There they go again.  The French parliament has passed a law that would fine or even cut off Internet access for a year for users caught illegally downloading copyrighted material.  The “three strikes” legislation, considered in other countries, now has to go through conference committee and faces constitutional challenges.  President Sarkozy is in favor of [...]

Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears all appeals in patent cases, ruled on an on-going legal battle between Microsoft and Alcatel-Lucent, now seven years old.  Brent Kendall of the Wall Street Journal reports on the decision here. The full text (not recommended) can be found here. Whether the [...]

I’m pleased to be one of the initial signatories of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Call to Defense and Celebration of the Online Commonwealth. The document, drafted by Cyberspace law pioneer David R. Johnson, nicely balances the remarkable success of online self-regulation with the need for innovative solutions to new problems posed by new [...]

Just as I was finishing the manuscript for “The Laws of Disruption,” my old friend David Post published “In Search of Jefferson’s Moose ” a wonderful monograph on, as he says, the state of cyberspace. Unlike many law professors who write books about Internet technology, Post is no dilettante. He has a deep understanding of [...]

The deadline for filing objections to Google’s settlement with the Author’s Guild and the Association of American Publishers has now past. Miguel Helft summarizes some of the last-minute objections in an article in yesterday’s New York Times. I explained some of these arguments in an earlier post. What is interesting to note about the last-minute [...]

No doubt the gooiest problem at the intersection of technology and law continues to be what is unhelpfully referred to as “privacy.” I’ve clipped five articles in just the last week on the subject, including several about Facebook’s efforts to appease users and government regulators in Canada, demands by Switzerland to Google to stop its [...]

As L. Gordon Crovitz of The Wall Street Journal points out in his August 17th, 2009 column, 60% of all books are out-of-print but still protected by copyright. Yet Google’s effort to make these books available through cheap digital copies is being met with fierce opposition from an unlikely coalition of publishers, libraries, European governments [...]

A new report just out from Forrester confirms my long-standing view that the migration of American households to a digital life is accelerating, the leading side-effect of the Law of Disruption. A summary of the report in The New York Times on Sept. 2, 2009 notes that the speed with which consumers are adopting disruptive [...]