Over the past three years, students in Columbia Law School’s Lawyering in the Digital Age Clinic have teamed up with the judges at New York City’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings and the Legal Aid Society to create a website to help people who had their cars confiscated during an arrest get their cars [...]
Recent Blog Posts
STLR Link Roundup – November 30, 2011
Online shopping sites celebrated their second annual Cyber Monday, with more than 75% of online retailers offering some sort of discount for making purchases on the Monday after Thanksgiving. This year’s Cyber Monday comes after shoppers set a record for online spending – racking up $816 million — on Black Friday. The next status conference [...]
Your Smartphone; A Prosecutor’s Best Witness
Introduction Witnesses in the United States may choose to exercise their right to “plead the Fifth,” or refuse to answer a question because the response could provide self incriminating evidence of an illegal act. But how strong is this right if a prosecutor is already aware of where a witness was, what they saw, what [...]
RE: Cloud Science, Dropbox, and Behavioral Economics
What is a cloud? I’m no meteorologist. In fact I can hardly spell the word (I mean, I have troubling spelling “meteorologist”; I can spell “cloud”). But I know what I see – and that’s that clouds are externally opaque. Still we assume they work. In the context of cloud computing, this much is true [...]
English Premier League Loses Match in European Court
This week, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) handed down a hotly anticipated ruling in Football Association Premier League v. Murphy, et al. The case pitted the English Premier League (EPL), the highest tier of club soccer competition in England, against, among others, Karen Murphy, a Portsmouth-area pub owner. Why would a billion-dollar sports juggernaut [...]
AT&T Says One Antitrust Suit is Enough!
In the wake of the Justice Department’s antitrust suit to stop AT&T’s $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile, Sprint Nextel (the nation’s 3rd largest wireless carrier) and Cellular South (a smaller wireless company in the Southeastern U.S., which changed its name to C Spire last week) filed similar suits seeking to enjoin the merger. The suits [...]
STLR Link Roundup – October 14, 2011
This week, Aurobindo Pharma became the first major generic drugmaker to join a patent pool designed to increase accessibility of AIDS/HIV treatments to the poor around the world. Lawmakers from across the country have written the Obama Administration in hopes of housing new satellite branches of the Patent and Trademark Office in their respective districts. [...]
Privacy Rights Re-“Kindled”: eBook Reader Privacy
There has been a tremendous sea change in the publishing landscape over the last several years. As people have been shifting from buying books in brick and mortar stores like Borders and Barnes and Noble, to online distribution of physical media like Amazon, to the rise of electronic distribution like Amazon’s Kindle or Apple’s iBooks [...]
STLR Link RoundUp – October 07, 2011
Tech visionary Steve Jobs passed away on October 5, 2011. His name was listed on 317 Apple patents, including the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. Sprint is urging the FCC to quickly hold hearings to rule on whether the transfer of spectrum licenses from T-Mobile to AT&T serves the public interest. AT&T’s [...]
STLR Link Roundup – October 5, 2011
Privacy rights advocates filed a letter with the FTC, asking the commission to investigate Facebook’s user tracking after log off and whether Facebook’s new Ticker and Timeline feature constitute unfair or deceptive business practices. The United States signs the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement this Saturday, an accord targeting intellectual property piracy. Some academics argue, however, that [...]