Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Inc. magazine has published Part Two of their early look at my upcoming book, "The Laws of Disruption." (See ”When Collaboration and the Law Collide” )

I haven't posted much the last few months as I finished the manuscript for a new book, "The Laws of Disruption,” which appears in October. Inc. magazine has just published the first of a two-part advanced look at the book. (See ”The Next New--Potentially Illegal--Thing” ).

What has the on-going financial crisis to do with information law? Everything

Financial services today are regulated by laws written when Bonnie and Clyde were robbing banks with Tommy guns—that is, when money was a physical commodity. As finance has evolved into a virtual industry, particularly in the last twenty years, the regulatory system hasn’t kept up. As a result, we’ve seen an accelerating string of increasingly dangerous crises of confidence.

Last year, I complained about the Cablevision case (see ”IP Law vs Moore’s Law”), a decision I’m pleased to see was recently reversed on appeal. Cablevision was trying to replace set-top DVRs with a centrally-managed system, a common trend in computing these days as hardware and communications improvements make hosted applications (the new term is “cloud” computing) more attractive from a cost, management, and environmental standpoint. The move ran afoul of copyright, however, and the Second Circuit struggled mightily to find a way to make the law fit common sense.

I write in this month’s CIO Insight about the 9th Circuit’s en banc decision in the Roommates.com case. This important decision tested the limits of immunity for information service providers (in this case, the operator of a website that allows users to post roommate-matching ads) under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Act.

I have a short article in CIO Insight this month about the real meaning of the Writer's Guild of America strike.

The three-month strike was remarkable in that the sole issue, one the industry was willing to spend over $2 billion fighting, was when and how revenues from new and future digital channels would be allocated. What's remarkable about that is that so far there are no such revenues.

A few weeks ago, I published an op-ed opposing pending Net Neutrality legislation. The editorial appeared simultaneously on both CNet and ZDNet.

Of course there are many in the technology community who disagree with me and who believe that legislation is needed to ensure the free-flow of content regardless of its nature, source, or use. I didn’t really expect to change any minds so much as cast a shadow of a doubt for those who have already made up their minds.

This week, Microsoft dropped its appeal in the European version of the antitrust action against the company that has been proceeding for about ten years. The European Commissioner for Competition Policy Neelie Kroes notes that there are now "clear precedents" for enforcement of anti-competitive remedies levied against Redmond.

There are precedents all right. Very bad precedents, as we will see over the coming years as similar actions are brought (I predict) against other technology companies.

My column in the current issue of CIO Insight, “Battle Over Linux: When a Win May Not be a Win” , drew a lot of froth from Linux-happy bloggers who don't like to hear anything that isn't completely positive about their operating system of choice.

My crime was pointing out that partial summary judgment by a district court (in this case, in a lawsuit by SCO over the ownership of UNIX copyrights) is not the definitive victory the mainstream press made it out to be.

In my current column in CIO Insight, “The Pointless Privacy Debate” I write that the rhetoric spilled over data privacy issues is both unproductive and unreasoned.

The European Union, for example, recently hailed Google's pledge to anonymize retained search data after 18 months. Another EU directorate similarly hailed Google's earlier pledge to comply with EU requirements to retain private data for at least two years.