Stanford Center for Internet and Society

The Court of Special Appeals of Maryland reinstated the Maryland Commercial Electronic Mail Act (MCEMA), reversing a Circuit Court ruling holding that MCEMA violated the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution. The Court also reversed the lower court’s holding that Maryland lacked personal jurisdiction over defendant First Choice Internet, Inc. (First Choice), a New York-based Internet marketing company, and its holding that defendant Joseph Frevola, a New York resident and president of First Choice, could not be held personally liable for First Choice’s alleged MCEMA violations. Plaintiffs MaryCLE, LLC (MaryCLE), a Maryland-registered consumer protection company based in Washington, D.C., and defendant NEIT Solutions, its interactive computer Internet service provider, brought an action under MCEMA against First Choice and Frevola. Over the course of two months, MaryCLE received 83 unsolicited emails from First Choice, all containing misleading information as defined in MCEMA. MaryCLE alleged that it opened all these emails in Maryland. The company replied to each email asking First Choice to remove it from its mailing list. These attempts were unsuccessful until MaryCLE sent a letter via postal mail to Frevola notifying him of the MCEMA violation, at which point the emails ceased. MaryCLE subsequently commenced this action.

The United States District Court for the District of Nevada granted Defendant Google, Inc.’s motions for summary judgment, finding Defendant did not infringe Plaintiff web site author’s copyright by maintaining a copy of Plaintiff’s works in its online cache and allowing search engine users access to the cached copy. Defendant uses an automated program (“Googlebot”) to crawl the Internet, analyzing and cataloging web pages. The Googlebot also makes a copy of the pages it finds and stores them in a temporary cache on Defendant’s servers. Web site owners can include a “meta-tag” in the computer code for their web pages to tell Defendant not to cache their pages (“no-archive meta-tag”). These meta-tags are an industry standard. When a user’s search results are displayed, Defendant shows a large link to relevant web pages and a smaller link to its cached copy of each page (unless the web page owner opted out through the use of meta-tags). The cached copy is useful when the web page is inaccessible, the web page has changed, or when users are having trouble finding their search terms (which Defendant highlights in the cached copy). The cached copy has a disclaimer at the top of the page stating it is Defendant’s copy of the page and providing two links to the actual website.

It's disappointing that the Senate's first response after learning the President has crossed the line, is to move the line without considering why it was there to begin with.

Developments last week suggest that lawmakers' investigation into the president's warrentless domestic spying program may be hijacked by an effort to pass legislation that would legalize his actions, codifying the power he's claimed under color of his general authority to conduct a war on terror.

While providing statutory cover for the surveillance may alleviate the “constitutional crisis” triggered by the president acting without Congress' permission, it does not address the real question the program raises: should the government be listening to the conversations of thousands of Americans who have done nothing more than communicate with someone on the government's terrorist watchlist?

I saw a screeing of Davis Guggenheim's documentary 'Teach' Friday night. Unbelievably inspiring. This 35 minute version is designed to encourage people to go into teaching, and he's tagged it with a creative commons license and made it available for free download on legaltorrent so as many people can see it as possible. excellent.

This Law Seminar conference "Blog Law and Blogging for Lawyers" looks pretty interesting if you're a lawyer trying to learn more about legal issues in blogging for your clients, or if you want to start your own blog. I will be speaking early Friday 4/21 morning on developments in the area of cyberlaw that bloggers and lawyers dealing with blogs should know about.

Monday February 20, 2006
12:30-1:30 PM
Room 280A
Stanford Law School
Open to All
Lunch Served

Human rights atrocities that occur on a massive scale are often the result of deliberate policy, and international legal accountability requires that we prove not only that abuses occurred, but that violence was the deliberately planned. Statistical patterns in the violations may provide evidence of policy, but finding these patterns requires a creative use of data and models. This talk will review the use of data ranging from official border registries to cemeteries, declassified documents, and qualitative victim interviews, each analyzed by a wide range of techniques. Examples will be presented from El Salvador, Guatemala, Kosovo, Timor-Leste, and Chad.

Feb 17- Moderating panel on "Domestic Spying—Privacy & Security Interests" at Stanford Law & Policy Review Symposium.

Wowsers!

In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a federal judge has ordered (pdf) the Department of Justice to process and release documents related to the Bush Administration's warrantless surveillance program by March 8. It is the first court opinion addressing the controversial domestic spying operation. "President Bush has invited meaningful debate about the warrantless surveillance program," U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy wrote. "That can only occur if DOJ processes [EPIC's] FOIA requests in a timely fashion and releases the information sought." (Feb. 16, 2006)

I never publish press releases here but I'm going to make this exception. Patrick Ball is a pioneer in the use of technology to assist human rights activists. When I met him he was helping human rights workers in South and Central America use cryptography for their communications so they could avoid arrest and torture by their governments. Now, he's using databases to document human rights abuses in a form that can be used in international crimes against humanity and genocide trials. In 2002, he testified at Slobodan Milosevic's trial at the Hague on on killings and refugee movement in Kosovo.

TSA announced in hearings before the Senate Commerce Committee that they've suspended plans for Secure Flight, the "ambitious program to check every domestic airline passenger’s name against government watch lists."

This appears to be largely based on a GAO report (.pdf) finding that the agency "has not followed a disciplined life cycle approach to manage systems development, or fully defined systems requirements" and recommending that “much work be done” before the system can go live.