Stanford Center for Internet and Society

In June, I am moving to the ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich, Switzerland. We have several vacancies for doctoral students (law and related disciplines) and an economics postdoc position.

Search is becoming an increasingly important topic in cyberlaw. After several sessions and conferences looking at the issue (including at CFP 2004, Yale Law School and in Berlin), Niva Elkin-Koren and Michael Birnhack from the University of Haifa in Israel have now put together a great conference on The Law of Search Engines, which I am currently attending. I won't do a full blogging of the conference, but I just wanted to make a few notes of what I found particularly interesting:

In May 2007, the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, in collaboration with Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, will hold a "Workshop on Commons Theory for Young Scholars". Larry Lessig and Tim Wu will provide feedback to presentations by young scholars (doctoral students, post-docs and assistant professors). More information about the call for papers, which is still open, is available online at http://www.coll.mpg.de/commons_theory.html.

In May 2007, the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, in collaboration with Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, will hold a "Workshop on Commons Theory for Young Scholars". Larry Lessig and Tim Wu will provide feedback to presentations by young scholars (doctoral students, post-docs and assistant professors).

More information about the workshop is available online at http://www.coll.mpg.de/commons_theory.html.

The problems concerning electronic voting machines and copyright law which have been discussed in the U.S. for some time, in particular concerning Diebold (see here and here), are slowly appearing in other countries as well. In Germany, at the last federal election, in about 2,200 of approximately 80,000 voting districts, electronic voting machines of the Dutch manufacturer Nedap were used. In order to be used in official elections, under German federal election law, this machine type had to get an approval by a federal agency (the national metrology institute). This approval certifies that the voting machine is compliant with the requirements set forth in the election statute.

Recently, a U.S. patent application by Philips was published. Philips seeks a patent for an "apparatus and method for preventing switching from a channel during an advertisement display". Basically, it is a system that could be included in the Multimedia Home Platform and would detect a special flag which would be broadcast during TV commercials. Upon detection of the flag, the system would prevent viewers from zapping to other channels unless the pay some fee.

Trusted Computing Between Closed and Open Architectures. Audio version of a talk at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, March 7, 2006. It's also available on iTunes.

That's a nice quote of Steve Jobs: "If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own."

Vivek Haldar, Semantic Remote Attestation, Ph.D. thesis, UC Irvine, 2006.

Arnd Weber, Dirk Weber, Legal Risk Assessment of Trusted Computing - A Review, Indicare Monitor 2(12), February 2006.