Epinions, The Path-Breaking Website, Is Dead. Some Lessons It Taught Us (Forbes Cross-Post)
Before Yelp and TripAdvisor, before blogs or social media, there was Epinions.com. Founded in 1999, Epinions was a consumer review website before we fully appreciated how much we needed consumer reviews. It made several advances over other websites of its…
Talk on Why State Legislatures Shouldn’t Regulate Internet Privacy
As regular readers know, I view state legislatures as currently the #1 threat to the Internet’s integrity. In the name of “protecting the kids” and “helping the Internet”, state legislatures are manufacturing a slew of anti-innovation laws that cumulatively threaten…
Daughter’s Celebratory Facebook Post Really “Sucked”–Gulliver Schools v. Snay
Patrick Snay was headmaster at Gulliver Preparatory School, a private school in the Miami area. The school didn’t renew his contract, so he sued for age discrimination and retaliation. The parties settled confidentially for $150k, broken down as $10k of…
My Wife Has Lung Cancer. Read Her Story
[Introductory note: I don’t normally cross-post from my personal blog, but this post is so important to me that I wanted to share it here as well.] Nothing in life prepared me for the moment when the doctor told me…
More Intellectual Property Trivia Questions (The Outtakes)
Recently I posted our IP trivia quiz from WIPIP. To prepare those trivia questions, my colleagues (Tyler Ochoa and Brian Love) and I made a list of potential questions and then picked our favorites. In this post, I’m sharing the…
How Well Do You Know IP Trivia? Let’s Find Out
Last week, the High Tech Law Institute hosted WIPIP, a conference where IP professors and fellows present their academic works-in-progress for peer feedback. As part of the festivities, we had an IP trivia night–which I believe is the first IP…
H2 2013 Quick Links, Part 5 (Miscellaneous)
* Ars Technica: How the feds took down the Dread Pirate Roberts. A great story on how hard it is to remain anonymous online against determined federal agents. * Nice Reuters retrospective on Judge Rader. * DailyDot: The battle to destroy Wikipedia’s biggest sockpuppet army. Related: Is Wikipedia…
H2 2013 Quick Links, Part 4 (Social Media, Advertising, E-Commerce)
Facebook * MarketingLand’s coverage of Facebook’s increasingly complicated algorithm for ranking news feed stories. * People v. DeJesus, 2013 WL 6327657 (Cal. App. Ct. Dec. 4, 2013): As for defendant’s claim about an Internet posting to a group as potentially violating the trial court’s…
H2 2013 Quick Links, Part 3 (Content Regulation)
Section 230 * The Good Wife on CBS had an episode, “Whack a Mole,” that addressed Section 230. It got Section 230 right on defamation damages but wrong on injunctions. * Preliminary injunction in Backpage v. Hoffman, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 119811 (D.N.J. Aug. 20, 2013)….
H2 2013 Quick Links, Part 2 (Privacy, Search Engines)
NSA * WaPo: The NSA seems to really enjoy exploiting high profile tech companies. * The Guardian: the Snowden incident portends the death of the Internet. * The Switch: Yes, there actually is a huge difference between government and corporate surveillance. * American Panopticon: How a…