Stanford Center for Internet and Society

A colleague and I were just discussing a new international working group, chaired by the FBI, which has “band[ed] together to fight cyber crime in a synergistic way.” The group is called the Strategic Alliance Cyber Crime Working Group; it even has a tagline: “Cyber Solidarity: Five Nations, One Mission.”

I had the pleasure of participating in the excellent Legal Futures Conference sponsored by CIS and Google last month, where I was on a panel of “lightning talkers” tasked with answering the following question in under five minutes: “What single fact or data point about the current world of content and technology tells us most about where the Information Revolution will stand in ten years?”

In yesterday's Wired News Circuit Court column "Free the Spam King" I take on the question of whether criminal prosecutions will stop spam, or are even fair. This one has engendered a lot of hate mail. It seems people really, really hate spam.

Last week, in United States v. Heckenkamp, the Ninth Circuit (correctly) ruled that students have a constitutionally protected reasonable expectation of privacy in their dorm room computers, but that University officials can search those computers without a warrant for school security purposes under the “special needs” exception.

My column in this month's CIO Insight describes a few of the big concerns I have with the Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime, which the U.S. Senate ratified over the summer.

The Justice Department took the unusual step of issuing a press release at the time announcing that, although in theory the treaty could lead to significant free speech and privacy issues, the U.S. wouldn't enforce it that way.

I am working in Europe this week with a large technology company, and of course everyone is talking about the filing of a $1 billion copyright infringement case against Google by Viacom. "We have rights management products that would solve the problem," one of my clients noted. "I don't understand why it isn't selling."

Maybe it's because Google doesn't think it has a problem. Maybe it's because what my client is offering isn't a solution, it's the raw material of weaponry in an escalating information war.

Phillips raised several challenges to his conviction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for intentionally accessing a protected computer without authorization. The Fifth Circuit, holding that questions of “authorization” should be understood with reference to “expected norms of intended use,” rejected these challenges and upheld Phillips’ conviction.

United States v. Cristopher Andrew Phillips, No. 05-51271 (5th Cir. Jan. 24, 2007).

Plaintiff Therapeutic Research Faculty brought suit in the Eastern District of California against defendants NBTY, Rexall Sundown, and Le Naturiste. Plaintiff alleged that NBTY had violated the terms of a single user license for plaintiff’s database by sharing access and information with its employees and with the other defendants. Defendants moved to dismiss eight of plaintiff’s claims: direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement; violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Title II of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and the California Comprehensive Data Access and Fraud Act; trespass; and misappropriation of trade secret. The court held that violation of a single user license by allowing access to copyrighted content by multiple users constituted unauthorized access and infringed the exclusive rights of copyright holders, and that a confidential username and password can be a trade secret,and therefore denied the motion to dismiss.

Therapeutic Research Faculty v. NBTY, Inc., No. 2:05-cv-2322-GEB-DAD (E.D. Cal. Jan. 25, 2007)

Alaska police are considering pursuing criminal charges against a 21 year old who was playing online games in the parking lot of the local public library. The alleged crime would be unauthorized use of an open wireless network. I'm quoted in this story about the pending investigation.