Year: 2009
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Thoughts on juries for intellectual property lawsuits
Here’s a thought that’s been stuck in my head for the past few days. It would never be practical, but it’s an interesting idea to ponder. David Robinson tells me I’m not the first one to have this idea, either, but anyway… Consider what happens in intellectual property lawsuits, particularly concerning infringement of patents or…
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Fascinating New Blog: ComputationalLegalStudies.com
I was inspired to post the essay I discussed in the prior post by the debut of the best new law blog I have seen in a long time, Computational Legal Studies, featuring the work of Daniel Katz and Michael Bommarito, both graduate students in the University of Michigan’s political science department. Every single blog…
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Computer Programming and the Law: A New Research Agenda
By my best estimate, at least twenty different law professors on the tenure track at American law schools once held a job as a professional computer programmer. I am proud to say that two of us work at my law school. Most of these hyphenate lawprof-coders rarely write any code today, and this is a…
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A "Social Networking Safety Act"
At the behest of the state Attorney General, legislation to make MySpace and Facebook safer for children is gaining momentum in the New Jersey State Legislature. The proposed Social Networking Safety Act, heavily marked-up with floor amendments, is available here. An accompanying statement describes the Legislative purpose. Explanations of the floor amendments are available here.…
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Possible Opportunity for Outstanding Law Graduates
We are constantly looking for scholars of digital technology and public life to join us at the Center for Information Technology Policy. We’ll be making several appointments soon, and look forward to announcing them. Meanwhile, I wanted to highlight a possible opportunity for graduating law students who have a strong scholarly interest in cyberlaw (reflected…
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Adam Thierer on the First Amendment Twilight Zone
Thursday’s lunch talk here at CITP was by my co-blogger Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation. Adam is a leading voice in the debate over online free speech, with a particular focus on how to protect children from harmful online material while preserving First Amendment freedoms. In his lunch talk, Adam focused on…
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Fingerprinting Blank Paper Using Commodity Scanners
Today Will Clarkson, Tim Weyrich, Adam Finkelstein, Nadia Heninger, Alex Halderman and I released a paper, Fingerprinting Blank Paper Using Commodity Scanners. The paper will appear in the Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, in May 2009. Here’s the paper’s abstract: This paper presents a novel technique for authenticating physical documents based…
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Government Online: Outreach vs. Transparency
These days everybody in Washington seems to be jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. The latest jumpers are four House committees, according to Tech Daily Dose. The committees, like a growing number of individual members’ offices, plan to use Twitter as a new tool to reach their audience and ensure transparency between the government and the…
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Kundra Named As Federal CIO
Today, the Obama administration named Vivek Kundra as the Chief Information Officer of the U.S. government, a newly created position. This is great news. Kundra, in his previous role as CTO of the District of Columbia, made great strides in opening the DC government by publishing government data. When he spoke at our Thursday Forum…
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New Podcast: CITP Conversations
Over the last few months, as the pace of activity at CITP has increased, we’ve fielded a growing number of requests from points around the web, and around the world, for podcasts and other ways to “attend” our events virtually. We hear you, and we’re working on it. Today, I’m very pleased to announce a…