Tim Armstrong reports in on what members of the Harvard Law School LLM Class of 2005 are saying about cyberlaw (internet governance, intellectual property, and more).  Tim also has great coverage of the Internet Law Colloquium‘s spam discussion.

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I agree with Prof. Bainbridge and others that the Supreme Court ought to strike down, on dormant Commerce Clause grounds, the discriminatory state laws against interstate shipments of wine.

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About a year ago, Diebold Corporation brought legal action against a group of students and others who posted to the web an e-mail archive that described, among many other things, potential shortcomings in the company’s electronic voting systems.  (See this briefing by Mary Bridges for context.)  Shortly thereafter, Diebold withdrew its claims when faced with substantial…

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My parents, Judy and Sean Palfrey, among 36 pediatricians, issued this open letter about the effects of the current administration’s health policies on America’s children.  One reporter covering the news conference in Washington, DC, today described my mom this way: “Dr. Judith Palfrey, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and past president of…

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Tonight’s win against the Devil Rays at Tropicana Field did the trick for the Red Sox, clinching at least a wild card berth in the playoffs.  The AL East division race isn’t over yet, either, as the Yankees are just a few games ahead going into the last 5 games or so.

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Two new/old entrants in the digital music mix this week — Virgin (subcriptions starting at $7.99/month for unlimited access to 1 million+ tunes) and eMusic (a bit more costly) — both of which are betting that Apple and Microsoft and the rest of the a la carte crowd have the pricing thing wrong.  From a transaction cost perspective, it…

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The Internet Engineering Task Force yesterday shuttered the MARID project that was seeking a standard for e-mail authentication.  It sounds as though the working group shut down over dispute around MSFT’s Sender ID proposal.  John Levine has much more. Today also happens to be spam day in my Cyberlaw and the Global Economy class.

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It’s just so extraordinary that a court would say: “Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way.”  The first sentence has the benefit of clarity; there’s something wonderful about clarity in the law, about bright-line rules.  But set that aside, and set also aside…

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The most-likely-to-succeed approach of curtailing spam is to mix a cocktail: some combination of technical standard-setting, changes in cultural norms surrounding to whom one connects, market decisions, a back-drop of legal provisions to prevent and punish the worst wrong-doing, and a heavy dose of cross-border cooperation on all fronts.  AOL dealt a blow, apparently, to Microsoft’s effort to spread its technical solution, Sender ID, which…

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Timothy Egan has written a good piece in the New York Times today on the youth vote in 2004 as compared to previous elections.  (Though I wonder, on page 2: is there any kind of blogging other than “computer-blogging”?)  The piece links up to one of the key themes of our conference coming up in…

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A provocative interview with a leading European law scholar, Thomas Hoeren, who is presently a visiting faculty member at the Oxford Internet Institute, who takes issue with the gospel of Lessig, talks about spam in Germany (opt-out; regulated as an unfair trade practice), and points out some other people whose work we should be reading.

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I wrote in an op-ed earlier this week in the Boston Globe about the digital copyright crisis about the importance of listening to customers and giving people more ways to go legit as one in a series of strategies to stop widespread illegal copying.  One idea that ended up mostly on the cutting room floor has to do with making greater…

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