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 [...]
A Global Convention on Cybercrime?
Cybercrime has been much in the news lately, from phishing, to botnets, ATM hacking, stock price manipulation and hacking cars, to mention but a few of the many forms online crime can take. Though it is difficult to quantify just how much cybercrime is going on, one FBI source put the annual losses to businesses in the [...]
U.S. Senate Subcommittee Examines American Companies’ Compliance With Censorship Abroad
Ever since Google’s recent announcement that it would no longer comply with China’s requirements for censored search results, U.S. companies doing business in China have come under increased scrutiny from human rights groups and American lawmakers, the New York Times reports. This scrutiny is directed at the companies’ compliance with internet censorship demands from the [...]
French Security Bill To Authorize Internet Filtering
On February 16, 2010, the Assemblée Nationale, the lower house of the French legislature, approved the draft Loi d’Orientation et de Programmation pour la Sécurité Intérieure (Law on the Orientation and Programming for Internal Security, or “LOPPSI”[1]). After the DADVSI law of 2007, which criminalized Digital Rights Management (DRM) circumvention, and the controversial HADOPI law [...]
Could the WTO bring down the Great Firewall of China?
Google’s recent announcement that it is no longer willing to censor content on its China-based search engine, google.cn, has once again highlighted the difficulties U.S.-based online service providers face in the Chinese market. The reason given by Google for the move was a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on [its] corporate infrastructure originating from China,” [...]
STLR Link Roundup – January 15, 2010
Here’s the latest on the STLR radar: Twitter is a source of evidence for a murder charge, reports the New York Daily News. But could those tweets be copyrighted? Law.com’s Law Technology News weighs in. The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides a good, link-heavy analysis of the unanswered questions surrounding Google’s decision to stop censoring their [...]
STLR Link Roundup – January 8, 2010
Here’s the latest on the STLR radar: Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco decided to allow showing the trial challenging California’s Proposition 8 on YouTube, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. The Wall Street Journal Law Blog questions whether that’s a good thing. Patent Librarian notes that Wikipedia citations in patent applications are [...]
STLR Link Roundup – December 4, 2009
The latest on the STLR radar: Patent Docs reviews Senator Patrick Leahy’s proposals for patent reform. Third Circuit gives “Spam filter ate my filing notice” excuse a second chance, from the Technology & Marketing Blog. EFF sues to find out how the government spies on us using social networks; Indiana University students makes a Freedom [...]
Prison terms for Google executives in Italy?
An Italian prosecution against Google made the headlines again this week (New York Times, Bloomberg) with the news that prosecutors in Milan are pushing for three Google executives and one former executive to be sentenced to terms of imprisonment for their failure promptly to take down an offensive video from the Italian-language Google Video service [...]