| Cyberspace in Court |
This blog was inspired by Freshman Seminar: Cyberspace in Court by Phil Malone
September 20th, 2007
The Internet is an infinite source of distraction from my classes. And that’s probably true for most other college students. But what about a class on the Internet? Could I then justify my Internet surfing habits?
To my delight, it did—for one class. The very first thing we did was something I...
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September 27th, 2007
Readings:
Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation US 9th Circuit Court, July 7. 2003
Mcgraw-Hill v. Google, No. 05 CV 8881 (SDNY 10/19/05):
Perfect 10, Inc., v. Amazon.com, Inc. and Google, Inc., 487 F.3d 701 (9th Cir. 2007)
From the point of view of a publisher, recording company or movie producer,...
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October 4th, 2007
Readings:
MGM v. Groskter:
- Supreme Court decision (pdf)
- Pam Samuelson, "Legally Speaking: Did MGM Really Win the Groskter Case?" (pdf)
Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Viacom International, Inc., v. YouTube, Inc. and Google, Inc., No. 1:07-cv-02103 (LLS) (FM) (SDNY)
- WSJ Online discussion,...
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October 11th, 2007
In 2005, Sony BMG thought they had come up with an effective way to limit of file-sharing. By adding XCP (extended copyright protection), Sony could limit their music files to sterile burning – meaning that the files could be copied once, but copies could not be made of the copies. This method allows...
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October 11th, 2007
For an act that claims to govern the "digital millennium," the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) behaves awfully like a relic from the analog age. Our discussion this week, which focused on the effects of the 1998 DMCA and attempts at digital rights management, essentially came to this conclusion...
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October 18th, 2007
Since 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has sued over 22,000 individuals for violating copyright infringement through P2P file-sharing. The very first of these cases to go to court, Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas, was decided on October 4, 2007. The jury found Thomas liable...
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October 18th, 2007
Last time we left off, we had concluded that the music industry needed a new model. Suing your current and potential customers is not the way to conduct business – or is it?
With the facts in place, it seems like suing individuals is the music industry’s new business model. Since the RIAA first...
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October 25th, 2007
While good deal of this blog has dealt with how you are not as anonymous as you think on the Internet, you are anonymous to the average person. As long as you don’t break any laws or threaten anyone’s life, nobody’s going to subpoena an IP address to find out who you are. After all, I am as good...
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October 25th, 2007
With Wikipedia becoming the most convenient source of information on the Internet, its reliability has become a major source of contention. This becomes a legal problem when the subject of Wikipedia articles is a living person complaining of libel.
In the November of 2005, John Seigenthaler Sr, a...
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October 30th, 2007
When I first walked into my interview for this blog, I was fresh out of my first Cyberspace in Court class, my mind swimming with ideas about the Internet and its relevant controversies. As I learned the specifics of this blogging job, a part of my brain – the part that knew of copyright law but didn’t...
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November 1st, 2007
As we continued to discuss the regulation of “objectionable speech” on the Internet, this week’s overarching topic was the regulation of free speech through government regulation. Seeing Internet pornography and citizen journalism lumped together on the syllabus had initially taken me by surprise,...
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November 1st, 2007
Another line made increasingly fuzzy by the Internet is the distinction between citizen and journalism. These days, everyone with Internet access can set up a blog, everyone with a blog can call themselves a journalist, so everyone can be a journalist, right?
For the second part of class, David Ardia...
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November 8th, 2007
Google knows a lot about me. It knows the subject of every email I’ve sent and received in the past 3 years. It knows I’ve been looking up the history of Wow chips. (And exactly which links I clicked on.) It knows I have math class every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 10. All this information...
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November 15th, 2007
If my last post described how much of my life is run by Google, this post shows how pathetically chained I am to Facebook. Over the course of this Sunday afternoon, I sat down with the intention of doing homework, only to end up on Facebook instead, discussing Thanksgiving weekend plans, browsing Harvard-Yale...
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November 15th, 2007
Is anonymous speech “too free”? As we have discussed before, the digital world’s unique cloak of anonymity allows a degree of freedom in speech that had never existed in the analog universe. The Internet is truly a level playing ground. But is absolute freedom in speech really what is best?
According...
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November 15th, 2007
The September 2005 case of Doe v. Cahill brings together many salient issues that we had discussed from previous weeks. At the heart of the case is a defamation case. The prior November, Patrick Cahill, a councilman in Smyrna, Delaware, filed case against 4 John Does for defamation. The allegedly defamatory...
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November 19th, 2007
I admit it: I just really wanted to title a blog post “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” But your humble blogger would like to make clear that this is still very much related to the issue at hand – student speech. The Supreme Court case “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” is more formally known as Morse v. Frederick. High...
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November 29th, 2007
As the semester winds down (yikes, already?), we’re beginning work on a final research project for the course. Thus, half of this week’s class was devoted to acquainting us freshman with the resources of the Harvard’s 90 or so libraries for research. (Apparently, no one knows for certain the exact...
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December 4th, 2007
In my post a couple of weeks ago, I discussed Facebook's Beacon program and optimistically hoped for better user privacy controls. After MoveOn.org raised some uproar and created Facebook protest group popped up, it looks like Facebook has backed down a little, changing the service to opt-in rather than...
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December 6th, 2007
It’s unfortunate that these two complex issues or network neutrality and antitrust had to be jammed into one class, though that’s probably a reflection of the interests of the class as a whole. Privacy and copyright were issues especially close to our own experiences as college students. In those...
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December 13th, 2007
We barely have enough for our first life, who has time for Second Life?
The answer, to that question posed by a classmate, is a lot people, up to 20 million of them. For anyone unfamiliar with Second Life, it is an interactive virtual world in which players create avatars (their “in world” digital...
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December 13th, 2007
As my last post discussed the legal aspects of Second Life, I'd like to also spill some thoughts on the social implications of Second Life because it is something easy to get hung up on. When we hear about people spending 10 hours a day hunched in front of the computer manipulating their digital lives,...
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© 2008 TheFinalClub.org, All rights reserved.
TheFinalClub.org has no affiliation with Harvard University.
User-generated content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution
Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.