTimes-Tribune
11/10/2011
Article provides overview of a speech by
Daron Acemoglu, professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Dr. Acemoglu stressed that income inequality and the influence of money and lobbying on government policy pose a political and economic threat to the United States. "I think those are alarming trends," Dr. Acemoglu said. "These are the same issues that mobilized people during the era of the robber barons."
The article goes on to summarize Dr. Acemoglu’s points:
Prosperous nations, mostly located in the Northern Hemisphere, thrived by adopting inclusive systems of legal rights and by encouraging investment, trade and innovation, he said. Struggling nations follow controlled "extractive" economic and political models traced to colonial systems featuring low wages, state-supported monopolies and human rights restrictions, he said.
Dr. Acemoglu wove history, political science and economics into his speech.
Dr. Acemoglu said he hopes the United States will address its political and economic inequity.
"I do have some hope and trust in the flexibility of U.S. institutions," he said. "I don't think we are an extractive society yet, but there could be danger."
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Source: ABC News (KGO-TV San Francisco)
11/9/2011
The report explores how facial recognition systems could be used to piece together personal information about individuals. It discusses an application developed by Professor
Alessandro Acquisti and his colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University that can determine the name and other personal information of a stranger with fairly good accuracy.
"We're getting closer to the end of anonymity as we know it," said Carnegie Mellon Professor Acquisti.
more
Source: Bloomberg
11/9/2011
Nicholas Economides, a professor at New York University, discusses the outlook for Greece's political leadership and the European sovereign debt crisis. Mark Crumpton talks with Professor Economides on
Bloomberg Television's "Bottom Line" and asks what emergency measures might be considered:
I think Italy might receive some financial packets from the EU and IMF similar to the ones that Greece, Portugal, and Ireland have received. That’s a real possibility, and I think it will stabilize the markets. But let me also say that although Italy is under so much pressure it is still –the ACB –the Central Bank—is buying Italian bonds. So the interest rates on Italian bonds are high despite the fact that the ACB is buying them. So who knows what the real market price would have been if the ACB wasn’t doing that. So Italy is following the path of Greece, Portugal, and Ireland. And this is very disturbing. The European Union has to take some measures to beef up tremendously the EFSF – the European stability mechanism – so that the stability mechanism can rescue both Italy and Spain which is the next to go.
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Source: The Huffington Post
11/9/2011
Article looks at Italy’s debt crisis and its potential impact on the U.S. economy.
Some economists say that it is also unlikely for Italy to abandon the euro, since the value of the Italian lira would plummet in the international markets. The rush to move Italian money elsewhere would crater the nation's banks people, rendering the move counterproductive, said New York University economist
Nicholas Economides.
more
Source: Slate
11/9/2011
Article discusses recent report by
Nick Bloom, Associate Professor of Economics at Stanford University, that shows allowing employees to work from home makes sense in some situations. “Can IT improve work-life balance?” describes “the effects of allowing customer service employees at a billion-dollar Chinese company to work from home: Productivity went up, as did hours worked, and employees seemed happier for it.”
Additionally, the article shares: “Nick Bloom tells of his discussions with flex-time employees at JetBlue, which has been able to put highly-educated moms back to work by offering them the flexibility to work between child-care obligations, logging in and out as necessary. Without the flex-time option, JetBlue could never have attracted the same caliber of employee.”
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Source: BBC News
11/8/2011
Article examines practice of technology companies doing business with patent houses in order to protect itself against potential intellectual property lawsuits.
"LG [LG Electronics] now has the opportunity to leverage IV's [Intellectual Ventures] large patent portfolio and more aggressively expand product offerings in novel directions," said
Andrea Matwyshyn from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.
more
Source: 90.5 Essential Public Radio (Pittsburgh)
11/8/2011
Lorrie Faith Cranor discusses anti-tracking tools for Internet users with Pittsburgh’s public radio Science and Technology reporter.
There’s a variety of different tracking technologies available, and there’s many different companies that are tracking people in different ways. So it’s not all that straight forward for the companies to provide the opt-out. And what we found is that is seems that a lot of the tools that are out there really haven’t undergone any usability testing, or if they did, it doesn’t appear they did a very good job.
Additionally, Professor Cranor said that not all tracking devices or “cookies” are undesirable.
Maybe you actually want ads that are targeted for your interests, rather than random ads that you’re not interested in. So some of these things are quite useful, and it’s really different today for a consumer to distinguish between the useful and non-useful trackers for them, and these tools don’t really make it much easier.
Lorrie Faith Cranor is the Director of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS) and an Associate Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University.
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Source: The Atlantic
11/8/2011
Article by Rob Atkinson examines the weak U.S. economy, and stresses that innovation is essential to fully recover from the recession this country has been in. Exploring arguments and theories for the country’s economic woes, Atkinson discusses a recently released e-book by
Erik Brynjolfsson and his colleague, “Race Against the Machine.”
MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee assert in a new a chillingly-titled e-book, Race Against the Machine, that technological change, far from playing itself out, is escalating so quickly that it is making workers obsolete. If that were true, how was it that machines allowed us to enjoy an unemployment rate of below five percent just four years ago? Or how could productivity average 3.1 percent per year growth in the 1960s while unemployment averaged 4.9 percent, but during the 1980s productivity was a sluggish 1.5 percent while unemployment rates averaged 7.3 percent. The answer is clear: there is no negative relationship between productivity rates and unemployment. In fact, studies by the OECD and others demonstrate that productivity's positive impact on economic growth and employment. Indeed, it is not too much technology we need to fear, but too little.
more
Source: Herald-Tribune (Sarasota, FL)
11/8/2011
Article examines the case of a Facebook-type web site for children, Skid-e Kids, that ran afoul of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). According to the Federal Trade Commission, the site collected personal information on the children using the site without their parents’ consent, which is against the law.
"Rather than providing parents with additional mechanisms to engage with sites honestly and negotiate the proper bounds of data collection about their children, parents are often actively helping their children deceive the sites in order to achieve access to the opportunities they desire," wrote
Danah Boyd, the lead author of the study and a researcher for Microsoft Research Labs.
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Source: The Washington Post
11/1/2011
Article examines the phenomenon of parents helping their underage children sign up for a Facebook account.
danah boyd, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and Visiting Researcher with Harvard Law School, is quoted: “There has been outrage about underaged children being on Facebook. And as it turns out, many parents are not only okay with it — they are helping their children set up accounts.”
more
Source: The Huffington Post
11/1/2011
Article discusses the high-risk gamble by the Greek government to hold a public vote on Europe’s policy prescriptions for Greece. This vote may threaten Greece's financial survival and the cohesion of the euro zone.
NYU economist
Nicholas Economides said that if the government loses the referendum, it would effectively become powerless and the administration would likely have to resign. He said this would put "tremendous pressure" on Italy and Spain, since their borrowing costs would spike and they would face the same situation that Greece encountered in early 2010.
"The European Union has missed the opportunity to get rid of the Greek problem once and for all by putting some money there in making Greece an isolated case," Economides said. "Right now the EU has to face the consequences in all the other weak countries."
more
Source: TMCnet.com
10/24/2011
TAP scholar
Alessandro Acquisti’s work with facial recognition is highlighted in an article that reports the German government is putting pressure on Facebook over its facial recognition application and related privacy concerns. From the article:
“Two experiments demonstrated the ability of identifying strangers online (on a dating site where individuals protect their identities by using pseudonyms) and offline (in a public space), based on photos made publicly available on a social network site,” Acquisti wrote on his
website. “A third … experiment illustrated the ability of inferring strangers' personal or sensitive information (their interests and Social Security numbers) from their faces, by combining face recognition, data mining algorithms, and statistical re-identification techniques.”
They also came up with a mobile phone app “to recognize and then predict someone's sensitive personal data directly from their face in real time,” Acquisti said.
Alessandro Acquisti is an Associate Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy at the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University.
more
Source: The New York Times
10/23/2011
Article introduces a new e-book “
Race Against the Machine” by
Erik Brynjolfsson, Director, MIT Center for Digital Business, and Andrew P. McAfee, associate director and principal research scientist at the center. The automation of more and more work once done by humans is the central theme of the book. “Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine,” the authors write.
“This technology can do things now that only a few years ago were thought to be beyond the reach of computers,” Mr. Brynjolfsson said. Last fall, Google announced that its robot-driven cars had logged thousands of miles on American roads with only an occasional assist from human back-seat drivers. “The Google cars,” Mr. Brynjolfsson said, “are but one sign of the times.”
more
Source: Star-Telegram
10/22/2011
Articles shows how companies sharing of information they’ve gleaned from the Internet is now travelling around the globe.
Anita Allen, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a privacy expert, shared her expertise. "Your readers should know that any information they give anyone on the Internet should be presumed public and shareable unless the information is provided to a reputable company that has explicitly promised confidentiality."
more
Source: The Economist
10/15/2011
The article looks at the effects of Chinese imports on America’s job market, and refers to a paper by
Nicholas Bloom and his colleagues that suggests trade may induce firms to invest in innovation, thus contributing to productivity growth. Quoted from
The Economist, “
Trade induced technical change? The impact of Chinese imports on innovation, IT and productivity” shows that “Competition from China drives low-tech firms out of the market, but forces others to upgrade. According to the [Bloom] paper, 15% of technical change in Europe between 2000 and 2007 can be attributed to competition from Chinese imports.”
Nicholas Bloom is an Associate Professor of Economics at Stanford University.
more
Source: Forbes
10/13/2011
This article examines a potential issue of standard-setting being used to keep competitors’ technologies out of the market. TruePosition, a company that sells the equipment AT&T and T-Mobile use to locate cellular phones when customers dial 911, filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing several cellphone equipment manufacturers of conspiring with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to use the emerging standards for 4G phones to block it from the market.
TAP scholar,
Nicholas Economides, Professor of Economics at the Stern School of Business of New York University, shared his expertise with Forbes. “There should be a concern. The standard-setting process can be used to manipulate the standards to be closer to what one company wants,” said Professor Economides.
The article examines the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) role in standard-setting for spectrum use. “The FCC has no preferred technology – and maybe that’s a good thing,” Professor Economides said. Back in the 1990s, when cellular carriers were bidding on spectrum for new digital systems and had to decide among the GSM, TDMA and CDMA standards, the FCC did not mandate one standard, it let the carriers decide.
“That led to problems,” such as the fact customers can’t switch their handsets from one carrier to another in the U.S., Economides said. But the decision not to decide gave a boost to Qualcomm’s then-unproven CDMA standard, which allowed for more data to be transmitted on a given slice of spectrum and ultimately won the battle for market share. “Almost miraculously, the FCC did it right,” Economides said.
more
Source: The Washington Post
9/8/2011
Article discusses the impact of the patent reform bill passed in the U.S. Senate.
“For a chemical, it’s very clear whether you’re infringing or not,” said
James Bessen, a lecturer at the Boston University School of Law who has studied the economics of patents. However, for technology companies, its products are not as easily defined.
The article goes on to discuss one of the key changes this legislation would make to how patents are handled. “For one, the United States would switch to a system where the first person to file for a patent takes precedent — not the first to invent, as the current system works. Bessen pointed out, however, that such disputes are relatively rare.”
more
Source: The Wall Street Journal
9/1/2011
Article examines recent lawsuits and settlement proposals surrounding the proposed AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile USA.
TAP Scholar
Christopher Yoo comments on the Department of Justice lawsuit to block the proposed $39 billion merger based on antitrust grounds:
This is a bit of a shock, because with T-Mobile's competitive problems you could reasonably make the case that T-Mobile doesn't have the resources to be a viable player without the merger.
Professor Yoo on news that AT&T plans to make concessions to address concerns that the T-Mobile deal is anti-competitive:
If the DOJ thought there was the chance of compromise with AT&T on conditions, they would have negotiated that with them before putting out this ruling.
more
Source: Los Angeles Times
8/13/2011
An article examining the proposed sale of the music label, EMI Group, points out that with record labels' power diminished in the music industry, antitrust officials might not be inclined to block a sale of EMI to one of the three other major labels.
Professor Mark Lemley is quoted:
In a different era, a merger between any of those companies [Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and EMI Group] would raise major red flags at the antitrust divisions [of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department] But things have changed. There are new sources of competition in the digital environment, and the dominance of the four majors has been reduced.
The ability to set prices is a classic consideration. But, increasingly, regulators have voiced concern about the power to stifle technological innovation. The danger is that firms with too much influence can squash start-up companies that innovate.
more
Source: IPWatchdog
8/11/2011
In its recent report entitled “
The Evolving IP Marketplace,” the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) advances a far-reaching regulatory approach (Proposal) whose likely effect would be to distort the operation of the intellectual property (IP) marketplace in ways that will hamper the innovation and commercialization of new technologies.
Stripped of the technicalities, the FTC Proposal would so reduce the costs of infringement by downstream users that the rate of infringement would unduly increase, as potential infringers find it in their interest to abandon the voluntary market in favor of a more attractive system of judicial pricing. … The adverse effects of this new trend will do more than reduce the incentives for innovation; it will upset the current set of well-functioning private coordination activities in the IP marketplace that are needed to accomplish the commercialization of new technologies. Such a trend would seriously undermine capital formation, job growth, competition, and the consumer welfare the FTC seeks to promote.
Richard Epstein is the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Law and Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.
F. Scott Kieff is a professor at George Washington Law School and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he directs the Project on Commercializing Innovation.
Daniel Spulber is the Elinor Hobbs Distinguished Professor of International Business and Professor of Management Strategy at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.
more
Source: The Wall Street Journal
8/11/2011
Article examines the stock market volatility of the end of July 2011.
Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University, said uncertainty is its own self-fulfilling prophecy. "If everybody puts off investing in new goods you get a short, sharp recession," Professor Bloom said.
more
Source: Investment News
8/10/2011
An interview with Stanford University professor of economics
Nicholas Bloom helps to put the volatility of the stock market from late July 2011 into perspective. Professor Bloom noted that, “stock market volatility is now so high that it's reached the level that occurred right after 9/11, a period of incredible political and economic uncertainty.”
more
Source: Sacramento Bee
8/9/2011
In an op-ed piece for the Sacramento Bee, Professor Mark Lemley stresses that innovation is a result of fringe competition in the marketplace. In “Viewpoints: If AT&T marries T-Mobile, all of us will lose” he states, “AT&T's proposed merger with T- Mobile, however, has the potential to fundamentally alter the wireless marketplace in a way that threatens innovation.”
Professor Lemley goes on to say:
We need innovation in our applications, devices and platforms. The history of innovation – not just in the telecommunications industry but more generally – suggests that it is competition, not market dominance, that's going to drive that new innovation.
And he concludes the piece with:
Regulation is certainly not the best option. We would be better off with competition in the wireless market and the innovation it fosters. But if we allow AT&T to buy out the competition, regulation is our only other choice.
more
Source: Green Faucet
8/9/2011
Nicholas Bloom, Associate Professor of Economics at Stanford University, is quoted in this piece that discusses the volatility of the U.S. and E.U. stock markets at the end of July 2011.
"The U.S. and European debt crisis of the last week have generated massive economic uncertainty,"
writes Nicholas Bloom. "One measure of the economic uncertainty – the VIX index of stock-market volatility – has jumped to levels not seen since the crash of 2008."
Professor Bloom goes on to note:
I have studied 16 previous uncertainty shocks – events like 9/11, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Assassination of JFK – and the only certain thing about these is they lead to large short-run recessions (
Bloom, 2009).
more
Source: Defining Ideas
8/9/2011
Richard A. Epstein, Professor of Law at New York University Law School and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago, discusses Standard & Poor’s recent credit rating downgrade for the United States. Here are a few quotes from this piece:
The clear lesson to the S&P folks is that entitlement spending, which was immunized from the debt ceiling compromise, remains on autopilot.
It takes zero federal dollars (but real political will) to remove obstacles to trade, which will stimulate both imports and exports and could lead to real growth that might put a dent in the deficit.
more
Source: MIT Technology Review
8/9/2011
At the computer security conference Black Hat in early August,
Alessandro Acquisti, an associate professor of information technology and public policy at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, showed how a photograph of a person can be used to find his or her date of birth, social security number, and other information by using facial recognition technology to match the image to a profile on Facebook and other websites. Acquisti acknowledges the privacy implications of this work, but he warns that the biggest problem could be the inaccuracy of this and other data-mining techniques.
"We tend to make strong extrapolations about weak data," says Acquisti. "It's impossible to fight that, because it's in our nature."
Acquisti and Sumner [Chris Sumner, cofounder of the Online Privacy Foundation] say that new government policies may be needed to protect individuals from excessive data mining and from the misuse of their information. This could involve setting standards of accuracy for organizations to abide by. "The defining question of our time," Acquisti says, "is how do we, as a society, deal with big data?"
more
Source: Harvard Business Review
8/8/2011
Daron Acemoglu, Professor of Economics at MIT, recently shared his thoughts on using innovation to increase the nation’s growth rate as a means to reign in the government deficit. Here are a few excerpts from his post:
We should not take our eye off the really important ball: economic growth and the innovation process that underpins it.
Though the U.S. economy has tremendous innovative capacity, even in the depths of the current recession, this means neither that policies to encourage high-value innovation are not possible nor that we should ignore the danger of significantly damaging this capacity.
Read the full post by Professor Acemoglu: “The Real Solution is Growth.”
more
Source: Nextgov
8/3/2011
“We need to train a new generation of kids to understand how code works and how they can fix it so that they can defend the United States from other people in other countries who may be seeing this [same activity] as a way to gauge warfare against us," said
Andrea M. Matwyshyn, a legal studies and business ethics professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.
[In the federal government] "there will be a need to create incentives to get them [kids] interested in the positive social impact that they may have by devoting themselves to the greater good of the country," Matwyshyn said.
"I think part of the goal of the Meet the Feds panel is to put a face on the people who are responsible for information security enforcement for the criminal end of things," Matwyshyn said.
more
Source: The Wall Street Journal
8/1/2011
Article looks at a study by Professor
Alessandro Acquisti, Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, that shows the power of facial-recognition technology when combined with publicly available personal data. Professor Acquisti said the research "suggests that the identity of about one-third of subjects walking by the campus building may be inferred in a few seconds combining social-network data, cloud computing and an inexpensive webcam."
Drawing from knowledge of the Social Security numbering system used in a previous experiment, Professor Acquisti was able to predict the first five digits of the subject's nine-digit Social Security numbers 27% of the time, with just four attempts. "The chain of inferences comes from one single piece of anonymous information—somebody's face."
Paul Ohm, University of Colorado Law School, who has read Professor Acquisti's paper, said it shows how easy it is becoming to "re-identify" people from bits of supposedly anonymous information. "This paper really establishes that re-identification is much easier than experts think it's going to be," he said.
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Source: Forbes
7/8/2011
In preparation for going public, Zynga’s taking proactive measures to improve how it deals with privacy issues. The company is garnering praise then for its newest game: PrivacyVille, which allows Zyngites to wander through a virtual town and find out about Zynga’s privacy policies.
Reviewing the privacy ‘game,’ privacy guru Lorrie Faith Cranor of Carnegie Mellon expressed disappointment, calling it a “good idea but not well-executed.”
more
Source: PBS Newshour
7/6/2011
Newshour correspondent Judy Woodruff asks, “Why aren't employers hiring more people?”
Asking Professor Richard Epstein this question, he blames the lack of hiring with President Obama and his "pro labor union polices." With these, Epstein charges that the president "badger(s) the very employers who can drive those unemployment numbers down." Until Mr. Obama abandons or moderates his policies, Epstein contends, "the near-jobless recovery will continue apace."
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Source: Ars Technica
7/4/2011
Article examines legalities of online music services such as Amazon’s “cloud music,” Google’s “music beta,” and Apple’s iTunes.
"There's no underlying policy logic," James Grimmelmann of New York Law School tells Ars. "It's just courts distinguishing precedents they don't want to agree with."
Grimmelmann points to one key difference between Google and Amazon: Amazon offers users the option to purchase music and put it directly into their lockers. "Amazon took the position that they didn't require additional permissions under their existing licenses" to offer this feature, he said. He isn't sure what legal theory Amazon uses to justify doing this, but "whatever it is, I'm confident their lawyers think it's fine."
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Source: Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine
6/1/2011
"Technology improves so quickly, by the time consumers understand one issue, there's a new one to worry about,” says Associate Professor Alessandro Acquisti, Carnegie Mellon University in an article that examines the new legislation in Congress that aims to limit what Internet marketers can find out about you.
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Source: The Epoch Times
5/19/2011
Article provides an overview of cybersecurity strategies being developed by the Obama Administration and U.S. Department of Defense.
“This is the start of a very large conversation,” said Andrea Matwyshyn, Assistant Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. According to Matwyshyn, the next step will need to include discussion with businesses and establishing required standards on cybersecurity. In particular, it will need to change a culture of secrecy and protecting brand image, to one of openness regarding network breaches.
Matwyshyn goes on to say that as the United States rolls out the new cybersecurity strategies, it will need to address the gaps in the business sector, since “security is only as strong as the weakest link.”
Part of the issue is that cyber-attacks often strike both public and private enterprises, and key government services and the military still rely on public infrastructures. Thus, in cyberspace, “The definition of what it means to be at war is clearly ambiguous in this situation, as well as who is a government target.”
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Source: Investment News
5/8/2011
“There is undoubtedly a lot of excitement about social media. As always in [venture capital], a few groups will generate most of the returns from these investments,” Josh Lerner, Jacob H. Schiff professor of investment banking at the Harvard Business School, wrote in an e-mail. He continued, “This has been a pattern from the industry's very beginning. VC is a very unfair game.”
“There has undoubtedly been a decline in VC fundraising, and there will be exiting groups,” Professor Lerner wrote. “This is consistent with the long-run pattern, where every 10 [to] 15 years, there is a cleansing of the industry.”
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Source: The Washington Post
5/8/2011
Article discusses upcoming hearing to question Apple and Google’s location-tracking practices.
Professor Joseph Turow, University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, commented: “There are terrific things about mobility. There’s a lot of good stuff that can come out of this.” Referring to the potential impact of users’ private data (where they go, who their friends are, what they purchase), Professor Turow states, “Executives in advertising don’t understand what’s going on. I really do believe that we need ground level protections. And certain things should be prohibited.”
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Source: The Deal Magazine
5/6/2011
"We are long overdue for a Supreme Court merger opinion," says Stephen Calkins, a law professor at Wayne State University. "Antitrust merger law currently consists of a mix of lower court opinions and the antitrust agencies' guidelines, all written in the shadow of dated but never officially rejected or modified Supreme Court opinions. That is obviously not the optimal situation."
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Source: Financial Times
5/2/2011
TiVo settled a contentious patent dispute with Dish Network and EchoStar Corporation over digital recording technology on Monday, ending one of the longest-running legal battles in the media sector.
Because the settlement came on the heels of that complex ruling, the resolution of the case was not necessarily a good thing for patent law, said Richard Epstein, Professor of Law at New York University Law School and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. “The slow and dilatory nature of the patent protection is yet another gratuitous weakening of the patent system,” he said. “Not a good show in my view.”
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Source: ABA Journal
5/1/2011
Article takes an in-depth look at the legal ‘No Man’s Land’ in which the Savory Jazz Collection and many other works are now frozen. Because of significant changes to copyright law in 1976 and 1998, many works that would have otherwise come into the public domain can now only be used with the copyright owners’ explicit permission.
Pamela Samuelson, a director of the Center for Law & Technology at the University of California at Berkeley:
The approach Congress was taking before was if you can’t find the author after a diligent search, you can freely use the work; and if the author shows up, you may need to stop using the work and/or pay a reasonable license fee.
One aspect of the Google Books settlement provides another model Congress might be willing to consider: allowing use of works that may be orphaned as long as the user pays for the use, with some of the funds used to search for the rights owner. This borrows a little from the Google Books model, but isn’t limited to just one company. When a work is an orphan it should be available for everyone to use.
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Source: The Seattle Times
4/30/2011
Article explains the growing demand on wireless spectrum.
"You throw a pebble in a pond, and it creates these waves that go out," said Dale Hatfield. "It's the same thing. When you move electric current in a wire, it creates a wave."
"As you go to higher frequencies, the radio waves get more and more like light waves and can't get through buildings. They can't even get through a leaf on a tree if you go too high."
Dale Hatfield is the Executive Director of the Silicon Flatirons Center, Adjunct Professor in the Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program at the University of Colorado, and former head of the office of engineering and technology at the FCC.
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Source: Bloomberg
4/29/2011
“It may be difficult for the FTC to build a case against Google’s search business," said James Grimmelmann, an associate professor of law at New York Law School who specializes in Internet law.
Google has taken the market share it has ‘because their search results are better,’ he said in an interview. Still, federal investigators may find violations in how Google has tried to use its clout to gain an upper hand in new markets, he said. "They’re doing stuff to try to take control of markets’ that may be fodder for an FTC antitrust lawsuit," he said.
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Source: Wired
4/26/2011
“Having a smaller number of high-bandwidth relationships can be good for you,” says Marshall Van Alstyne, Associate Professor in the area of information economics at Boston University. Professor Van Alstyne and colleague Sinan Aral tested the relative advantages of a few strong connections with people.
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Source: Boston Herald
4/26/2011
Article reports federal agents raided the home of a Buffalo, N.Y., man whose unsecured wireless Internet connection was being used by someone else to download child pornography.
“Anybody who leaves their networks open is leaving themselves open,” said John Palfrey, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. “This kind of story suggests it’s best practice to lock down your Wi-Fi.”
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Source: Bloomberg
4/21/2011
Timothy Wu, an information industries scholar hired by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, said in his first interview since joining the regulator that dominant Internet companies should be barred from monopolizing more than one market.
“We just take it for granted the Internet is always going to be vibrant, always going to be moving,” Wu, who joined the FTC in February, said in an April 18 interview. “It may require some oversight and also may require that the government itself doesn’t become the guarantor of monopoly.”
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Source: The Wall Street Journal
4/19/2011
The Wall Street Journal asks Jonathan Levin, recent recipient of the Bates Clark Economist Award, to describe his approach to economics. Below is a part of his response.
I’m interested in how you can use economic theory to better understand different markets. How you can bring the theory together with empirical evidence from different settings to try to understand what makes markets work efficiently or inefficiently and how you can design rules for markets to make them work better.
Jonathan Levin is Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Stanford University.
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Source: Bloomberg
4/15/2011
“A good chunk of my work has been trying to take modern economic theory that was developed in an abstract way and think about how you could make it really practical,” Jonathan Levin said.
“It’s incredibly exciting,” said Levin of winning the award, adding that he found out about it via a phone call from the association while he was walking around Stanford’s campus.
Jonathan Levin is Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Stanford University.
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Source: ABA Journal
4/12/2011
Article summarizes Professor Lawrence Lessig’s keynote speech at the ABA Techshow 2011.
“Our first instinct is to invoke the law quite forcefully,” Lessig says, citing the reaction of regulators to slap music pirates—most often children and teens—with hard-line copyright infringement suits rather than accept that file sharing is the reality of the Net. “The right instinct would be to modify the law and the market to reflect the new ways innovation and technology are being used, while also making sure artists are getting paid.”
“The law needs to deregulate a certain area of culture in order to effectively regulate where it should properly be applied.”
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Source: The Chronicle Review
3/20/2011
Marc Perry interviews Tim Wu and examines his professional path in hopes of answering the question: what might change now that Tim Wu has some power to directly shape government policy?
Shortly before Wu joined the FTC, he said his goal in joining it was to help "reinvigorate the role of a public counterforce to private power. I would hope to instigate or encourage a look at industries I'm particularly familiar with, like the information industries, and see what it would mean to have meaningful oversight over those."
Closing quote:
We may look back at this era, the last 15, 20 years, as that early utopian, exciting era of the open Internet. I've been happy to be alive during the Internet revolution. And I hope I will not live to see its death.
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Source: Motherboard
3/14/2011
In this video interview Tim Wu argues that we (human beings) are not free. Here are select quotes:
Human will is involved. Human will fears decay. And so it turns its powers into trying to make things feel better or improve. That’s why technology is always improving because it’s a product of human will.
The greatest danger comes from the union of transportation and content. When the people who move stuff are also the people who own the content, you have an inherent conflict of interest. And you have an inherent possibility for censorship.
Information is invisible so sometimes it seems less important than food. But it is what ultimately shapes the tenor of an era. It ultimately shapes how we get food, prevent war, it underlies everything. Free speech, censorship, control are some of the most important things about being human. And we at some level are fundamentally tool-using creatures. Today our tools are phones, laptops, internet apps. And if we don’t control those, we are not free.
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Source: The New York Times
3/5/2011
Following the Supreme Court ruling that the First Amendment protects anti-gay protests at military funerals, Professor Richard Epstein, University of Chicago Law School, joined The New York Times “Room for Debate” segment to put in his thoughts on “Keeping the Haters at Bay.” Here are a few quotes from his essay:
“…the First Amendment wins, but only by a hair.”
“Ordinary people have a right to be deeply uneasy with the outcome in Snyder v. Phelps, for it is almost obscene that the members of the Westboro Baptist Church think that their path to salvation lies in ruining the lives of others in the moment of their greatest grief. And I am grateful to Justice Alito for writing a dissent so that the public understands that there are two sides to this question.”
“It seems odd therefore to say that conduct that is widely recognized as unlawful should somehow be necessarily protected under the banner of freedom of speech.”
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Source: New York Times
2/28/2011
Article looks at change in Microsoft’s moonlighting policy with its employees in order to encourage development of apps for its new mobile platform, Windows 7.
Microsoft’s new rules fit into the broader rethinking of how large companies manage research, said Josh Lerner, a professor of investment banking at Harvard Business School. “Microsoft is not just rewarding people for what they do in their spare time,” he said, but is also “harnessing that energy to the company’s ends” to catch up in the mobile market. “It’s symptomatic of a larger transformation,” he said, as companies unlock more entrepreneurial activity, granting incentives and rewards to researchers in the hope they will stay put instead of moving to other companies.
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Source: Scientific American
2/24/2011
This article, written by
Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, stresses that a fear of cyberattacks should not lead us to destroy what makes the Internet special. Below are a few excerpts from his article:
Attacks on Internet sites and infrastructure, and the compromise of secure information, pose a particularly tricky problem because it is usually impossible to trace an attack back to its instigator. This “attribution problem” is so troublesome that some law-enforcement experts have called for a wholesale reworking of Internet architecture and protocols, such that every packet of data is engraved with the identity of its source. Unfortunately, such a reworking would also threaten what makes the Internet special, both technologically and socially.
The Internet works thanks to loose but trusted connections among its many constituent parts, with easy entry and exit for new Internet service providers or new forms of expanding access.
We rightly fear our networks and devices being attacked—but we should not let this fear cause us to destroy what makes the Internet special. We have to become more involved and more subtle—and soon.
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Source: The Economist
2/23/2011
"The Economist" held an open debate on Internet democracy, asserting that the internet is not inherently a force for democracy. Law professor John Palfrey and Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University argued against the motion. He asserts that, “The internet is inherently a force for democracy. That will not necessarily always be true, but it is the case today, given its present architecture and the way that people use the network.”
In Professor Palfrey’s opening remarks, he states:
The optimistic premise is that we can bend the arc of the internet towards democracy. It is not the technology itself, but the way we use it and build it, that matters. The way that skilful activists are using the internet and digital media today, especially mobile technologies, favours those who are seeking to express themselves and to organise their peers, not those who are seeking to close down debate and to prevent crowds from gathering in the streets.
The rebuttal phase of the debate included these thoughts from Professor Palfrey:
The internet, in its relatively open form, can be an effective tool for those who are advancing democracy in states around the world. As a matter of statecraft, it is not just sensible but good policy to work to keep the internet open and free. That must, by the way, be true in the context of WikiLeaks (when it is our own State Department's ox that is being gored) as well as in the context of the uprisings in Egypt or in Vietnam, China and Iran.
Professor Palfrey’s closing statements include:
Those who use the internet, whether in a time of crisis or in a time of peace and stability, need to get much smarter about the risks that they are running through their use of these media. … Those who blog, tweet and post to Facebook may well be subject to retaliation—and surely will be subject to surveillance. This is a wake-up call: we need to focus not just on access to technology, but also on skills, particularly among those who are at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum, in every culture.
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Source: The Wall Street Journal
2/12/2011
Social media, most notably Facebook and Twitter, have featured prominently in recent years as tools of the opposition in insurrections against entrenched regimes, accustomed to controlling what their citizens know through an iron-tight grip on their country's newspapers and television.
"Technology has been a supportive tool and an amplifier of revolutions for some time," said John Palfrey, a co-director of Harvard University's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. But the difference with social media is that "they are globally connective, not just in Cairo, but with the region and the world. There is a bridge quality to mainstream media from social media that leads to greater transparency on the ground, and greater connectivity globally.”
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Source: Chicago Tribune
2/11/2011
An Evanston dad posted a video clip on YouTube to show the school district superintendent’s behavior. The School District 65 cited copyright infringement and successfully asked YouTube to remove the original clip.
Randal Picker, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said that the law regarding the federal government shows that "the basic premise is that the government doesn't get copyrights of their own works."
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Source: Politico
2/11/2011
Article examines the the legal and political considerations of a potential “Section 2” antitrust case against Google.
“The administration is holding up Google as a huge American success story,” said Andrew Gavil, an antitrust expert at Howard University School of Law. “That raises an already very high bar.” Gavil goes on to say, “The standard under Section 2 is you gotta be big and you gotta be bad. Being big alone is not enough.” (Google has provided funding to support Gavil’s research.)
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Source: Los Angeles Times
2/11/2011
The article discusses a ‘do not track’ privacy bill introduced in Congress.
"It really is a strong pro-consumer bill," said
Ryan Calo, director of the Consumer Privacy Project at Stanford Law School, who noted that the bill's teeth included provisions that would allow state prosecutors to go after privacy violators if the FTC didn't have time or resources.
Still, Calo noted that the bill was not a panacea for preserving online privacy.
For one thing, he said, it would apply only to consumers who elect not to be tracked — a process called opting out. Anyone who did not opt out, for instance because they did not know how or know that they could, would not be protected.
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Source: Chicago Tribune
2/10/2011
Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy named Yale University professor and environmental expert Daniel C. Esty on Thursday to lead the new state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.
Esty told reporters that it is "an honor to be asked to serve in this new role, to work with the governor on the consolidation that he has announced, and to ensure that the people of Connecticut get lower-cost energy, a greater energy efficiency and really become leaders in the push toward a clean energy future.''
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Source: Financial Times
2/9/2011
Article by Professor Richard Epstein, University of Chicago Law School, examines the Federal Communications Commission approval of the acquisition of NBC by the Comcast Corporation.
A few quotes from Professor Epstein’s article:
“But the real question goes not to the merger’s business acumen, but to its antitrust pedigree. Critics fear that Comcast could remove desirable channels or jack up prices. But no company has that kind of market power in a dynamic marketplace. A decade ago, critics prophesised that the AOL/Time Warner merger would dominate information markets. We know how that turned out.”
“Second, it may make good sense for Comcast and NBC to accept the conditions of the deal. But it makes little sense for the government to impose them. Make no mistake about it, this consent decree turns the Department of Justice into the monitor of a quasi-public utility regime dedicated to some version of net neutrality.”
“Like the European Union, the DoJ has become more proactive in attempted monopolization cases. Those priors matter in treating discrete cases. With Comcast/NBC, it led to a set of remedies best described as too much, too soon.”
more
Source: The Hill
2/9/2011
Article reports that Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu will join the Federal Trade Commission as senior adviser for consumer protection and competition issues affecting the Internet and mobile markets.
Tim Wu:
The Internet platform has given rise to new and hard problems of privacy, data retention, deceptive advertising, billing practices, standard-setting and vertical foreclosure just to name a few. The FTC is the agency at the front line of these issues, which have such obvious effects on how we live our lives.
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Source: The Washington Post
2/8/2011
“I think there are critical periods in industry formation where there is a strong need for a public voice” [Tim] Wu said in a statement. "The Internet platform has given rise to new and hard problems of privacy, data retention, deceptive advertising, billing practices, standard-setting and vertical foreclosure just to name a few.”
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Source: Indus Business Journal
2/7/2011
Stanford University economist Nick Bloom and his colleagues recently released a report that used India as a testing ground to examine the differences in the productivity of companies in the same industries or countries. This report provides evidence that a core set of management best practices does increase productivity and profits.
“A natural explanation for these productivity differences lies in variations in management practices,” said Professor Bloom who teaches in the global management curriculum at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “The problem, however, has been proving it.”
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Source: Sidney Morning Herald
2/4/2011
In the wake of the Egyptian government shutting down the Internet to its citizens, an Internet “kill switch” is discussed.
Columbia Law School Professor Tim Wu: "[The internet is] probably going to go – unless something happens – towards a future more like other media, which is more closed and more controlled unless there is an uprising," he said when asked about the future of the internet in an interview with the Sidney Morning Herald. "And I think Egypt, I think the kill switch Act [and] I think some of the Australian proposals are going all in that direction." There was a tendency, Wu said, for media to start open and then become closed. "Early stages of them are often very utopian, open, competitive - they [then] tend to evolve towards a more monopolised and sometimes government-controlled state and I believe the internet is going in that direction.”
Video of interview is available.
more
Source: PC World
2/4/2011
"What comes after net neutrality is, unfortunately, a little bit more net neutrality,” said Christopher Yoo, a communications and law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, at a telecom policy conference.
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Source: The Harvard Crimson
2/3/2011
The article looks at Professor John Palfrey’s call to Facebook and Twitter to develop and abide by a code of conduct that prioritizes user rights in the face of government crack downs. It outlines that while websites are bound to follow local law in the countries in which their users reside, local statutes sometimes conflict with the core values of the sites.
Palfrey states, “For example, if the Egyptian government petitioned Facebook to release names of all citizens who organized protests on the site, Facebook would be obligated under local law to comply.” John Palfrey is Professor of Law and Co-Director of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
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Source: Reuters
2/2/2011
Article outlines U.S. lawmakers plans to reform the patent system in efforts to eliminate huge damage awards. This is an issue ripe for legislation after recent court decisions challenged calculation methods.
"Those court decisions didn't tell us how to calculate damages. They told us how not to calculate damages," said Mark Lemley, who teaches law at Stanford University.
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Source: Washington Post
2/2/2011
In an article reporting that Egypt had restored Internet access on Wednesday, after a one-week blackout for Web and cell phone users to try to stem civil unrest. “One of big questions is does it work for a government to shut off the network entirely? I think the answer is no," said John Palfrey, Professor of Law and Co-Director of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
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Source: The Washington Post
2/2/2011
The article compares Facebook’s actions against those of Twitter and Google. It states that Facebook has not engaged in a role they were placed in by the Egyptian insurrectionists. It was via Facebook that Egyptians shared outrage over the killing of a prominent activist –which is thought to have led to the protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. By comparison, the article points out that Google and Twitter actively helped opposition leaders communicate after the Egyptian government shut down Internet access.
"The good news for Twitter and Facebook is how important they are, and one should congratulate them for being critical tools," said John Palfrey, Professor of Law and Co-Director of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "But also, there is an obligation that comes with that level of adoption."
more
Source: Daily News
1/31/2011
In this op-ed about the Egyptian government blocking Internet access, John Palfrey, Professor of Law and Co-Director of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, examines the role social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, can play in putting power in the hands of individuals. Additionally, he discusses the Global Network Initiative: a collaborative effort with companies such as Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google, and civil society organizations to establish a set of principles for responding to government pressure to use or block the Internet in ways that may conflict with human rights of freedom of expression and privacy.
A few quotes from Professor Palfrey’s op-ed:
“But equally important over the long term is the positive responsibility of powerful social networking companies like Twitter and Facebook, whose choices today and tomorrow will prove just as crucial in shaping global rights to free assembly.”
“This is part of a very troubling trend: As people, especially young people, get ever savvier in harnessing new technologies, threatened governments get more and more sophisticated at using the Internet for surveillance, censorship and hacking.”
“Can anything be done to stop such blanket repression, which in today's interconnected world comes perilously close to threatening the right to free expression? … The answer: yes. More can be done - and must be done. The social networking companies themselves, already such vital tools for organizing, must take strong steps to put more power in the hands of individuals and less in the hands of regimes.”
“If the market does not work and companies do not come together voluntarily, we will need other mechanisms to ensure that platforms like Twitter and Facebook and many mobile digital tools - and those that will inevitably come after them - will stay live in times of crisis.”
“With great success in terms of global adoption comes great responsibility for companies like Twitter and Facebook.”
more
Source: The Wall Street Journal: Digits
1/31/2011
The article looks at the Internet and wireless network black-out that occurred in Egypt recently, and the efforts Google took to open a line of communication. A complete shutdown can render tools that facilitate text messaging anywhere from mobile signals and software programs that allows users to access text messaging, Twitter and the Web useless.
Jonathan Zittrain, a Professor of Law and Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, said most of the tools used to get around Internet firewalls or throttling “don’t assume the plug would be pulled.” He added that, “The toolbox for responding to a complete denial is pretty bare.”
more
Source: Silicon Valley
1/27/2011
Services such as Twitter and Facebook are "playing an increasingly large role in almost any mass protest around the world," said John Palfrey. "We will see more of this." Palfrey went on to say, “Egypt is far from alone in seeing the Internet and other new technology as threats. The number of countries censoring or blocking at least some Internet content has increased from two about 10 years ago to three dozen now.”
Palfrey added, “The Obama administration has taken a more aggressive stance against Internet censorship than previous administrations.”
John Palfrey is Professor of Law and Co-Director of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
more
Source: NPR: Morning Edition
1/18/2011
In a story relating Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords’ improving medical condition, Professor Anita Allen of the University of Pennsylvania Law School discussed current privacy laws. Allen contends that the public should be grateful for the bits of information that have been released because under current privacy laws, Giffords family could have said nothing. And frankly, she says, under similar circumstances, that's what a lot of us would want.
"It's a little embarrassing, a little awkward, a little sensitive to have every aspect of one's self revealed to other people when one is in pain, when one doesn't look one's best, sound one's best." Allen says. Maybe Giffords deserves a little private space, Allen suggests — room to heal without all the gory details known to everyone.
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Source: The Register
1/14/2011
Sony brought a case to the U.S. District Court claiming that by publishing the means to bypass the protection measures built into the gaming console, a group of hackers violated provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Sony also claims they violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act “by transmitting in interstate and foreign commerce a communication containing a threat to obtain information from a protected computer without authorization.”
“You bought the computer,” George Washington School of Law professor Orin Kerr wrote on The Volokh Conspiracy blog. “You own it. You can sell it. You can light it on fire. You can bring it to the ocean, put it on a life raft, and push it out to sea. But if you dare do anything that violates the fine print of the license that the manufacturer is trying to impose, then you're guilty of trespassing onto your own property. And it's not just a civil wrong, it's a crime.”
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Source: EU Bankers
1/11/2011
Building rapid and sustained economic growth within a country sometimes means replacing outdated technologies, ideas and companies, said Daron Acemoglu, professor of applied economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The willingness of a country to allow new entrepreneurs and innovations to take the place of old companies and technologies is one factor that separates wealthy countries from poor ones, according to Dr. Acemoglu. Speaking on Dec. 15 at Georgia State University, Dr. Acemoglu said that this process of "creative destruction" where innovators replace the "losers" is crucial to a growing economy.
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Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazzette
12/2/2010
A privacy report released Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission proposes the creation of a "Do Not Track" tool for the Internet, which would enable people to prevent marketers from tracking their Web browsing.
Professor Lorrie Faith Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University, specializes in computer science and public policy. She was among the first experts to testify at one of the FTC's roundtables in Washington, D.C., a year ago, and her input is cited several times in the report.
"In general, it's a good idea," she said of the "Do Not Track" option. "From the research we've done at Carnegie Mellon, we know that a lot of Internet users don't like the idea of being tracked online and want an easy way to say 'I don't want that.' But it needs to be easy and effective. ... And consumers want to be able to say 'no' to tracking, but sometimes they want to say 'yes."
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Source: The New York Times
11/14/2010
In a New York Times interview, Professor Tim Wu of Columbia Law School tells about the first time he used the term, "net neutrality": "I was working in Silicon Valley in the early 2000s for a company that sold technologies designed to filter and block areas of the Internet. Something about it didn’t sit well with me. So I wrote a paper in 2002 for a conference that explained my thoughts on this. Originally, the phrase I was promoting was “broadband discrimination,” and I also said “network neutrality,” to capture the concept, which ended up becoming the default."
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Source: Wall Street Journal
11/13/2010
In an article written by Tim Wu, the Columbia Law School Professor states: "Market power is rarely seized so much as it is surrendered up, and that surrender is born less of a deliberate decision than of going with the flow."
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Source: Reuters
10/27/2010
Professor Joseph Turow, University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, said the data collection showed that someone else could scrape up the same information for malicious reasons. "I think that this will be seen as another one of the steps along the way that expose the tenuousness of security," he said. "I never thought that this was anything more than Google screwing up but the implications are pretty heavy."
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Source: The New York Times
10/7/2010
In an article noting a recent meeting between Microsoft's chief executive, Steve Ballmer, and Adobe's chief executive, Shantanu Narayen, speculation was discussed about a possible merger.
Randal C. Picker, a professor of law of the University of Chicago, said in a telephone interview that the technology landscape was drastically different now and that an acquisition or partnership of this nature would likely not be halted. “There’s not a question that the atmospherics of Microsoft are much more different that they were a decade ago,” he said. “I think you could imagine Microsoft being a more aggressive purchaser in a world where they are no longer an 800-pound gorilla.”
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Source: Forbes
10/7/2010
Discussing Skype's free internet calling and its threat to the phone companies' lucrative business, Professor Tim Wu of Columbia University Law School states: "If there were no net neutrality, Skype would have already been suppressed."
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Source: The New York Times
10/1/2010
John Palfrey participated in a debate about Cyberbullying and a Student's Suicide.
"What is different today is that the public spaces in which young people interact have expanded. Instead of interacting only in physical public spaces -- schoolyards, parks, malls -- much of the social life of young people takes place in a converged space that links the online and the offline."
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Source: The Los Angeles Times
9/25/2010
An article speculating about the reasons behind Paul Allen's infringement lawsuit. "This is a patent troll-style lawsuit," Mark A. Lemley, a patent law expert at Stanford law school, told me. And it is likely to have the same effect as conventional patent troll lawsuits: It will cost the defendants millions. "They'll certainly have to litigate for a while," Lemley said, predicting that it will take a year and a half of lawyer fees even to get to the point where the defendants can ask a court to throw the case out.
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Source: The New York Times
9/23/2010
Jonathan Zittrain shared his expertise in this debate about The Buried Threats in That Tweet.
"Once alerted to Tuesday's virus problem, Twitter could set up an automated system to look for manifestations of dangerous code in a tweet and squelch it. Should we sleep better or worse with the thought that the same technique could be applied to another kind of clear and present danger: falsehoods designed to wreck a business, ruin a reputation, or incite a panic?"
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Source: The New York Times
9/22/2010
Professor Edward Felten shared his expertise in this debate about The Buried Threats in That Tweet.
"Like an airplane pilot who must be able to land safely even if the weather is hostile and the aircraft is flawed, the engineers at social network companies must find a way to deliver security in spite of the special challenges they face."
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Source: Wall Street Journal "Real Time Economics"
9/16/2010
Highlights Professor Randal Picker's article, The Razors-and-Blades Myth(s) which is about the practice of investing in an installed base with cheap prices for products like razors and then making profit on replaceable parts like blades. ”The actual facts of the dawn of the disposable razor blades market are quite confounding. ... For whatever it is worth, the firm understood to have invented razors-and-blades as a business strategy did not play that strategy at the point that it was best situated to do so."
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Source: Bloomberg Businessweek
9/8/2010
An article noting the litigation over the appointment of Mark Hurd as co-president of Oracle. Hurd was formerly Chief Executive Oficer with Hewlitt-Packard Co. The theory that trade secrets will inevitably be disclosed “won’t work in California as a reason to prevent someone from taking a job,” said Mark Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School who specializes in intellectual property. “Neither will California courts enforce a noncompete agreement. HP will have to show real evidence that Mark Hurd is about to use its secrets at Oracle.”
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Source: CBS News
9/6/2010
Regarding Craigslist recent removal of ads for its controversial adult services section, Professor John Palfrey, Harvard University Law School said the move from Craigslist was still a victory because it moved the ads off a highly visible location."Will people be able to find these ads online? The answer is almost certainly," he said. "Will they be able to find these on legitimate sites? I think the answer is probably not."
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Source: PC Pro
9/6/2010
Google defends its search algorithms and ranking of web sites in search results, and highlights: New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann concluded: "I want Google to be able to rank them poorly."
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Source: Wall Street Journal
9/5/2010
Regarding Craigslist recent removal of ads for its controversial adult services section, Professor Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard University School of Law, says, Craigslist has been caught for years in a murky legal fight that centers on how much responsibility the company bears for its ads. "Prosecutors can argue Craigslist is an "intermediary" to the crime of prostitution, but such cases are hard to prove." He goes on to say, prosecutors must essentially prove that Craigslist knew an ad was a solicitation for prostitution; ads on Craigslist are typically worded more vaguely.
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Source: San Francisco Chronicle
9/5/2010
Regarding Craigslist recent removal of ads for its controversial adult services section, Professor Brian Carver, University of California at Berkeley, says that could have a chilling effect on online expression. "If you impose liability on Craigslist, YouTube and Facebook for anything their users do, then they're not going to take chances," he said. "It would likely result in the takedown of what might otherwise be perfectly legitimate free expression."
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Source: The Wall Street Journal
9/3/2010
A court may explore the enforceability of End User License Agreements (EULAs). Regarding this case, Professor Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard University School of Law, says "EULAs are, for most companies, a shield not a sword. The reason you don't see tech companies dragged into court for their buggy software," Professor Zittrain says, "is that you need to prove actual physical harm," to overcome the liability limits of the standard EULA.
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Source: The Economist
9/2/2010
An article discussing the evolution of the internet quotes Professor Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard University School of Law. “The internet was able to develop quietly and organically for years before it became widely known,” writes Jonathan Zittrain, in his 2008 book, “The Future of the Internet—And How To Stop It”. Even more important, the internet is an open platform, rather than one built for a specific service, like the telephone network. Mr Zittrain calls it “generative”: people can tinker with it, creating new services and elbowing existing ones aside.
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Source: The Economist
9/2/2010
An article discussing the evolution of the internet quotes Professor Tim Wu of Columbia University. Their (proponents of net neutrality) nightmare is what Tim Wu calls “the Tony Soprano vision of networking”, alluding to a television series about a mafia family. If operators were allowed to charge for better service, they could extort protection money from every website. Those not willing to pay for their data to be transmitted quickly would be left to crawl in the slow lane.
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Source: Law360
8/24/2010
Combining a prolific academic career at Stanford Law School with a bustling practice at Durie Tangri LLP, Mark Lemley has earned a reputation among his colleagues as an encyclopedia of intellectual property law as well as a place on Law360's list of the 10 Most Admired Intellectual Property Attorneys.
Referring to case where Lemley represents T3 Technologies against IBM Corporation in an antitrust and IP law case, Lemley says:
I like the complexity of the interaction between these two already complex bodies of law. We want to make sure that we encourage innovation by encouraging intellectual property [protections], but at the same time we also want competition, not just because we think it gives us lower prices but also because sometimes competition ends up encouraging innovation.
Discussing teaching, Lemley says:
I never regretted the move to teaching, but I still wanted to stay connected to the world of practice," Lemley said. "I do think it's useful to think about the system as a whole, and it's easy if you're only participating in one part of that system to see that as the important bit and neglect the rest.
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Source: The New York Times
8/10/2010
Lawrence Lessig: “As much as anything else, the economic success of the Internet comes from its architecture. The architecture, and the competitive forces it assures, is the only interesting thing at stake in this battle over “network neutrality.””
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Source: The New York Times
8/10/2010
Jonathan Zittrain sums up his thoughts: “In a medium in which so many of the giants were yesterday’s scrappy upstarts — eBay, Google, even the Web itself — it would be a travesty to freeze out the next round of innovation from odd corners by deploying an impenetrable web of contracts and fees.”
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Source: The New York Times
8/10/2010
Tim Wu: "The greatest danger of the fast lane is that it completely changes competition on the net. The advantage goes not to the firm that's actually the best, but the one that makes the best deal with AT&T, Verizon, or Comcast."
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Source: The New York Times
8/10/2010
Edward Felten: "The question is not whether we want to keep this open, neutral Internet --- we do, or should --- but whether government rulemaking can give us the result we want."
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Source: The New York Times Magazine
8/6/2010
In an article that explores differential pricing through Amazon Prime, Joseph Turow, professor at the Univerity of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, is quoted: "The flow of data about us is so surreptitious and so complex that we won’t even know when price discrimination starts. We’ll just get different prices, different news, different entertainment."
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Source: CED Magazine
8/1/2010
One of the primary arguments offered by supporters of network neutrality is exemplified in remarks by Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor and one of the earliest voices in this debate. Based on his analysis of the future plans of broadband ISPs, Wu has consistently stated that these corporations will inevitably choose to use their control over the gateways to the Internet in a manner that squeezes more and more revenue from the content providers.
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Source: CED Magazine
8/1/2010
Christopher Yoo, Professor of Law and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, sums up the role of the FCC now and in the future in his written statement to Congress in 2008: “The vigor with which the FCC has pursued allegations of improper network management suggests that the regulatory structure may already be in place to ensure that consumers are both protected and able to enjoy the Internet’s tremendous promise in the future.”
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Source: The Seattle Times
8/1/2010
In an article about network neutrality, Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu has said that letting carriers choose favorites is "just too close to the Tony Soprano vision of networking: Use your position to make threats and extract payments. This is similar to the outlawed, but still common, 'payola' schemes in the radio world. If allowing network discrimination means being stuck with AT&T's long-term vision of the Internet," Wu concludes, "it won't be worth it."
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Source: NPR's "On the Media"
7/30/2010
“Here is an official of the United States government declaring that the activity by which you can use the phone however you like is legally protected. And that’s important.” Quote from Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain during a discussion of jailbreaking and the real-life implications of the DMCA exemption during NPR’s “On the Media.”
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Source: The Wall Street Journal's "Digits" blog
7/27/2010
Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain discussed the impact of documents on the war in Afghanistan by WikiLeaks.
"I think technology in general facilitates the flow of information from one place to the other. It’s pretty amazing that you have thousands of classified documents released at once, and the government seems implicitly aware that they can’t put the genie back in the bottle. The technology structure being used here is not very advanced; it’s very Web 1.0. The fact that it can be mirrored and remirrored makes a difference. But to actually get something out without being traced is still difficult."
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Source: The New York Times
7/26/2010
In the article, "Answers to Questions About Internet Privacy," Professor Paul Ohm of the University of Colorado School of Law responded to several questions from readers about safeguarding their online privacy. Here is one part of Professor Ohm’s response to a question about crafting legislation to provide discrimination protection.
"History has taught us that the best time to enact a privacy law is immediately after somebody suffers a sensational, newsworthy privacy harm. When someone leaked Judge Robert Bork’s video rental records, Congress enacted the Video Privacy Protection Act. When a stalker tracked down and killed the actress Rebecca Schaeffer using D.M.V. records, Congress passed the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act. I wonder if the story of Stacy Snyder — the would-be schoolteacher denied a teaching degree because of a MySpace photo — is sensational enough to encourage legislatures to act."
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Source: The New York Times
7/18/2010
Professor Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School was quoted in this article about a case of a partnership between a start-up and a big company gone bad.
“What you want is the business equivalent of no-fault divorce. You want the ability to experiment, fail and disengage, and move on, to keep the innovation process moving forward.”
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Source: Publishers Weekly
7/16/2010
Some publishers may think an exclusive right to publish a story in book form includes e-book rights, but they need to be careful. "Where there is a real ambiguity in the language, courts do put a thumb on the scale in favor of the author," says Paul Goldstein, a Stanford law professor who specializes in copyright. "It's risky because we're dealing with contracts that go back to a time well before anyone thought about this." Under the Copyright Act, a reproduction right permits "the right to make a literal copy," which could be electronic or print, says Goldstein. To alter a book and turn it into a movie, producers need to get a separate derivative right that deals with adaptations.
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Source: WBZTV.com
7/15/2010
Stanford law professor Mark Lemley says more and more Web sites are imposing contract language on users. He says, "the courts have upheld most of the terms and conditions in click-wrap agreements. We get by," he continues, "largely by ignoring the contracts that companies have written because we think 99 percent of the time they're not going to affect us. But when it does happen, then the courts have largely said tough luck! You signed the contract, you're stuck with it."
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Source: Suite101.com
7/15/2010
An article discussing the potential influence of technology on the education system in developing countries relates the following information from Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig’s book, “Law and Other Codes of Conduct:” "Students are becoming slavishly addicted to socially interactive online networks, such as Facebook.” The book also offers, “The Internet’s architecture constrains and governs a person’s behaviour as well as the way it interacts with other persons in society. Through these online social networks, students renew and sustain their community ties, access selective information, and find a sense of belonging, meaningful support, and social identity.”
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Source: The Economist
7/12/2010
Professor Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School defended the motion: "After many failed government attempts to save declining, zombie businesses—whether steel or textiles or shipbuilding—thankfully hardly anyone these days believes in bailing out losers. The acceptable face of government intervention now is to try to catalyse the growth of brand new industries."
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Source: The New York Times
6/28/2010
Professor Josh Lerner of the Harvard Business School commented on the Bilski decision in The New York Times article: “The court is certainly not shutting the door on business method patents, as some thought it might. This preserves a fair amount of ambiguity."
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Source: Mercury News
6/26/2010
In an article about Facebook and privacy, Chris Hoofnagle, Director of the UC Berkeley School of Law's Center for Law and Technology, is quoted: "But some people, others point out, may live to regret the way a moment of indiscretion can come back to haunt them, in ways they may have never imagined. A case of herpes can inspire a lawsuit — and a comment on Facebook could wind up as evidence in court."
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Source: Bloomberg
6/14/2010
“Botswana’s post-colonial leadership, particularly Seretse Khama and Quett Masire, and also its major economic elites were committed to democracy, economic development, secure property rights and fairly orthodox macroeconomic policies,” says Daron Acemoglu, the economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who first called attention to Botswana’s achievement.
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Source: The New York Times
5/26/2010
Professor Edward W. Felten of Princeton University provided an opinion piece to The New York Times question: should the government take on Facebook? "Yet despite the flaws of notice-and-consent, it’s hard to see an alternative regulatory model that looks better. One approach is for government to create default rules — such as allowing Facebook to share information only with the user’s friends — and require strong user consent to deviate from them. This might work for a single type of service, but it’s unlikely that government will be able to keep up with the ever-growing variety of services."
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Source: The New York Times
5/21/2010
In an article exploring possible antitrust issues with Google's business practices, Professor Tim Wu of Columbia University is quoted: “They are not just on the radar screen. They are at the center of it. If you are in the federal government and are interested in antitrust, you are looking at Google.”
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Source: The New York Times
5/12/2010
Professor Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, is quoted in this New York Times article: "The ruling did not appear to consider the technology itself as illegal, only the promoting and encouraging of illegal uses of that technology..." Also: "If you’re coming real close to flying the Jolly Roger as a business, you can expect to be in legal trouble"
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Source: Financial Times
5/10/2010
In an article written for the Financial Times, Professor Richard Epstein discusses patent protection. "Let the BRCA gene cases be decided on narrow grounds one way or the other. Under no circumstances should two atypical patents spell the doom of patent protection where it is so manifestly needed."
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Source: The New York Times
5/7/2010
In this New York Times article about how early adopters help the rest of us save money, Professor Jay Pil Choi of Michigan University describe early adopters as pioneers.
"They, in a sense, provide valuable services to other consumers by their willingness to serve as a guinea pig."
He added, "Their early purchase allows the firms to go down the learning curve and enables a lower price for other consumers."
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Source: The Huffington Post
4/26/2010
In an essay published with The Huffington Post, Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, makes a case for Elena Kagan's US Supreme Court appointment.
"She was strong and principled when it was within the scope of her role." "It's not enough to appoint someone who will cast the right vote. We need someone who will make majorities."
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Source: The Weekly Standard
4/19/2010
An article on WeeklyStandard.com explores a presidential memorandum which aims to remake the methods by which the federal government regulates our homes, our offices, our roads --nearly everything. Among other things, Obama seeks to “clarify the role of the behavioral sciences in formulating regulatory policy.” This caught the attention of Joshua Wright of George Mason Law School. “Even if you discover a real cognitive bias,” Wright said last month, “there will be a good deal of variation within the population, based on cognitive ability and personality traits. And if the bias varies from person to person, you can’t assume that the bias will just ‘scale up,’ in a generalized way, when it’s in the marketplace. Thaler and Sunstein will take a single study of a hundred Duke undergrads and say, ‘Here’s what we found—and here are the public policy implications.’ That’s not scientific. That’s just sloppy.”
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Source: NPR's "Morning Edition"
4/15/2010
In an NPR report, Nina Totenberg reviews a case going before the U.S. Supreme Court next week that questions whether personal text messages are private when transmitted over an electronic device supplied by an employer. Quoted in this report is George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr: "Does the government violate your rights when they take those messages off the server, even though you're not the government employee? And what does that mean for the rest of us, who do have privacy rights, when the government wants to get copies of those communications?"
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Source: The Herald Online
4/15/2010
The Herald Online shares a report, from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania, that is among the first quantitative studies looking at young people's attitudes toward privacy. "Yes, there are some young people who are posting racy photographs and personal information. But those anecdotes might not represent what the average young person is doing online," said Chris Hoofnagle, co-author of the study and director of information privacy programs at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.
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Source: The Herald Online
4/15/2010
The Herald Online shares a report that is among the first quantitative studies looking at young people's attitudes toward privacy. "But there is not enough research to find out (whether) older people do the same thing," said Joseph Turow, professor at Penn's Annenberg School for Communication. "Older adults, they may not show up naked, but they may be releasing other kinds of (personal) information."
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Source: The New York Times
4/8/2010
MasterCard is getting into the predictive online marketing business. Professor Anita Allen of The University of Pennsylvania Law School commented about
consumers giving up private information for short-term gains. “In the end, we turn into citizens who live in a world where we have no control over our own data.”
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Source: Mercury News
4/2/2010
An article by the Silicon Valley Mercury News discusses that Google, Yahoo and other major Internet advertising companies are developing new ways to tailor ads by tracking users' online history. Chris Hoofnagle of UC Berkeley's law school comments, "There is a real disconnect between business practices in this field and consumer expectations.”
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Source: MediaPost
3/12/2010
From MediaPost: Facing a consumer class-action privacy lawsuit and a Federal Trade Commission inquiry, Netflix is dropping its ill-conceived plan to release data about consumers as part of a new contest to improve its recommendation engine.
Among the first to draw attention to the issue was University of Colorado law professor Paul Ohm, who publicly implored the company to changes its mind. "Researchers have known for more than a decade that gender plus ZIP code plus birthdate uniquely identifies a significant percentage of Americans (87% according to Latanya Sweeney's famous study)," Ohm wrote. He added that researchers will be able "to tie many people directly to these supposedly anonymized new records" even without birthdays.
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Source: San Francisco Business Times
3/12/2010
From the San Francisco Business Times: Farmers and seed companies have complained about skyrocketing prices for Monsanto's genetically modified seeds. St. Louis-based Monsanto has said the price increases reflect the increasing quality of the seeds.
Antitrust-law expert Keith Hylton, a professor at the Boston University School of Law, said prices for Monsanto’s seeds could go up because of supply declining
or because of demand increasing. "Any investigation of price increases should look into both factors," he said. "But the productivity side of the equation cannot be left out."
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Source: The New York Times
3/11/2010
"The problem is that our bankruptcy system is too difficult and expensive for the people who use it."
In this op-ed piece in The New York Times, Professor Ronald Mann of Columbia Law School shares his proposal on reforming the US bankruptcy system.
"Such a bold reshaping of the bankruptcy system would provide Americans immediate respite from crushing debt and the ceaseless emotional and financial pressure that comes with it.
Then they could turn their attention to finding new jobs, moving into housing they can afford and caring for their families."
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Source: The Wall Street Journal
3/10/2010
The Wall Street Journal reports: Google Inc. could stop censoring its Web-search results in China within weeks, said people familiar with the matter, but the company isn't likely to withdraw from the country entirely.
Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University Law School adds,
"It will likely have to locate the equipment and staff that run the site out of mainland China."
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Source: The Daily Northwestern
3/5/2010
Prof. Daniel Spulber led a talk (March 4, 2010 at Northwestern University) about censorship in China and the recent hack of the country’s Google operating system. While Spulber said he has been critical of China’s policies regarding censorship, he acknowledged it was a part of their history.
“Although there are great leaps in Chinese culture occurring, Mao (Zedong)’s legacy continues today,” Spulber said. “Google’s staying is beneficial to the cause of freedom. The more engagement we have with China, the more cooperation we will see in the future.”
Spulber added, “I am very concerned about Google’s experience in China,” he said. “It highlights the importance of liberty without government controls on speech, dissent, assembly (and) privacy.”
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Source: Publishers Weekly
3/4/2010
Publishers Weekly states that publishers are losing the battle over copyright in the court of public opinion. Pamela Samuelson, director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology at UC/Berkeley, said "People are playing with content in new ways and publishers need to find ways to give them the products they can play with. She said publishers need to move away from the idea that they can exercise the same type of control over the content that they have been able to do in the past.
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Source: The Economist
3/4/2010
From The Economist: "Unlike those of us a shade older, this new generation didn’t have to relearn anything to live lives of digital immersion. They learned in digital the first time around," declare John Palfrey and Urs Gasser of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School
in their 2008 book, "Born Digital."
The authors argue that young people like to use new, digital ways to express themselves:
shooting a YouTube video where their parents would have written an essay, for instance.
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Source: The New York Times
2/27/2010
In a New York Times article, policy and privacy experts agree that the relentless rise of Internet data harvesting has overrun the old approach of using lengthy written notices to safeguard privacy. -- Professor Lorrie Faith Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University, states, “When we go online, there are a lot of ways we can inadvertently give up our privacy.” -- Professor Edward Felton, Princeton University, wants to re-engineer the Web browser for greater privacy. A key, he says, is to alter the software’s design so that information about on-screen viewing sessions is kept separate and not routinely passed along so a person’s browsing behavior can be tracked. "The browser needs to be less promiscuous about revealing the information collected.”
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Source: NPR's "On the Media"
2/19/2010
Story from NPR: On the Media -- This week a federal judge heard arguments to determine whether to approve the settlement between Google and two major arms of the publishing industry over Google Books. Many groups used this week's hearings to air grievances with the project. Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig argues an unintended consequence of the settlement could alter print culture as we know it.
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Source: Library Journal
2/18/2010
At the hearing, speakers argued for and against the revised settlement agreement. Among the wide variety of viewpoints offered, University of California, Berkeley, law professor Pamela Samuelson reiterated her argument that academic and scholarly authors have goals that are very different than those of commercial authors.
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Source: The Guardian
2/3/2010
"If anything the demand for technological innovation is going to be greater in the years to come rather than less."
In an interview with The Guardian, Josh Lerner, professor of investment banking at Harvard Business School,
discusses the role of government in entrepreneurship and venture capital.
The extended interview is available as a podcast.
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Source: The Wall Street Journal
2/2/2010
"Militarism is negatively associated with trade," argue Daron Acemoglu of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Pierre Yared of Columbia University in their recently published paper, "Political Limits to Globalization" (published by the National Bureau of Economic Research). Their findings are a reminder that peace is the soil that nourishes trade. The two economists compared the growth of trade between 1988 and 2007 and the growth of militarism over roughly the same time frame and found that countries that experience an above-average increase in military spending are likely to experience a below-average increase in trade.
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Source: Digital Spy
2/2/2010
As reported in Digital Spy: Disney's $4 billion purchase of Marvel has put the firm at risk of antitrust complaints, according to legal experts.
"What an antitrust regulator would be concerned about very clearly is the notion that Disney and Universal would be able to co-ordinate their activities in the theme park business," said Randal Picker, a commercial law professor at the University of Chicago. "You'd really want to be careful with this."
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Source: Daily Online Examiner
1/28/2010
From the Daily Online Examiner: During the Federal Trade Commission's Privacy Roundtable (held on 1/28/10), Chris Hoofnagle, Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology,
mentioned that some companies had boasted that Flash cookies can be used for behavioral targeting because most consumers don't know enough to delete such cookies -- stored in a different place than traditional HTTP cookies.
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Source: The Huffington Post
1/25/2010
As written in the Huffington Post: January 28 was the last day on which owners of copyrights in books... can opt out or object to the proposed settlement of the Google Book Search (GBS) class action lawsuit.
University of California, Berkeley, law professor Pamela Samuelson, a critic of the deal, writes: "For what it's worth, I'm objecting to the settlement, not opting out. The more opt-outs there are, the less likely GBS is to achieve the lofty ambitions of being a universal digital library to make the knowledge in books more accessible to all. My objection is aimed at making the GBS deal fairer for academic authors whose books constitute a substantial majority of books in GBS."
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Source: The New York Times
1/23/2010
Taken from: The New York Times -- Eric Posner, a law professor, and Luigi Zingales, an economist, both from the University of Chicago, have made an interesting suggestion: Any homeowner whose mortgage is underwater and who lives in a ZIP code where home prices have fallen at least 20 percent should be eligible for a loan modification.
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Source: The Wall Street Journal
1/22/2010
There are many comments and opinions about Thursday’s (1/21/10) Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United. "The Wall Street Journal" Law Blog has compiled many, including one from Professor Lawrence Lessig of Harvard School of Law.
Professor Lessig summarizes his post with this: "Thursday’s decision by the Supreme Court denies to Congress the same institutional integrity enjoyed by the Court. The vast majority of Americans already believe that money buys results in Congress. This Court’s decision will only make that worse."
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Source: The Wall Street Journal
1/21/2010
In an article from The Wall Street Journal. Observers said there's little chance Google will get its way. "I don't think it is likely that they could get a free pass for what they done in the past week," said John Palfrey, Professor of Law at Harvard University.
Mr. Palfrey said the likelihood that Google will receive any licenses that could be necessary for it to sell ads to Chinese customers, even on its other properties, is slim. "I would be very surprised if the Chinese government gives Google carte blanche to sell its services, having snubbed its nose at the censorship regime."
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Source: Forbes.com
1/19/2010
Professor Richard Epstein, University of Chicago Law School, writes a weekly column for Forbes.com. In this week's column, he writes:
For the sake of the long-term stability of the nation, we have to back off this feeding frenzy. Taxing banks and bankers won't bring small businesses back to life by sucking money and talent out of the banking system.
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Source: Kitsap Peninsula Business Journal
1/19/2010
Taken from: Kitsap Peninsula Business Journal: As Congress attempts to merge two national health care expansion bills, analysts are predicting that economic tumult and destruction will be among the results.
"This financial squeeze will likely drive many insurers out of business," notes Richard Epstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.
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Source: Multichannel News
1/18/2010
In an article published in Multichannel News, Professor Christopher S. Yoo, University of Pennsylvania, writes...
"Last year, the Federal Communications Commission voted to continue the arduous task of creating new rules of the road for the ever-changing Internet. The stakes couldn’t be higher for 2010."
And further into Professor Yoo's exploration of the issues, he states, "Instead, we need an architecture that allows ISPs to manage their networks intelligently and keeps the Internet open to everyone regardless of what they are doing."
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Source: The New York Times
1/18/2010
"The New York Times" quoted Jonathan Zittrain, a director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Professor of Law at Harvard University. Professor Zittrain said Google's move in China could encourage development of technologies to circumvent local restrictions.
“My hope, and expectation, is that Google engineers who might have been a bit halfhearted about implementing censorship mandates in Google.cn could be full-throttle in coming up with ways for Google to be viewed despite
any network interruptions between site and user,” Mr. Zittrain wrote on his blog: The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It
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Source: The Anniston Star
1/17/2010
"Texting has become the language of youth," says John Palfrey, author of "Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of the Digital Natives" and Professor of Law at Harvard University.
Only since the advent of unlimited plans has texting become what Palfrey calls a "cultural phenomenon." But many scientists, sociologists, cultural anthropologists and psychiatrists are scrambling to understand the long-term affects this trend will have.
"As with any phenomenon, there is the worry of about what could be lost — social skills, face-to-face communication, etc.,"
says Palfrey. "There will be changes, but it's important not to presume it's all bad … just different." As quoted from the Anniston Star.
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Source: KCBS News Radio
1/13/2010
Presented on KCBS News Radio, San Francisco, CA: Professor Mark A. Lemley of Stanford Law School, discusses the ruling of whether to post video on the Internet from the Prop 8 trial: "Well we've seen a move in the last several years towards greater public accessibility of federal court trials. And I think this is part of that move so the surprising thing is not that Judge Walker initially allowed video to be posted. The surprising thing, in my view, is that the Supreme Court took enough of an interest to stay that order."
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Source: The New York Times
1/12/2010
“I think it’s both the right move and a brilliant one,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a legal scholar at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Professor Zittrain was quoted in this New York Times article.
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Source: Forbes.com
1/5/2010
Richard Epstein, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago publishes an opinion piece in Forbes.com. At this point, it won't work to reaffirm the deadly triumvirate that drives this misery: tax the rich, greater local control over real estate development and special privileges for organized labor. What's needed is to break from the past with some unimaginative, but necessary, New Year's resolutions in the areas of taxation, real estate and labor.
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Source: Los Angeles Times
1/5/2010
"The government isn't showing any signs of giving up on censorship," said Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "If anything, they're innovating and exploring other avenues."
Visiting professor Jonathan Zittrain was quoted in the Los Angeles Times on internet censorship in China.
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Source: Newsweek
12/8/2009
This op-ed piece, by Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain, appeared in Newsweek Magazine.
"Invoking the current mania around cloud computing, where things your computer used to do now happen online, a new class of companies are promoting cloud labor.
This new form of labor has begun to catch on in the post-financial-crisis world. It could create efficiencies and opportunities that economists hitherto could only dream of. It could also usher in a new era of digital sweatshops."
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Source: Wall Street Journal
12/7/2009
The Federal Trade Commission is looking at how the U.S. might craft tougher online privacy rules that could limit some practices, provide consumers more information about how they’re online movements are being tracked, and make it easier for consumers to opt out of online tracking.
“We find that the traditional English-language privacy notice is impenetrable to most people,” said Lorrie Faith Cranor, associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. “People read a privacy policy, and they can’t figure it out.”
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Source: Berkeley Center for Law and Technology
11/19/2009
House lawmakers stepped up their questioning of companies that collect and store information about consumers both on the Internet and in real life. Privacy advocates Chris Hoofnagle of UC Berkeley Law and Pamela Dixon of World Privacy Forum pointed to databases that store personally identifiable information about consumers--such as diseases and other afflictions--without consumers' knowledge.
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Source: Harvard University
10/16/2009
A major new study by Yochai Benkler and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society was released by the FCC for public comment as part of the National Broadband Plan process.
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Source: The New York Times
10/5/2009
Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center on Law Technology, says new rules may look ahead to the existence of a possible market to "buy" public endorsements.
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Source: Technology Review
9/30/2009
John Palfrey, co-founder of the Berkman Center on Internet and Society, thinks manipulation of bandwidths or ISP may affect free speech.
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Source: The National Law Journal
9/14/2009
Writing on his blog and in the National Law Journal, Russell Jackson provides his take on the growing use of the Alien Tort Claims Act, an issue that is being looked at closely by the Searle Center.
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Source: Business Week
6/22/2009
John Duffy, law professor at The George Washington University Law School, spoke with Business Week about the U.S. patent system. "Precisely because innovations break with the preconceptions of the past, the law should not rely on yesteryear's notions of technology."
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