As a follow-up to yesterday’s post regarding privacy, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals laid bare a flaw in the Communications Decency Act 0f 1996, granting websites immunity over liability for content uploaded by individual users. Apparently, it’s a license to exploit people. The case involves former Bengals cheerleader Sarah Jones and defamatory material uploaded to the gossip site thedirty.com. ...
What matters more to you, the right to privacy or the right to know? Or is it even reasonable to believe these rights are in conflict with one another? While there is some dispute as to whether or not the 4th Amendment implies a constitutional right of privacy in the United States, it seems that we have generally believed that ...
Yesterday’s New York Times offers a very well-articulated editorial by media writer David Carr on the larger economic cost of free media. Using an example of buying fresh fruit at a neighborhood stand, Carr questions his own instinct to undervalue the price of a bunch of grapes in context to the way in which so much access to “free stuff” ...
NOTE: Apologies in advance for the American-centric post, but what follows can only universally apply in the context of U.S. copyright law. Certain prominent figures making proposals for more limited copyright protections like to repeat the slogan, “We are all authors/creators now,” meaning now that we have the Internet and social applications designed to facilitate easy sharing of all sorts ...
The pen may well be mightier than the sword, but pens have been known to unsheathe a sword now and then. So what about video blogs and guns? In the wake of travesties like this latest shooting at UCSB, I’m sure the question raised at my dinner table last weekend was echoed in conversations around the country. Why are we ...
