Saturday, December 31, 2011

MIRLN --- 4-31 December (v14.17)

MIRLN --- 4-31 December (v14.17) --- by Vince Polley and KnowConnect PLLC (supplemented by related Tweets: http://twitter.com/vpolley #mirln)

NEWS | PODCASTS | RESOURCES | BOOKS | DIFFERENT | LOOKING BACK | NOTES

New EU Directive on Consumer Rights Affects Website Terms (IT Law Group, 8 Nov 2011) - In late October 2011, the European Council of Ministers formally adopted the new EU Consumer Rights Directive . The new Directive will drastically affect the rules that apply to online shopping. Numerous provisions will also apply to both the online and the offline markets. The Directive is intended to protect "consumers," i.e., all natural persons who are acting for purposes that are outside their trade, business, craft, or profession. It creates new obligations for "traders," a broad term that encompasses all categories of persons who sell products or services. The Directive defines the term "trader" as any natural or legal person who is acting, directly or indirectly for purposes relating to his/its trade, business, craft of profession in relations to contracts covered by the Directive. These contracts include: sales contracts, service contracts, distance contracts, off-premises contracts, and public auction contracts that are concluded between a trader and a consumer. US companies that operate websites that sell to European customers, as well as their affiliates who make direct sales to EU consumers, must start evaluating the numerous consequences that the implementation of the Directive on Consumer Rights will have on their operations. The consequences include: * * *

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iCloud to the Rescue? (Digital Samurai, 11 Nov 2011) - We doubt it, but let's slow down and stop drinking the Apple Kool-Aid. There are some very interesting items in the T&C (Terms & Conditions) that most people don't even read. The tendency is to click, click, click just to get to the end quickly. The T&C for iCloud is around 12-13 pages long, depending on the device used to view it. So let's dive right into some of the "features" presented in the T&C and what they may mean. First, you are required to have a compatible device, duh? It also states that "…certain software (fees may apply)…" whatever that means. There are a lot of words about the location-based services and what Apple and its partners can do with the collected data. Make sure you understand the cloud collects GPS location, crowd-sourced Wi-Fi information, device ID, Apple ID, etc. That sounds like enough information to be personally identifiable to us. There are no words on how long they store the data, if at all, but we're pretty sure they don't throw it away after processing. You can opt out of the collection by not using any location-based services, which we doubt many will do. Apple doesn't take any responsibility for the integrity of any content stored in iCloud. In other words, you are on your own so don't assume that you can actually use any of the data that you may transmit to iCloud. There's a whole sentence in capital letters that states "…Apple does not guarantee or warrant that any content you may store or access through the service will not be subject to inadvertent damage, corruption, loss, or removal in accordance…" Geez, you call that a backup solution? Apparently not, since a few pages later they say "You are responsible for backing up, to your own computer or other device, any important documents, images or other Content that you store or access via the Service." One of the more disturbing provisions states that Apple will give your data to any law enforcement authority, government official or third party if they feel it appropriate, necessary or legally required. That's pretty scary and there is nothing that says Apple will even give you notice that they are giving over your data. Apparently your data is not encrypted in iCloud or Apple has the decryption keys, which still means unintended parties can see your data. This means that iCloud is NOT an acceptable service for attorneys that keep client information on their iDevices.

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Red Cross Wants Real Life Laws Enforced Within Virtual Worlds (TechDirt, 5 Dec 2011) - Kotaku has published an article in which the International Committee of the Red Cross proposes that real life laws such as the Geneva and Hague Conventions should be enforced within video games . Before you get too riled up, they are not proposing that video game players be locked up and punished for war crimes for actions performed within the game, but are rather proposing that game designers program those conventions into the games: " In computer and video games, violence is often shown and the players become 'virtually violent'. However, such games are not zones free of rules and ethics. It would be highly appreciated if games reproducing armed conflicts were to include the rules which apply to real armed conflicts. These rules and values are given by international humanitarian law and human rights law. They limit excessive violence and protect the human dignity of members of particularly vulnerable groups. " These types of arguments are very similar to the arguments made by those who have requested laws regulating violence in video games in the past. Those people argued that the lack of consequences in the game would influence player behavior in real life. We know that the US Supreme Court rejected those arguments as the science behind them was not sound. But we all know that pesky court rulings never get in the way of those who want to control human behavior. The Red Cross is looking to have game developers to voluntarily include these laws within the game world noting that some developers already take the time to do it. If that fails, it has no qualms about getting the government involved: "One possible course of action could be to encourage game designers/producers to incorporate IHL in the development and design of video games, while another could be to encourage governments to adopt laws and regulations to regulate this ever-growing industry."

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The Trespass Tort Versus the CFAA: A Response to the Oracle Amicus Brief in Nosal (Volokh Conspiracy, 5 Dec 2011) - In a recently-filed amicus brief submitted by Oracle America Inc. before the en banc Ninth Circuit in United States v. Nosal , the important Computer Fraud and Abuse Act case I have blogged a lot about, Oracle makes the following argument about interpreting "access" and "authorization" in the context of the CFAA. The CFAA's prohibition on exceeding authorized access and access without authorization is modeled on trespass principles, the brief reasons, so the scope of the CFAA should be interpreted by reference to the trespass principles articulated in the Restatement (Second) of Torts. According to the Oracle brief, this means that (a) computer owners can condition access to their computers using express restrictions like Terms of Service, but (b) express restrictions are only enforceable in some circumstances. The brief summarizes when express restrictions can be enforced under the tort of trespass. [Editor: interesting argument, well-presented.]

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Cut-and-Paste Reveals Redacted Info on Apple Smartphone Market in Federal Judge's Opinion (ABA Journal, 6 Dec 2011) - A federal judge's opinion in Apple's patent infringement suit against Samsung Electronics was formatted in a way that exposed redacted information. The mistaken revelation in the opinion issued Friday by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh discussed Apple studies showing its customers are unlikely to switch to Samsung's Android devices, Reuters reports. The redacted portions also included some details on Apple's licensing deals with Nokia and IBM. The redacted material was revealed when the opinion, released in PDF format, was cut and pasted into another document. According to Reuters, the redactions reveal courts' predilection to seal materials in intellectual property cases. The story quotes Emory law professor Timothy Holbrook, who said he didn't see any apparent trade secrets in the redactions. "Most of it just seems like it was sealed out of an abundance of caution," he said. Koh's opinion denied Apple's request for a preliminary injunction in its suit claiming Samsung's Galaxy products infringe patents for the iPhone and iPad. The opinion revealing the information was sealed and a new version was posted about four hours later.

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Oregon Judge Rules Bloggers Aren't Journalists (CNET, 7 Dec 2011) - A U.S. District Court judge in Portland, Ore., ruled that a blogger who wrote about an investment firm that subsequently accused her of defamation must pay the company $2.5 million because she's a blogger who doesn't legally qualify as a journalist. Crystal Cox, whose blogs are a mixture of fact, opinion, and commentary, wrote several posts that were critical of Obsidian Finance Group and its co-founder, Kevin Padrick. In one blog post , Cox accused Padrick of fraud while serving as trustee in a real estate bankruptcy case. The firm considered the posts defamatory and filed a $10 million lawsuit (PDF) against Cox in January. The blog the court focused on during the case was more factual in tone, suggesting she had an inside source who was leaking her information. Obsidian demanded she reveal the source of her information to prove its veracity. Cox, who acted as her own attorney in the case, refused to reveal her source, arguing that she was afforded the same protections as journalists under Oregon's Shield Law.

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Does a Naked Retweet Carry an Endorsement by a Lawyer or Law Firm? (Kevin O'Keefe, 7 Dec 2011) - Does a retweet mean an endorsement of something that was tweeted by someone else or a simple "check this out?" That's a question journalists are trying to answer that also applies to some law firms. Last month the Associated Press released modified guidelines for social media (pdf), including a specific section on retweeting. [Editor: Interesting exploration of the issues.]

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DARPA Unshredding Contest (Bruce Schneier, 8 Dec 2011) - DARPA held an unshredding contest, and there's a winner : "Lots of experts were skeptical that a solution could be produced at all let alone within the short time frame," said Dan Kaufman, director, DARPA Information Innovation Office. "The most effective approaches were not purely computational or crowd-sourced, but used a combination blended with some clever detective work. We are impressed by the ingenuity this type of competition elicits."

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Feds Launch Cloud Security Standards Program (Computerworld, 8 Dec 2011) - Federal agencies will soon have a government-wide security standard for assessing, authorizing and monitoring cloud products and services. Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel Thursday unveiled the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), which establishes a set of baseline security and privacy standards that all cloud service providers will need to meet in order to sell their products to government agencies. The program requires that all federal agencies use only FedRAMP-certified cloud services and technologies for public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds and community clouds. The program also covers all cloud service models, including Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). FedRAMP will also provide federal agencies with standard procurement language to use in requests for proposals from cloud service vendors. A Joint Authorization Board, comprising of security experts from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), General Services Administration (GSA) and the Department of Defense will be responsible for updating the FedRAMP security requirements on an ongoing basis. A group of third-party assessors hired from the private sector will be responsible for independently assessing cloud service providers and certifying their compliance with the standards. The Federal CIO council, a group of government IT executives that set federal IT management practices, will publish an initial set of baseline security and privacy controls for cloud providers within 30 days, VanRoekel said in a White House Office of Management and Budget memorandum ( download pdf ) sent on Thursday to federal agency CIOs. [Europeans considering cloud services may find the ENISA (the European Network and Information Security Agency) guide to "Cloud Computing Risk Assessment" useful:

http://www.enisa.europa.eu/act/rm/files/deliverables/cloud-computing-risk-assessment ]

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Privacy Fades in Facebook Era (NYT, 11 Dec 2011) - As much as it pains me to say this: privacy is on its deathbed. I came to this sad realization recently when a stranger began leaving comments on photos I had uploaded to Instagram, the iPhone photo-sharing app. After several comments - all of which were nice - I began wondering who this person was. Now the catch here is that she had used only a first name on her Instagram profile. You would think a first name online is enough to conceal your identity. Trust me, it's not. So I set out, innocently and curiously, to figure who she was. I knew this person lived in San Francisco, from her own photos. At first I tried Google, but a first name and city were not enough to narrow it down. Then I went to her photos and looked for people whom she had responded to in the comments. Eventually I found a conversation with someone clearly her friend. I easily found that person's full name, went to the person's Facebook friend list and searched for my commenter's first name. There it was: a full name. With that, I searched Google and before I knew it, I had this person's phone number, home address and place of employment. Creepy, right? I even had a link to a running app that she uses that showed the path of her morning run. This took all of 10 minutes. "We used to have privacy through obscurity online, so even if people had that information out there, the steps that it would take to aggregate it all were too great," said Elizabeth Stark, a lecturer in law at Stanford who teaches about privacy on the Internet. "Previously you could have searched every photo on the Internet for a photo of Nick Bilton until you eventually found one, but that would take a lifetime. Now, facial recognition software can return more images about someone instantly." [Editor: try it - go to http://images.google.com/ and click on the camera icon in the search bar to search-by-image. It worked for one of my own images. There are similar services - e.g. www.tineye.com ]

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Law Firms and Social Media: A Match Not Yet Made in Heaven (WJS, 12 Dec 2011) - While a number of global law firms have dipped their toes in the social media pool, relatively few have taken the plunge into genuine interactivity, according to an audit released today by LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell. The company looked at how 110 global law firms used LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and other social media from April to mid-May of 2011. The upshot? "It's just getting going," said Bryn Hughes, the company's marketing and communications manager in international markets. "For the legal sector, I think they are slow to adapt to new technology." Firms appear interested in using social media as a marketing platform, particularly outfits based in places with excellent internet penetration: New York, Canada, the United Kingdom and Western Europe. Still, most of those surveyed use social networks as one-way channels to distribute company news, and few embraced blogging and YouTube or integrated social media widget into firm web sites, the audit found. Hughes said that lawyers he had spoken with seem interested in using social media, but remained cautious about liability, client confidentiality and the potential embarrassment of posting erroneous statements online. Here's the snapshot of the findings:

  • 77% of firms surveyed had profiles on LinkedIn
  • 31% used Twitter
  • 29% used Facebook
  • 10.9% used YouTube
  • 8% had official firm blogs
  • 7% used social media widgets to integrate firm web sites

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Are You Following Your Clients On Twitter? (Kevin O'Keefe, 20 Dec 2011) - Good attorneys and law firms are always looking for ways to stay in touch in with their clients. Weeks can go by without meeting a client on an active matter. Months or a year can by without talking to a client for which you have no matters pending. How do you stay in touch? Many law firms send out newsletters and alerts, arguably to share helpful information, with the intent to keep 'mind share.' That's a one-way broadcast style of communicating. You're not engaging the client, listening to the client, nor meeting them on their turf. An easy way to stay in touch with clients is to follow them on Twitter. It's becoming more and more common that people have Twitter accounts, whether business leaders or consumers. Look up your clients on Twitter. Look in their LinkedIn profile for their Twitter handle. Start following your clients.

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LexisNexis and Vizibility Release Research Results on the Use of Social Media Within Law Firms (PR Newswire, 21 Dec 2011) - Vizibility Inc. and LexisNexis announced today the results of a survey conducted to shed light on the use of social media in legal services marketing. To illustrate the findings, the results have been released as an infographic . The research suggests a high degree of reliance on broadly defined social media marketing programs, with 81% of survey participants reporting they already use social media marketing tools and another 10.1% saying they plan to deploy social media marketing elements within six months. Furthermore, reliance on social media tools and how they're measured differ significantly by firm size. The survey found that a clear majority of participants consider social media an important part of their overall marketing strategy, with nearly half (48.5%) reporting that social media is "somewhat important" while another 31% believe the tools are "extremely important" to their total marketing efforts. A minority, 5% of responding firms, report not using social media. "You have to measure the results from social media to justify it. Our new data reveals a split between small and large firms in social media marketing objectives," noted Lawyers.com(SM) Editor in Chief and LawMarketing Blog author Larry Bodine. "For example, among small firms, almost 71% of participants in practices with five or fewer attorneys said that they rely on social media marketing to generate new business. In contrast, among respondents from big firms with 100 or more attorneys, only 37% measure social media success this way. Large firms better get smart about social media if they expect it to produce new work."

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Some Facts About Carrier IQ (EFF, 13 Dec 2011) - There has been a rolling scandal about the Carrier IQ software installed by cell phone companies on 150 million phones, mostly within the United States. Subjects of outright disagreement have included the nature of the program, what information it actually collects, and under what circumstances. This post will attempt to explain Carrier IQ's architecture, and why apparently conflicting statements about it are in some instances simultaneously correct. The information in this post has been synthesised from sources including Trevor Eckhart, Ashkan Soltani, Dan Rosenberg, and Carrier IQ itself.

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YouTube for Schools and Lecture Capture (InsideHigherEd, 13 Dec 2011) - YouTube announced YouTube for Schools today, a variant of YouTube designed to be more education friendly. This site seems primarily aimed at the primary and secondary market, although higher ed may find some things to like. If a school signs up for the service it can upload videos that are then displayed without any non-educational videos (or commenting). The YouTube University site has playlists for arts, business, education, engineering, history, humanities, languages, law, mathematics, medicine, science and social sciences.

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M.I.T. Expands Its Free Online Courses (NYT, 19 Dec 2011) - While students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pay thousands of dollars for courses, the university will announce a new program on Monday allowing anyone anywhere to take M.I.T. courses online free of charge - and for the first time earn official certificates for demonstrating mastery of the subjects taught. "There are many people who would love to augment their education by having access to M.I.T. content, people who are very capable to earn a certificate from M.I.T.," said L. Rafael Reif, the provost, in a conference call with reporters Friday. M.I.T. led the way to an era of online learning 10 years ago by posting course materials from almost all its classes. Its free OpenCourseWare now includes nearly 2,100 courses and has been used by more than 100 million people. But the new "M.I.T.x" interactive online learning platform will go further, giving students access to online laboratories, self-assessments and student-to-student discussions. Mr. Reif and Anant Agarwal, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, said M.I.T.x would start this spring - perhaps with just one course - but would expand to include many more courses, as OpenCourseWare has done. "The technologies available are much more advanced than when we started OpenCourseWare," Mr. Agarwal said. "We can provide pedagogical tools to self-assess, self-pace or create an online learning community." The M.I.T.x classes, he said, will have online discussions and forums where students can ask questions and, often, have them answered by others in the class. M.I.T. said its new learning platform should eventually host a virtual community of learners around the world - and enhance the education of M.I.T.'s on-campus students, with online tools that enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. The development of the new platform will be accompanied by an M.I.T.-wide research initiative on online teaching and learning, including grading by computer. And because the M.I.T.x platform will be available free to people around the world, M.I.T. officials said they expected that other universities would also use it to offer their own free online courses.

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UK Judge Sanctions Live-Tweeting for Reporters (Mashable, 14 Dec 2011) - A high-ranking UK judge has issued official guidelines that allow journalists to live-tweet public court proceedings in England and Wales without seeking permission. The practice guidance allows journalists to issue live, text-based communications on mobile phones and other Internet-connected devices, including emails, tweets and Facebook status updates. Reporters won't be able to share Twitpics or sound bites over the social web, however; photography and sound recording on these (and other) devices still needs court approval. These new sanctions do not extend to the public. Public attendees will still need to seek permission to use their mobile devices for text-based communications - and any other purpose - during court sessions.

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Is It Enough to Tell Jurors Not to Tweet? (CMLP, 19 Dec 2011) - The Arkansas Supreme Court has reversed a murder conviction - and death sentence - in a case where one juror tweeted during trial, while another fell asleep. Both these problems, the court said, constituted juror misconduct requiring reversal and a new trial. Erickson Dimas-Martinez v. State , 2011 Ark. 515 (Dec. 8, 2011). The Supreme Court was particularly concerned about one of the juror's tweets, "Its over," sent 50 minutes before the jury informed the court that it had agreed on a sentence. As a result of this tweet, the court said, followers of the juror's Twitter feed - including, the court said, at least one journalist (with the online magazine Ozarks Unbound ) - "had advance notice that the jury had completed its sentencing deliberations before an official announcement was made to the court." Dimas-Martinez's lawyers also pointed out that the tweeting juror tweeted during trial despite continued admonitions to the jury throughout the trial warning them not to do so, and that he continued tweeting after the trial judge specifically told him to stop after defense lawyers discovered an earlier tweet. (That one said, "Choices to be made. Hearts to be broken. We each define the great line.") The case raises the question of whether admonishing jurors to not use the Internet and social media is effective. The Arkansas Supreme Court expressed its clear concern, and suggested that measures more drastic than admonitions may need to be taken: "[W]e take this opportunity to recognize the wide array of possible juror misconduct that might result when jurors have unrestricted access to their mobile phones during a trial. Most mobile phones now allow instant access to a myriad of information. Not only can jurors access Facebook, Twitter, or other social media sites, but they can also access news sites that might have information about a case. There is also the possibility that a juror could conduct research about many aspects of a case. Thus, we refer to the Supreme Court Committee on Criminal Practice and the Supreme Court Committee on Civil Practice for consideration of the question of whether jurors' access to mobile phones should be limited during a trial." It is worth noting that while the jurors in this murder trial were told not to tweet about the trial, it does not appear, based on the admonitions repeated in the Arkansas Supreme Court's decision, that they were told why.

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Court Denies Motion to Provide Access to Social Networking Sites in Civil Discovery (Volokh Conspiracy, 14 Dec 2011) - The decision by the Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas is Arcq v. Fields (Dec. 8), and it distinguishes Largent v. Reed (blogged about recently here ) on the ground that the party seeking discovery lacked a sufficient good-faith basis for requesting access to the private portion of the other side's social networking accounts. In Largent, and in other cases, the party seeking discovery saw the public portion of her adversary's Facebook account, and therefore had a basis to conclude that there may be relevant information in the private portions of the account. In Arcq, by contrast, the party seeking discovery made a blanket request for access to all of the other side's social networking accounts, and yet didn't know if his adversary even had any such accounts. The court in Arcq concludes that because the moving party did not first see the public portion of his adversary's site, he lacks a good-faith basis to believe that there is relevant evidence in the private portions and therefore the motion to access the social networking sites is denied.

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Judge Dismisses Twitter Stalking Case (NYT, 15 Dec 2011) - In a case with potentially far-reaching consequences for freedom of expression on the Internet, a federal judge on Thursday dismissed a criminal case against a man accused of stalking a religious leader on Twitter, saying that the Constitution protects "uncomfortable" speech on such bulletin-boardlike sites. The government had accused the defendant, William Lawrence Cassidy, of harassing and causing "substantial emotional distress" to a Buddhist religious leader named Alyce Zeoli. He had posted thousands of messages about her, some predicting her violent death. He lived in California, she in Maryland. In his 27-page order, Judge Roger W. Titus wrote that "while Mr. Cassidy's speech may have inflicted substantial emotional distress, the government's indictment here is directed squarely at protected speech: anonymous, uncomfortable Internet speech addressing religious matters." In his order, Judge Titus drew an analogy to the colonial period, when the Bill of Rights was written. A blog, he said, is like a bulletin board that a person of that time might have planted in his front yard. "If one colonist wants to see what is on another's bulletin board, he would need to walk over to his neighbor's yard and look at what is posted, or hire someone else to do so," he offered. With Twitter, he went on, news from one colonist's bulletin board could automatically show up on another's. The postings can be "turned on or off by the owners of the bulletin boards," he wrote. In other words, one can disregard what is posted on a bulletin board. "This is in sharp contrast to a telephone call, letter or e-mail specifically addressed to and directed at another person," he concluded. Hanni Fakhoury, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, based in San Francisco, which filed a brief in support of the defendant's motion to dismiss the case, said he was heartened by the distinction that the judge drew between speech on a public platform, versus through e-mail or telephone. The order is among the first to address a recently expanded cyberstalking law and, as such, could have important repercussions. "This is an area where there has been very little case law," said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. "It is likely to be quite influential." Judge's order is here .

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It's Official: The LAPD Ain't Going to Google (GigaOM, 15 Dec 2011) - After a long-running controversy, the 13,000 employees of the Los Angeles Police Department will definitely not move to Google Apps. And that's final. On Wednesday, the Los Angeles City Council voted to officially kill a proposed deployment of Google Apps to the LAPD. The city's other 17,000 employees-those outside law enforcement - will keep using Gmail, the Los Angeles Times reported last night. Two years ago, the LA-Google deal, with CSC acting as contractor, was trumpeted by Google to show that Google Apps - Gmail, specifically - was ready for use by large organizations. But the LAPD had misgivings about how secure Gmail is. For law enforcement and court officials who must deal with sensitive information - evidence, names of confidential informants, etc. - security is critical. Because the LAPD must communicate with the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies, its communications must meet federal Criminal Justice Information Security standards, as well - something no cloud-based mail is yet able to do. That means the issue is not be as much about Gmail per se as cloud-based email, in general, a fact conceded privately by even some of Google's largest competitors. A spokeswoman for LA city council president Eric Garcetti reiterated that today. "This is about the security of cloud. There are federal as well as local security requirements that must be met," she said.

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Breach Response: The Legal View (BankInfoSecurity, 15 Dec 2011) - As legal issues surrounding data breaches become increasingly complex, more organizations are turning to attorneys for post-breach response, says Lisa Sotto, a managing partner for New York-based law firm Hunton & Williams. Complying with a multitude of regional and international laws when consumers' personal information is compromised is critical. And depending on the size and reach of the organization breached, that could mean complying with dozens of mandates and regulations in various parts of the country and world. Sotto, who focuses on privacy and information security, says the role of attorneys has changed significantly in recent years. After a data breach, attorneys handle many facets during the response process. "A lawyer who's well-versed in managing data breaches knows that she or he needs to manage really much more than the straight legal compliance issues," Sotto says in an interview with BankInfoSecurity's Tracy Kitten [transcript below]. Attorneys' duties post-breach typically include: forensics investigations; managing public relations; managing media issues generally; hiring and training call-center agents; retaining a mail house; retaining a credit monitoring and identity protection service; and dealing with the inevitable fallout of a data breach internally. "And of course, the lawyers also need to set things up to try to mitigate the risk of litigation that typically follows a security incident," Sotto says.

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PATRIOT Act Continues To Harm US Businesses: BAE Refuses To Use MS Cloud Over PATRIOT Act Fears (TechDirt, 15 Dec 2011) - Following on recent reports that, under the PATRIOT Act, European companies that use Microsoft's cloud offerings in Europe might find their data subject to US government snooping and seizure, it appears that some rather large European companies are rethinking their cloud deployment plans. UK defense contracting giant BAE had apparently planned to start using Microsoft Office 365, until it was pointed out that this could make their documents subject to US snooping under the PATRIOT Act... and the company changed its plans . At what point do PATRIOT Act supporters realize that such broad provisions don't help the US at all, but only lead to situations like this, where business is driven elsewhere. [Editor: see complementary story at ArsTechnica here .]

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The Online Media Legal Network Celebrates its Second Birthday! (Berkman, 15 Dec 2011) - We are pleased to announce that the Online Media Legal Network, the Citizen Media Law Project's legal referral service, is now two years old! The OMLN was started in Dec. 2009 as a way to help online journalism ventures and digital media creators find lawyers experienced in the sorts of legal issues media ventures face and to provide legal services on a pro bono or reduced-fee basis. Now, two years later, the OMLN has a network of 232 lawyers in 49 states and the District of Columbia who are willing to offer their services to needy citizen journalists and online publishers. And help they have: as of Dec. 9, the OMLN has over 170 clients and has found counsel for 347 different legal matters, ranging from setting up a business to authoring website terms of use to defending clients against defamation claims. We commemorated the event with a talk this week as part of the Berkman Center's Tuesday Luncheon Series, where we discussed the history of the OMLN, how the OMLN works, and what we've learned from it. [Editor: fairly dry podcast is here .]

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Metropolitan Museum Provides a Trove of Images for Google Goggles (NYT, 16 Dec 2011) - Over the past year visual-art obsessives have been having a field day with the feature of the Google smart-phone app called Google Goggles, which allows a user to shoot a picture of something - a painting, a photograph, a poster - and in seconds see an identification of the image and a list of search results for more information about it. The app, which was introduced for Android phones in late 2009 and last year for the iPhone, has been getting much better recently at digging up the title, artist and art-historical provenance of the work that the phone camera is looking at. Part of the credit for that can go to holders of huge art-image databases like the J. Paul Getty Museum, which provided Google several months ago with access to several hundred images from its collection, becoming the first museum to do so. Now the Metropolitan Museum of Art has gotten involved. It announced Friday that it has supplied more than 76,000 images of paintings, drawings, prints and photographs in its collection to the project, meaning that if you come across a reproduction of a painting that rings a bell - like "Juan de Pareja" - but can't remember who painted it, your phone can tell you within seconds that it was Diego Velázquez. The app then directs you to the work on the Met's site, for example, which tells you where to find the painting in the museum and gives you much more information about it. (Two-dimensional works function best with the app; it tends to struggle with sculpture, so the Met has so far stuck to paintings and other works on flat surfaces.)

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Don't Break the Internet (Profs Lemley, Levine & Post, in Stanford Law Review, 19 Dec 2011) - Two bills now pending in Congress-the PROTECT IP Act of 2011 (Protect IP) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House-represent the latest legislative attempts to address a serious global problem: large-scale online copyright and trademark infringement. 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, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet's extraordinary growth, and for free expression. [Editor: full paper here .]

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Do Individuals Have "A Right To Be Forgotten"? (MLPB, 19 Dec 2011) - Jef Ausloos, Electronic Frontier Foundation, has published The 'Right to Be Forgotten' - Worth Remembering? in Computer Law & Security Review (2012). Here is the abstract: "In the last few years there has been a lot of buzz around a so-called 'right to be forgotten.' Especially in Europe, this catchphrase is heavily debated in the media, in court and by regulators. Since a clear definition has not emerged (yet), the following article will try to raise the veil on this vague concept. The first part will weigh the right's pros and cons against each other. It will appear that the 'right to be forgotten' clearly has merit, but needs better definition to avoid any negative consequences. As such, the right is nothing more than a way to give (back) individuals control over their personal data and make the consent regime more effective. The second part will then evaluate the potential implementation of the right. Measures are required at the normative, economical, technical, as well as legislative level. The article concludes by proposing a 'right to be forgotten' that is limited to data-processing situations where the individual has given his or her consent. Combined with a public-interest exception, this should (partially) restore the power balance and allow individuals a more effective control over their personal data." Paper is here .

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NewtGingrich.com, Occupied (Washington Post, 21 Dec 2011) - When you go to NewtGingrich.com right now, you might end up on the Washington Post. The pro-Democratic super PAC American Bridge has bought the domain and programmed it to redirect to various Web sites, a clever attack on the former House speaker. The link might take you to Freddie Mac 's Web site, Tiffany's , information about Greek cruises , or to the ad Gingrich cut with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in favor of addressing climate change. Sometimes the page goes to a Post article about his campaign's June implosion . American Bridge has now put NewtGingrich.com on Craigslist , jokingly offering to sell the site for somewhere between $10,000 and a million dollars to "someone with greater need than us." The only other candidate whose .com website remains unclaimed by the candidate is Texas Gov. Rick Perry's RickPerry.com. For a few months, that site redirected to the campaign website of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas); it now goes to a generic page. As the Post reported recently , web domains are a new battleground in the 2012 campaign. Anonymous proxies often make it hard to determine which campaign is behind attack Web sites.

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The PeaceTones Legal Empowerment Project (Robert Ambrogi, 22 Dec 2011) - On the latest Lawyer2Lawyer podcast , we look at Peacetones , an initiative of the Internet Bar Organization to empower artists in the developing world with legal and technology tools to bring their music to the world online. Also in the program, we share a holiday treat from a great songwriter and longtime friend, attorney Larry Savell . Read more about this week's show and listen to the full program at the Legal Talk Network . [Editor: I'm on the board of InternetBar.org, where MIRLN is mirrored.]

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Volkswagen Agrees to Curb Company E-Mail in Off Hours (NYT, 23 Dec 2011) - Volkswagen has agreed to deactivate e-mails for its German staff members' company BlackBerrys when they are off duty. Under an agreement reached this week with labor representatives, staff members at Volkswagen will receive e-mails via BlackBerry from half an hour before they start work until half an hour after they finish, and will be in blackout mode the rest of the time, a spokesman for the company said. The new e-mail protocol for Europe's biggest automaker applies to staff members covered by collective bargaining, so it would seem that board-level executives will still be attached to their BlackBerrys. Very few companies have taken such drastic measures to force workers toward a better work-life balance. Deutsche Telekom, the telecommunications company, introduced a "smart device policy" last year that calls on workers to claim communication-free time when they are off work, in exchange for a promise that management will not expect them to read e-mail or pick up the phone at all times. "Mobile communication devices offer a great amount of freedom, but also embody the risk of no longer being able to switch off," the company said. In Europe's biggest economy, where burnout is blamed for almost 10 million sick days a year, labor representatives want to limit the amount of time that employees spend responding to e-mails on weekends and during vacation. Bitkom, a German technology organization, published a study this year showing that 88 percent of German workers are reachable for clients, colleagues and bosses by e-mail or mobile phone outside of working hours, compared with 73 percent two years ago. [Editor: see related story from MIRLN 14.16 involving Atos.]

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NOTED PODCASTS

Universal Access to All Knowledge (Long Now Foundation; Brewster Kahle; 94 minutes) - As founder and librarian of the storied Internet Archive (deemed impossible by all when he started it in 1996), Brewster Kahle has practical experience behind his universalist vision of access to every bit of knowledge ever created, for all time, ever improving. He will speak to questions such as these: Can we make a distributed web of books that supports vending and lending? How can our machines learn by reading these materials? Can we reconfigure the information to make interactive question answering machines? Can we learn from past human translations of documents to seed an automatic version? And, can we learn how to do optical character recognition by having billions of correct examples? What compensation systems will best serve creators and networked users? How do we preserve petabytes of changing data?

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RESOURCES

Defending Privacy at the U.S. Border: A Guide for Travelers Carrying Digital Devices (EFF guide, December 2011) - Legal analysis and presentation of technical measures to protect information from border search.

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BOOKS

In Search of Jefferson's Moose (book by David Post, Dec 2011) - In 1787, Thomas Jefferson, then the American Minister to France, had the "complete skeleton, skin & horns" of an American moose shipped to him in Paris and mounted in the lobby of his residence as a symbol of the vast possibilities contained in the strange and largely unexplored New World. Taking a cue from Jefferson's efforts, David Post, one of the nation's leading Internet scholars, here presents a pithy, colorful exploration of the still mostly undiscovered territory of cyberspace--what it is, how it works, and how it should be governed.

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DIFFERENT

Mysterious Paper Sculptures (Central Station, August 2011) - Those of you who don't keep up with Edinburgh's literary world through Twitter may have missed the recent spate of mysterious paper sculptures appearing around the city. [Editor: Whimsical charming story about a mysterious library visitor, bearing gifts.]

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LOOKING BACK - MIRLN TEN YEARS AGO

SOFTWARE ENABLES HANDS-FREE FLIGHT New technology from the NASA Ames Research Center allows a pilot to land a plane just by waving his hands around in the air. Rather than grasping the controls, the pilot dons a sleeve made out of a pair of old exercise tights with a series of metal buttons sewn on. The buttons pick up electrical signals from the nerves controlling the pilot's arm, and is capable of interpreting the signals precisely enough to land a plane safely. The real goal of the experiment is not hands-free flight, but using nerve signals to control equipment such as nanomachines without surgical implants. The technique could also eventually replace keyboards or joysticks, and prove useful for astronauts wielding tools while wearing bulky spacesuits. "This is a fundamentally new way to communicate with machines," says Charles Jorgensen, head of NASA Ames' neuroengineering lab. The technique has been tested in a simulated environment to land a damaged aircraft, with problems ranging from locked rudder controls to full hydraulic failure. In each case, the landing was successful, says Jorgensen. ("Hands-off Approach" New Scientist 2 Feb 2001) http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn387-handsoff-approach.html

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IT SECURITY GROUP GEARS UP (ZDnet, 6 February 2001) The IT Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) will use an anonymizing service when they begin sharing information on attacks and defenses next month. However, many companies are uncomfortable sharing information about their vulnerabilities with each other and with the government. Computer Associates, Microsoft, Oracle and 16 other major technology companies have put up $650,000 for the center's first year. The center is an outgrowth of a four-year, federal effort to secure the nation's critical information infrastructure against criminals, terrorist and garden-variety hackers. Internet Security Systems of Atlanta will run the operation. http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0%2C4586%2C2682476%2C00.html [URL expired]

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NOTES

MIRLN (Misc. IT Related Legal News) is a free e-newsletter published every three weeks by Vince Polley at KnowConnect PLLC. You can subscribe to the MIRLN distribution list by sending email to Vince Polley ( mailto:vpolley@knowconnect.com?subject=MIRLN ) with the word "MIRLN" in the subject line. Unsubscribe by sending email to Vince with the words "MIRLN REMOVAL" in the subject line.

Recent MIRLN issues are archived at www.knowconnect.com/mirln . Get supplemental information through Twitter: http://twitter.com/vpolley #mirln.

SOURCES (inter alia):

1. The Filter, a publication of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu

2. InsideHigherEd - http://www.insidehighered.com/

3. SANS Newsbites, sans@sans.org

4. NewsScan and Innovation, http://www.newsscan.com

5. BNA's Internet Law News, http://ecommercecenter.bna.com

6. Crypto-Gram, http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html

7. McGuire Wood's Technology & Business Articles of Note

8. Steptoe & Johnson's E-Commerce Law Week

9. Eric Goldman's Technology and Marketing Law Blog, http://blog.ericgoldman.org/

10. Readers' submissions, and the editor's discoveries.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

PRIVACY NOTICE: Addresses and other personal information provided during the subscription process will be kept confidential, and will not be used for any other purpose. top

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Saturday, December 03, 2011

MIRLN --- 13 November 2011 – 3 December (v14.16)

MIRLN --- 13 November 2011 - 3 December (v14.16) --- by Vince Polley and KnowConnect PLLC (supplemented by related Tweets: http://twitter.com/vpolley #mirln)

COMMENTS | NEWS | PODCASTS | LOOKING BACK | NOTES

ANNOUNCEMENT

(for ABA members)

On 24 October 2011, Dan Schwartz sent the following blast to an audience of ABA technology leaders. If you should have been on that list, consider yourself added. The more the merrier: " Dear Fellow ABA Member -- We all get a lot of ABA related e-mail. But, as members of the Standing Committee on Technology and Information Systems (SCOTIS), we ask for your indulgence for one more to introduce something, we believe, will offer great value to all of us and the ABA: an ABA Technology Stakeholders Community. What would YOU like to see the ABA do with technology? Join our forum. It's easy and it's free. (No lifetime commitment necessary, either). Use the following, easy-to-remember link and become engaged in the discussion: http://ambar.org/techatstake and feel free to share it with other ABA members via e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ or whatever other tool you like to use. We are reaching out to you because we have identified you as a technology stakeholder within the ABA. Whether through your position, your section, or just interest, we are trying to build a new community within the ABA -- one that isn't based on Section, but rather a love for and an interest in technology. Through a new technology forum (and eventually, some new-fangled way to communicate) we hope to reach out to various groups, to solicit input and discussion on important subjects, and share useful information. Ultimately, we hope that this forum will provide meaningful input to the ABA and its members, and be a place where ABA members can share information and discuss solutions to the technology issues the ABA faces.

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COMMENTS

re " Employers Demanding the Right to Remotely Wipe Employees' Phones " from MIRLN 14.05, a reader comments: Last summer [XYZ Co] changed its policy, and so will pay phone charges (including data), and the carrier will give you a "free phone", however if you want a smartphone to read email, then the employee is supposed to by the phone, but XYZ has a similar sting: "(1) I agree to allow XYZ to install or uninstall software as necessary to remotely manage and secure my PDA or mobile device; (2) I agree not to uninstall or disable XYZ installed software; (3) XYZ accepts no liability for loss of data or functionality on my PDA or mobile device; and (4) Upon ceasing to work for XYZ I accept that ALL data may be wiped from my PDA or mobile device." My 3.5yr XYZ owned smartphone died on Wednesday, so I'm a little hesitant about giving XYZ the rights to control my equipment, or even make the device stop functioning at my expense.

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NEWS

Utah Mayor Used Alias To Write Upbeat News Stories (NPR, 11 Nov 2011) - Disguising himself with an alias, the mayor of Utah's second-largest city has been writing upbeat freelance articles about his town for area news outlets because he claimed the media spent too much time on crime coverage. He unapologetically revealed himself this week, insisting the balance was needed. "I thought about all the people just reading about crime in our city and nothing better," West Valley City Mayor Mike Winder said Friday. "I'm trying to stand up for us because we do get the short end of the stick negative stories." Winder had been writing under the name Richard Burwash, an alias he actually swiped from a real man, a one-time professional tennis player from California that he found on the Internet. He said getting stories published by the Deseret News, KSL-TV's website and a community weekly was as easy as setting up a Gmail account and Facebook page. He communicated with editors by email and phone, never showing his face. As an unpaid writer for several months earlier this year, the so-called Burwash even quoted himself as mayor in some stories. In one published piece, he wrote about the opening of a Buddhist Temple in his Salt Lake City suburb, quoting himself as saying, "We applaud any time a group builds a place to celebrate peace and to encourage people to live better lives." [Editor: See also " Google+ Launches Guide for Politicians and Candidates " (Mashable, 28 Nov 2011)]

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Stanford Law Review Online Launched - Offers Timely Legal Analysis (Stanford, 11 Nov 2011) - The Stanford Law Review (SLR) launched a new website today, the Stanford Law Review Online offering timely, short-format, law-review-quality legal analysis. The site hosts perspectives , where multiple scholars weigh in on legal issues in the news (similar to newspaper op-eds for readers with a legal background). The new site also provides a forum to respond to law review articles published in the journal edition of SLR . The goal of the website is to provide a more flexible outlet to publish short, original legal scholarship and commentary on a faster time-frame with the same editorial quality that is the hallmark of the Stanford Law Review . The first perspective, California's De Facto Sentencing Commissions , by Stanford Law Professor Robert Weisberg is available online today.

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Site to Resell Music Files Has Critics (NYT, 14 Nov 2011) - Music fans looking to clear out some clutter can always try to sell their old CDs. But can someone resell an old digital music file of "Thriller" that's languishing on a computer? A legitimate secondhand marketplace for digital music has never been tried successfully, in part because few people think of reselling anything that is not physical. But last month a new company, ReDigi, opened a system that it calls a legal and secure way for people to get rid of unwanted music files and buy others at a discount. The service has already drawn concern from music executives and legal scholars, who say it is operating in a gray area of the law. Last Thursday the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the major record companies, sent ReDigi a cease-and-desist letter, accusing it of copyright infringement. John Ossenmacher, ReDigi's chief executive, contends that the service complies with copyright law, and that its technology offers safeguards to allay the industry's concerns that people might profit from pirated music. "ReDigi is a marketplace that gives users tools to be in compliance with copyright law," he said. "Before I put a file up for sale ReDigi says you will need to delete them, and if not it won't take them." When a user wants to upload a song for sale, ReDigi analyzes its metadata - a kind of digital fingerprint - to verify that it came from an official store like iTunes or Amazon. (It does not accept files ripped from a CD, or others whose provenance it considers suspect.) A desktop program then deletes any copies left on a user's computer, and can detect if that user tries to add copies later. Songs on the service, which is based in Cambridge, Mass., cost 79 cents, as much as 50 cents less than the price of new tracks at iTunes. ReDigi users also get coupons worth 20 cents for each song upload for sale, effectively reducing the cost of a track to 59 cents. ReDigi's fee ranges from 5 to 15 percent, a spokeswoman said. The company also plans to open a similar market for e-books, Mr. Ossenmacher said. ReDigi says it is legal under the first-sale doctrine, the idea that once someone buys a copyrighted item like a CD or book, that buyer is free to resell it. But legal scholars say that the law is unclear when it comes to digital goods because transferring a digital file from one party to another usually involves making a copy of it, something generally not allowed under copyright law. "The real challenge for the first-sale doctrine in the digital environment," said Mark A. Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School, "is that courts have generally said that if you've gone beyond using your copy, and made a new copy, then you're outside the scope of the doctrine." Jason M. Schultz, an assistant professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, said there were aspects to the first-sale law that may apply to digital goods, but have been largely untested in the courts. The recording industry association's letter to ReDigi, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, says that the company violates copyright by making copies of files, and by providing 30-second samples of songs without licenses. A spokeswoman for ReDigi said on Friday that the company had not received the letter.

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- and-

Authors Guild: Kindle Owners' Lending Library Is "Nonsense" (PaidContent.org, 15 Nov 2011) - The Authors Guild is taking a stand against the Kindle Owners' Lending Library, Amazon's new initiative allowing Kindle-owning Prime members to borrow free e-books. Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) is "boldly breaching its contracts" with publishers, the Guild contends, in "an exercise of brute economic power." The Kindle Owners' Lending Library contains over 5,000 titles, many of which are being included without publisher permission. In those cases, Amazon is simply buying a copy of the book at the wholesale price any time a Prime member borrows it (hence no "big six" publishers' titles are in the program, since they set their own e-book prices). When the program first launched, many publishers did not even know that their books were included. The Association of Author Representatives and others have raised questions over how authors whose books are included will be paid. The Authors Guild contends that the publishers who willingly included their books in the lending library (and were paid a hefty sum by Amazon to do so) are in the wrong: "While these publishers generally have the right to license e-book uses for many of their authors' titles (just as most trade publishers do), our reading of the standard terms of these contracts is that they do not have the right to do so without the prior approval of the books' authors."

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- and -

Cambridge University Press to Try Renting Academic Articles (ArsTechnica, 30 Nov 2011) - Ars' science articles link to the academic papers that are being discussed, and based on reader comments, people have a clear interest in looking over the publications. Unfortunately, that interest often runs into a significant hurdle, one that can be summarized as "they expect me to pay $30 to read that?" Now, one academic publisher is experimenting with a system that might get a few more people reading its products: it's offering to rent access to the articles. The publisher, Cambridge University Press, isn't a major force in the world of academic journals; many of its offerings, such as the Journal of Helminthology and the American Journal of Alternative Agriculture, appeal to very niche audiences. But it appears to be a reasonable attempt to find a balance somewhere between strict article purchasing and an open access model. Under the plan, users would pay a moderate fee for one-time access (£3.99/$5.99/€4.49) to a PDF of the article. They won't be able to save, print, or copy any of the text-just display it in their browser. Cambridge University Press plans on adding support for mobile browsers shortly. The prices still seem a bit high for a casual reader, but it's certainly a significant step down from the typical prices (for the journals in question, it represents an 86 percent discount). On its own, Cambridge University Press doesn't publish enough material that this will significantly change academic publishing. The best hope for this effort to have a larger impact would be if it inspired a larger publisher to perform a similar experiment.

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Title Firm Sues Bank Over $207k Cyberheist (KrebsOnSecurity, 14 Nov 2011) - A title insurance firm in Virginia is suing its bank after an eight-day cyber heist involving more than $2 million in thefts and more than $200,000 in losses last year. In an unusual twist, at least some of the Eastern European thieves involved in the attack have already been convicted and imprisoned for their roles in the crime. Sometime before June 2010, crooks infected computers of Vienna, Va. based Global Title Services with the ZeuS Trojan, giving them direct access to the company's network and online banking passwords at then-Chevy Chase Bank (now Capital One). On June 1, 2010, the thieves made their move, and began sending a series of unauthorized wire transfers to money mules, individuals who were hired to help launder the funds and relay them to crooks overseas. The first three wires totaled more than $200,000. When Global Title's owner Priya Aurora went to log in to her company's accounts 15 minutes prior to the first fraudulent transfers went out, she found the account was locked: The site said the account was overdue for security updates. When Aurora visited the bank local Chase branch to get assistance, she was told she needed to deal with the bank's back office customer service. Between June 2 and June 8, the thieves would send out 15 more wires totaling nearly $1.8 million. The bank ultimately was able to reverse all but the first three fraudulent wires on June 1. Global Title is suing Capital One, alleging the bank failed to act in good faith and failed to implement commercially reasonable security procedures for its online banking clients. The lawsuit notes that at the time of the breach, Capital One's online banking system used single-factor authentication; it allowed commercial clients to log in and to transfer millions of dollars using nothing more than a username and password.

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Pentagon: Offensive Cyber Attacks Fair Game (Washington Post, 15 Nov 2011) - The Pentagon has laid out its most explicit cyberwarfare policy to date, stating that if directed by the president, it will launch "offensive cyber operations" in response to hostile acts. Those hostile acts may include "significant cyber attacks directed against the U.S. economy, government or military," Defense Department officials stated in a long-overdue report to Congress released late Monday. But the report is still silent on a number of important issues, such as rules of engagement outside designated battle zones - a sign of how challenging the policy debate is in the newest and most complex realm of warfare. The statements are consistent with preexisting policy, but have never before been stated quite so explicitly, even in the Pentagon's recently released cyberspace strategy . That strategy focused on the importance of deterring attacks by building defenses that would "deny" adversaries the benefits of success. In the latest report, the Pentagon states that adversaries threatening a crippling cyber attack against the United States "would be taking a grave risk."

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Righthaven Case Ends in Victory for Fair Use (EFF, 18 Nov 2011) - In a victory for fair use, the publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Stephens Media, filed papers yesterday conceding that posting a short excerpt of a news article in an online forum is not copyright infringement. The concession will result in entry of a judgment of non-infringement in a long-running copyright troll case that sparked the dismissal of dozens of baseless lawsuits filed by Righthaven LLC. The case began when the online political forum Democratic Underground -- represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Fenwick & West LLP, and attorney Chad Bowers -- was sued by Righthaven for a five-sentence excerpt of a Review-Journal news story that a user posted on the forum with a link back to the newspaper's website. Democratic Underground countersued, asking the court to rule that the excerpt did not infringe copyright and is a fair use of the material, and brought Righthaven-backer Stephens Media into the case.

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Fair Use In European Law (Media Law Prof Blog, 21 Nov 2011) - P. B. Hugenholtz and Martin Senftleben, University of Amsterdam, have published Fair Use in Europe: In Search of Flexibilities. Here is the abstract: "There appear to be good reasons and ample opportunity to (re)introduce a measure of flexibility in the national copyright systems of Europe. The need for more openness in copyright law is almost self-evident in this information society of highly dynamic and unpredictable change. A historic perspective also suggests that copyright law, particularly in the civil law jurisdictions of Europe, has lost much of its flexibility in the course of the past century. By contrast, with the accelerating pace of technological change in the 21st Century, and in view of the complex process of law making in the EU, the need for flexible copyright norms both at the EU and the national level is now greater than ever. Against this background, the authors argue that the EU copyright acquis leaves considerably more room for flexibilities than its closed list of permitted limitations and exceptions suggests. In the first place, the enumerated provisions are in many cases categorically worded prototypes rather than precisely circumscribed exceptions, thus leaving the Member States broad margins of implementation. In the second place, the EU acquis leaves ample unregulated space with regard to the right of adaptation that has so far remained largely unharmonized. A Member State desiring to take full advantage of all policy space available under the Information Society Directive, might achieve this by literally transposing the Directive's entire catalogue of exception prototypes into national law. In combination with the three-step test, this would effectively lead to a semi-open norm almost as flexible as the fair use rule of the United States. Less ambitious Member States seeking to enhance flexibility while keeping its existing structure of limitations and exceptions largely intact, can explore the policy space left by distinct exception prototypes. In addition, the unharmonized status of the adaptation right would leave Member States free to provide for limitations and exceptions permitting, for example, fair transformative uses in the context of producing and disseminating user-generated content." The paper is here .

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Can A Copyright Be Assigned By Email? (Eric Goldman's blog, 21 Nov 2011) - Can a copyright be assigned by an exchange of emails? Section 204(a) of the Copyright Act provides that a transfer of copyright ownership is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or by such owner's duly authorized agent. The 11th Circuit has recently affirmed a lower court's decision that an exchange of emails was sufficient to constitute a contract to assign a copyright. The court's decision, however, does not seem to adequately address whether the email exchange satisfies the "writing" requirement in Section 204. Vergara Hermosilla v. The Coca Cola Company, No. 11-11317 (11th Cir. Nov. 3, 2011).

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New Version of NC SaaS Ethics Opinion (VirtualLawPractice, 22 Nov 2011) - The NC Bar has published the revised version of it proposed ethics opinion entitled "Subscribing to Software as a Service While Fulfilling the Duties of Confidentiality and Preservation of Client Property", 2011 FEO 6 on the website. It will also be published in the next issue of the NC State Bar Journal . You can read some of the history of this opinion in this post . After a year or more of subcommittee review and revision, this latest version will hopefully be the final one that the Ethics Committee recommends for adoption by the Council at their January meeting. The subcommittee removed the list of minimum requirements for the selection of a technology vendor. Many of the items on the list had raised concern as detailed here by myself and others. The new version of the opinion sticks with the "reasonable care" standard requiring the attorney to do his or her due diligence in researching the technology and any third-party provider. The proposed opinion states: "…a law firm may use SaaS if reasonable care is taken to minimize the risks of inadvertent disclosure of confidential information and to protect the security of client information and client files. A lawyer must fulfill the duties to protect confidential client information and to safeguard client files by applying the same diligence and competency to manage the risks of SaaS that the lawyer is required to apply when representing clients." The opinion then goes on to state that because technology and security risks change so rapidly, the opinion will not include minimum requirements that might quickly become outdated and create a false sense of security for practitioners. Instead, they suggest that in order to conduct due diligence the attorney can 1) look for confidentiality provisions in the vendor's user agreement or SLA, 2) review the SLA and any security policies, 3) evaluate how the vendor has stored secures the data and 4) review how the vendor backs up the data.

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Findlaw Legal Pulse as Launched - Aggregates Topical News and Social Media (BeSpacific, 22 Nov 2011) - News release : "FindLaw.com is introducing FindLaw Legal Pulse , a new content area that offers continuously updated legal headlines from around the world, along with news, photo feeds and analysis from such sources as Reuters, the Associated Press, New York Times and Washington Post. The content covers a broad range of law-related topics -- everything from Supreme Court decisions to legislative updates, everyday legal issues and even sports and celebrity news. FindLaw Legal Pulse offers tangible user benefits -- the news is up-to-date, comes from a rich variety of sources, and is tailored to audiences with legal interests." [Editor: so far, I'm not impressed - the above-the-fold stories (styled "Editor's Picks") haven't changed in a week.]

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Panel Admonishes Criminal Defense Attorney For Blog Naming Clients, Omitting Disclaimer (BNA, 23 Nov 2011) - A criminal defense attorney who blogs about criminal proceedings, including his clients' cases, violated Virginia lawyer conduct rules by including clients' names in blog posts without their consent, a Virginia State Bar disciplinary committee determined in an order released Nov. 8 (In re Hunter, Virginia State Bar, 3d Dist. Comm., VSB No. 11-032-084907, 11/8/11). The panel also found that the attorney's blog, This Week in Richmond Criminal Defense, hosted on his law firm's website, constitutes advertising and therefore should have included a disclaimer required by rules governing lawyer advertising. The panel's order publicly admonishes the attorney, Horace F. Hunter, and warns that further ethics violations will result in more serious sanctions. "Respondent's website discusses information regarding his clients' cases, the disclosure of which would be embarrassing or be likely to be detrimental to the client," the committee's opinion states. "Respondent did not receive consent from any of the clients listed in the postings on the respondent's web page prior to disseminating such case information."

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EU Privacy Law is No Excuse for Spoliation of Evidence (Steptoe, 23 Nov 2011) - European Union requirements to delete personal data once it is "no longer necessary" for business purposes do not excuse a company from U.S. law regarding spoliation of evidence. A decision last month by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in IO Group Inc., et al. v. GLBT Ltd., et al., rejected a British website operator's argument that its intentional destruction of emails relevant to copyright infringement litigation could not be considered spoliation of evidence because it was done per the requirements of the U.K. Data Protection Act 1998. This decision highlights the fact that U.S. courts often will not excuse noncompliance with U.S. law on grounds that complying would result in a violation of foreign law - a conundrum that is increasingly faced by companies that have data stored abroad but are subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

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Digital Downloads Sub for Weighty Scores (NYT, 24 Nov 2011) - Digital gadgetry has increasingly been making its mark on classical music performance. It hit a milestone this week at the New York Philharmonic. Jeffrey Kahane, the pianist and conductor who is making a guest appearance at the orchestra, used an iPad on Tuesday instead of a score to lead the orchestra in a Mozart symphony. It was a first for the orchestra, the Philharmonic said. Mr. Kahane said it was also his debut with the device in such a major setting. Mr. Kahane conducted from a harpsichord, improvising an accompanying part, or continuo, to the symphony. The sight of a computer tablet sitting atop a quintessentially nonelectronic instrument made of wood, strings and plectrums for plucking them was incongruous. Musicians more and more are using iPads and laptops instead of traditional paper scores, especially pianists. The Borromeo String Quartet makes it a regular practice. Wireless foot pedals or a quick screen tap make it easier to turn pages. Downloading scores for study or performance saves about 30 or 40 pounds of luggage while on the road, said Mr. Kahane, who is music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Mr. Kahane said the iPad would be impractical for a Mahler symphony, say, with its much larger scoring, and there is the danger of equipment malfunction. But tapping also eliminates the possibility of turning two pages at once, tearing out a leaf or pulling the whole score off the stand, as can happen, he said. He uses a stylus or other program features to mark the scores, many of which he downloads from open-source sites. Mr. Kahane said he had about 100 scores on his iPad, including Mozart's Symphony No. 33, the work played on Tuesday and scheduled for performances on Friday, Saturday and Tuesday.

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Web Poster's Anonymity Preserved By Appellate Decision (Chicago Tribune, 26 Nov 2011) - The name of an anonymous Web poster who ridiculed a former Buffalo Grove trustee's 15-year-old son does not have to be revealed, an appellate court has ruled in a case closely watched for its implications for Internet anonymity. "Encouraging those easily offended by online commentary to sue to find the name of their 'tormentors' would surely lead to unnecessary litigation and would also have a chilling effect on the many citizens who choose to post anonymously" on newspaper websites, the Illinois First District Appellate Court ruled. Putting publishers and website hosts in the position of "cyber-nanny" is "a noxious concept that offends our country's long history of protecting anonymous speech," Justice Terrence Lavin wrote.

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French IT Company Declares The Email Dead (Business Insider, 28 Nov 2011) - The CEO of one of Europe's largest IT companies has told his staff they are to stop emailing each other stating that it is no longer an "appropriate" communication tool. The Telegraph reports that Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos, wants to abandon email all together within 18 months. Instead, he wants to promote instant messaging and the good old fashioned spoke word. The Wall Street Journal reports that Breton hasn't sent a work email for three years. Now, France's former finance minister is hoping to pass his ethos on to his employees stating to the Telegraph: "It is not normal that some of our fellow employees spend hours in the evening dealing with their emails." "The email is no longer the appropriate (communication) tool." The newspaper also reported that only 11 percent of French 11 to 19-year-olds utilize email as a communication method. [Editor: Atos was part of Schlumberger, where I worked for 2 decades. They aren't (usually) crazy; maybe this story is incomplete. See also the story below under " LOOKING BACK "]

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Cablegate One Year Later: How WikiLeaks Has Influenced Foreign Policy, Journalism, and the First Amendment (EFF, 28 Nov 2011) - One year ago today, WikiLeaks started publishing a trove of over 250,000 leaked U.S. State Department cables, which have since formed the basis of reporting for newspapers around the globe. The publication has given the public a window into the inner workings of government at an unprecedented scale, and in the process, has transformed journalism in the digital age. In recognition, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was just awarded Australia's version of the Pulitzer Prize, in addition to the Martha Gellhorn journalism prize he won in the United Kingdom earlier this year. As Salon's Glenn Greenwald observed, "WikiLeaks easily produced more newsworthy scoops over the last year than every other media outlet combined." Yet at the same time, the Justice Department has been investigating WikiLeaks for criminal violations for doing what other media organizations have been doing in the U.S. for centuries-publishing truthful information in the public interest. Here is a look at Cablegate's impact on journalism surrounding six countries central to U.S. foreign policy, and why it is vital for the media to stand up for WikiLeaks' First Amendment right to publish classified information.

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D.C. Courts Fight the Future in New Rule Limiting Electronic-Device Use in Courthouse (Berkman CMLP, 28 Nov 2011) - The Blog of the Legal Times reports that the Superior Court of the District of Columbia - the local trial court for the nation's capital - has issued a new administrative order regarding use of electronic devices in the courthouse. And like other courts, the new rules impose a class system of "haves" and "have nots" - favored types of the people can have and use the devices, while everyone else can not. The rules also contain an archaic view of electronic devices that effectively means that even when the rules allow them to be used, they cannot be used for any modern, web-based functions. Unlike most other "state" courts , the D.C. Superior Court maintains an almost complete ban on photography in court. See D.C. Super. Ct. R. Crim. Proc. 53(b); D.C. Super. Ct. R. Civil Proc. 203(b); D.C. Super. Ct., Juv. Proceed. R. 53(b), and D.C. Super. Ct. Dom. Rels. R. 203(b). The Radio Television Digital News Association points out a limited exception to the ban: the juvenile and criminal court rules permit photography "in any office or other room of the courthouse" with the consent of the person in charge of the office or room and the person or people being photographed. In practice, this means that all such devices must be left outside the courthouse, or checked with court officers at the entrances. The new order , Admin. Order 11-17 (D.C. Super. Nov. 9, 2011) continues this policy, by generally requiring that "before entering any courtroom, everyone shall turn off all electronic devices in his or her possession. Pocket-sized electronic devices shall be turned off and stowed so that they are not visible." The order's definition of "electronic device" is expansive, and includes all types of cameras (whether film or digital), cell phones, computers, analog or digital recorders, MP3 players, "and any other device that is capable of receiving, transmitting, or recording messages, images, sounds, data, or other information by electronic means". The order specifically mentions that it covers "all members of the media and students, who may take notes manually," but the order also provides that "[m]embers of the media may be given permission by the presiding judicial officer to use electronic devices in the courtroom for official business." While the order says that this requirement applies to "everyone," it does not really apply to every person in the courthouse. The order goes on to state that "[t]his prohibition does not include a litigant representing himself or herself and to whom the court has given permission to use an electronic device or any person appearing before a judicial officer in the well of the courtroom if authorized by the presiding judicial officer to use an electronic device in the courtroom." The order also exempts "[m]embers of the Bar or other individuals who are authorized to sit in designated rows of the courtroom (such as pretrial service officers, probation officers, supervision officers, or social workers in court on official business)."

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Complaint: Medical "Copyright Over Your Comments" Contracts Are Illegal (ArsTechnica, 29 Nov 2011) - When our own Timothy B. Lee stepped into a Philadelphia dentist's office earlier this year, he had an unpleasant experience : the dentist required him to sign over control of all copyright in future online commentary related to that dentist. Here's how Tim described the visit: "When I walked into the offices of Dr. Ken Cirka, I was looking for cleaner teeth, not material for an Ars Technica story. I needed a new dentist, and Yelp says Dr. Cirka is one of the best in the Philadelphia area. The receptionist handed me a clipboard with forms to fill out. After the usual patient information form, there was a "mutual privacy agreement" that asked me to transfer ownership of any public commentary I might write in the future to Dr. Cirka. Surprised and a little outraged by this, I got into a lengthy discussion with Dr. Cirka's office manager that ended in me refusing to sign and her showing me the door." The contract in question came from Medical Justice , which claims to be "relentlessly protecting physicians from frivolous lawsuits." Over the last few years, the company has pioneered a strange niche in the medical business: providing contractual templates that first barred patients from commenting about their doctors online and later gave doctors the power to veto negative reviews. Is this legal? The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) filed a complaint today with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) arguing that Medical Justice was itself engaging in "deceptive and unfair business practices" through the sale of these contracts. The complaint argues that Medical Justice is "engaging in a deceptive business practice by selling contracts which are themselves deceptive to doctors and patients as to whether they are legally enforceable." CDT asks that Medical Justice be barred from selling these kinds of contracts to doctors, that it alert doctors who have already purchased them that the contracts are "likely unenforceable and illegal," and that it give up all money earned from the sale of the contracts.

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- and -

Medical Justice Capitulates by "Retiring" Its Anti-Patient Review Contracts (Eric Goldman, 1 Dec 2011) - It's been a rough week for Medical Justice, the company that tries to help doctors suppress patient reviews. First, the Center for Democracy and Technology filed an FTC complaint alleging three main points: (1) Medical Justice deceives doctors by selling them contracts that don't work as promised, (2) the effort to suppress patient reviews is unfair under Sec. 5 of the FTC Act, and (3) Medical Justice violates the endorsement/testimonial guidelines through efforts that appear to create fake reviews for doctors. See the CDT announcement . Second, Public Citizen filed a declaratory judgment action against a dentist who tried to use Medical Justice's contract to suppress a patient's review. The dentist didn't actually sue the patient, but he did send over a draft complaint. The DJ complaint touches on a number of interesting issues, including contract unconscionability and dentist ethics, but the copyright angles are perhaps the most interesting. See the Public Citizen announcement . Both CDT and Public Citizen acknowledge the DoctoredReviews website , which Jason Schultz, two Berkeley students and I launched a half-year ago as a way of calling attention to the problems being created by Medical Justice's contracts. Although I'm delighted that the website was helpful to them, I'm even more grateful that they took the website's advocacy and turned it into action. While the FTC complaint and lawsuit work their way through the system, they have already been effective: after going through multiple iterations of its review-suppression contracts, Medical Justice apparently threw in the towel and admitted it is dropping the contracts altogether. Timothy B. Lee at Ars Technica reports: "While we believe these agreements are honest, ethical, and legal, we are going to use this situation as an opportunity to retire these written agreements used since 2007," MJ CEO Jeffrey Segal told Ars on Wednesday. He claims that MJ will recommend to doctors that they stop using the agreements, and that patients will not be asked to sign any such agreements in the future."

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MyShingle Comments on Proposed Model Rule 5.3 [by] ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 (Carolyn Elefant, 30 Nov 2011) - Below is my final set of comments on the ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20′s proposals. My comments address the Commission's proposal to subject lawyers to the same level of supervisory oversight for passive cloud services as for human, non-legal service providers. For reasons discussed in this post , I strongly oppose any additional requirements which pose additional burdens on lawyers who seek to use the cloud. Moreover, I just don't see the need to extend the oversight and supervisory obligations of Model Rule 5.3 to passive services, except if the point is backlash against the cloud . Think about it - lawyers have long been permitted to rely on services like banking, phones and computerized legal research without the need for an express directive to oversee and instruct these vendors. As my comments discuss, lawyers must act prudently in selecting any service - that's not just an ethical mandate, but simple common business sense. We can't run effective profitable practices if we employ phone service that goes down every two days or legal research tools that produce inaccurate results. Do we really need more ethics rules governing selection of passive services? In addition, as my comments point out, it may well be impossible for lawyers - and particularly solos to meet the active oversight and instruction requirements proposed in Model Rule 5.3. Solos lack the bargaining power to force vendors to modify their services to our liking. So why impose a requirement that can't be enforced? You can read my full comments at the end of this post, and my earlier comments here .

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A Note to Our Readers About Comments (NYT Managing Editor, 30 Nov 2011) - Today we are introducing enhancements to our comment system to improve the community experience across NYTimes.com. The first thing you'll probably notice is an entirely new design, which for the first time brings our readers' comments onto the same page as the article or blog post. This improves the old system, which relegated them to a separate page. We are also adding new functions. Comments are now threaded, giving readers the ability to respond to one another. In addition, we've added tie-ins to social media: comments, both yours and others', can now be shared to Twitter and Facebook. And finally, we are introducing a program for "trusted" commenters -- those who have maintained a history of posting outstanding comments on the site. Submissions from these members of our community will not be moderated in advance. Trusted commenter status is offered by invitation only. ( Read more about this program .) We look forward to hearing from you. Please leave your reactions and questions about the new system in the thread below. We'll do our best to respond to as many as possible.

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Carrier IQ Tracking Scandal Spirals Out of Control (Mashable, 1 Dec 2011) - Carrier IQ, a diagnostic tool installed in millions of smartphones all over the world, is gathering a lot of info about your activity - possibly even recording keystrokes, content of SMS messages and more - and sending it to a third party. It's present on nearly all Android devices, but not Galaxy Nexus, Google Nexus One, Nexus S, or the Motorola Xoom. It's also present on iOS devices, but it seems to be active only when the device is in diagnostic mode. This is the short version of what is quickly becoming a very complicated story with huge implications for user privacy. Carrier IQ is a tool whose primary purpose is recording various info which helps carriers improve the quality of service for their customers. In October, researcher Trevor Eckhart discovered that Carrier IQ is recording, among other things, your every keystroke and possibly sending it back to Carrier IQ's servers. Carrier IQ responded by sending Ekchart a cease & desist letter and publishing a media alert, in which it claims the company is "not recording keystrokes or providing tracking tools." Fast forward to this week, when Eckhart posted video evidence (below) suggesting that Carrier IQ is recording keystrokes and reading incoming SMS messages on Android, more precisely on an HTC EVO 3D. Worse, the app cannot be stopped or removed by the user. While this doesn't prove that Carrier IQ is actually sending the data back to Carrier IQ's servers, it's definitely disconcerting to see all this done by an app which is completely out of users' control. Many questions are still left unanswered. We don't know what Carrier IQ does with the data it collects, or whether it sends keystrokes, SMS messages or other info back to Carrier IQ's servers. We don't know the nature of the deal between Carrier IQ and - seemingly - most of the world's carriers, since almost every device which is sold together with a carrier contract has the app installed. We'll keep you updated as the story unfolds.

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France Still In Search Of Perfect Cookie (Steptoe, 1 Dec 2011) - France's data protection agency, the Commission National de l'Informatique et des Libertés, has released yet more guidance on acceptable practices for implementing amendments to EU privacy law that requires website operators to obtain user consent prior to the installation of cookies. The latest set of guidelines reiterates the data regulator's intent to strictly apply active consent requirements in enforcing France's laws implementing the EU e-Privacy Directive, once again reminding website operators that browser settings alone are not sufficient to fulfill EU privacy obligations. This statement goes further than the agency's September guidance in clarifying what measures are necessary to comply with EU requirements by providing examples of adequate and inadequate website consent mechanisms. Even the loquacious Proust didn't need this many words to describe his wondrous madeleine in In Search of Lost Time.

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U.S. Publishes Final Rules on Student Privacy Law (InsideHigherEd, 2 Dec 2011) - The U.S. Education Department today published final rules to update the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, making relatively few substantive changes from proposed regulations that drew significant comment and quite a bit of criticism from some college groups. The rules give colleges and universities more latitude to share student-level information with state agencies and others, without student consent.

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NOTED PODCASTS

World of Lawcraft (Berkman Center, 4 Nov 2011; 32 minutes) - Video games aren't just, well, fun and games. When you pop open a video game - be it Farmville on Facebook for your smartphone or World of Warcraft on your $10,000 immersive gaming setup - you are entering into any number of different terms and conditions agreements about behavior and property that govern your playtime. But questions have started to arise as more and more games build the concept of virtual property into their play. New powers, levels, avatars, privileges - who do those things belong to, and under what jurisdiction do they fall? Greg Lastowka is a professor of law at Rutgers University and author of the book Virtual Justice: The New Laws of Online Worlds . Lastowka has given a great deal of thought to the virtual worlds of video games, and documented some of the cases where the laws of the game and the laws of real life clash, sometimes violently. [Editor: Interesting discussion, but I was surprised that he didn't touch on money-laundering issues in MMORPG environments. On that subject, Neal Stephenson's new book, REAMDE , is a pretty interesting read.]

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Michael Nielsen on Doing Science in the Open (Berkman Center, 25 Oct 2011; 72 minutes) - Consider the Polymath Project, an ongoing experiment in "massively collaborative" mathematical problem solving. The idea is to use online tools like blogs and wikis to collaboratively attack difficult mathematical problems. Michael Nielsen - author of the book Reinventing Discovery and an advocate of open science - discusses how online tools like the Polymath Project can be used to transform the way we humans work together to make scientific discoveries, and how the normally conservative scientific culture can become more open. [Editor: The podcast implicates knowledge-production (if not management) in the distributed academic sphere, with crowdsourcing, Communities of Practice, and cultural enablers/barriers. There's an interesting post by Nick Milton parsing some of the implications for knowledge management - " It's Not Always Experts Who Have the Answers ."]

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LOOKING BACK

SHORT MESSAGING MAKES A DENT IN E-MAIL USE E-mail use has fallen by 5% this year in the U.K., due to the popularity of short text messaging via mobile phones. According to a report for Barclays bank, the drop was even more dramatic -- 10% -- among 18- to 24-year-olds. "Young people aren't giving up on the Internet," says Barclays e-commerce chief Simon Newman. "They take what they want out of it and move on to other high-tech media for convenience and leisure." (Ananova 30 Mar 2001) http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_259919.html

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POORER COUNTRIES GET FREE E-ACCESS TO MEDICAL JOURNALS (Washington Post 9 Jul 2001) -- Mirroring the drug industry's newfound commitment to make medicines for AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis more widely available to Third World countries, six publishing houses recently announced they will provide free electronic access to about 1,000 medical journals to medical schools, research laboratories and government health departments in poorer countries. Institutions in countries in which the per-capita gross national product (GNP) is less than US$1,000 a year will receive the journals free. In countries where the per-capita GNP is US$1,000 to US$3,000, there would be a minimal charge. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33714-2001Jul8.html

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NOTES

MIRLN (Misc. IT Related Legal News) is a free e-newsletter published every three weeks by Vince Polley at KnowConnect PLLC. You can subscribe to the MIRLN distribution list by sending email to Vince Polley ( mailto:vpolley@knowconnect.com?subject=MIRLN ) with the word "MIRLN" in the subject line. Unsubscribe by sending email to Vince with the words "MIRLN REMOVAL" in the subject line.

Recent MIRLN issues are archived at www.knowconnect.com/mirln . Get supplemental information through Twitter: http://twitter.com/vpolley #mirln.

SOURCES (inter alia):

1. The Filter, a publication of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu

2. InsideHigherEd - http://www.insidehighered.com/

3. SANS Newsbites, sans@sans.org

4. NewsScan and Innovation, http://www.newsscan.com

5. BNA's Internet Law News, http://ecommercecenter.bna.com

6. Crypto-Gram, http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html

7. McGuire Wood's Technology & Business Articles of Note

8. Steptoe & Johnson's E-Commerce Law Week

9. Eric Goldman's Technology and Marketing Law Blog, http://blog.ericgoldman.org/

10. Readers' submissions, and the editor's discoveries.

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