John

  • Municipal WiFi

    As we become more reliant on computers in business and education a new type of poverty is created, that of technology haves and have-nots. This gap is commonly referred to as the “digital divide.” This Wired magazine article discuss one effort to bridge that gap using the power of free, wireless Internet access. http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/04/wifiproject_0403

  • Register – Google Changes “Street View” Privacy Policy

    Google’s Street View — think of it as zooming in beyond the rooftops from Google Earth — captures precise images of everything in a 360? radius as its photographers (mounted cameras in VW Bugs) cruise U.S. streets. The benefit is that you can check out, say, landmarks for that restaurant you want to visit,…

  • Tracking Electronic Downloads

    Content owners and their associations (in the U.S., the RIAA and MPAA) are developing more sophisticated techniques for detecting pirated content. Two articles: The first from a pro-sharing site focused on the Bit Torrent technology discussing methods in the U.K. ; the second an article on software employed by copyright holders to track and…

  • Document Retention Policies

    As more information is stored electronically, producing that information for the purposes of litigation creates challenges and perils for companies. In the U.S., new rules governing the retention and production of electronically stored information (“ESI”) went into effect in December, 2006, rules that impose obligations for record retention. http://www.masslawblog.com/?p=122 http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/continuity/features/article.php/3642421 https://www.lexisnexis.com/applieddiscovery/lawlibrary/whitePapers/ADI_WP_ElementsOfAGoodDocRetentionPolicy.pdf

  • HP Leak Case

    One of the most fascinating examples of how technology may be used to infringe on one’s privacy is the recent case involving HP that turned on three factors:- One, the availability of personal information online (in this case cell phone records) – Two, the lack of effective authentication on those sites – Three, the…

  • Turnitin Case

    Technology presents all manner of new challanges for copyright law… Turnitin is a Web-based tool to allow educators to check the originality of student’s work — it does block text comparisons of papers against its database to find exact or too-close matches. Problem is (from an IP law standpoint) is that students have a…

  • Generation Y and Privacy

    To those born in the last twenty-five years, attaining their “fifteen minutes of fame” is as easy as populating a MySpace or facebook template. In contrast to the tech-savvy of older generations they are untroubled by the privacy implications of posting personal information on line. They often view these networking sites as digital confessionals…