Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Viacom accused Google's video sharing website, YouTube of violating its copyright in a $1 billion lawsuit. And as of last week, Google and Viacom reached an agreement to allow Google's YouTube to mask important user information from records before the handover to Viacom. Law.com bloggers and co-hosts, J. Craig Williams and Bob Ambrogi welcome Attorney Kevin A. Thompson from the firm Davis McGrath LLC, and Lauren Gelman, Executive Director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society to discuss this case. They will discuss the legal issues, privacy rights, piracy issues and what this case means for the users, the source of business for these companies.

I imagine the subset of individuals that read the Center's blogs but not, for instance, Boing Boing to be in the (low) single digits. I still could not resist posting this news story about bearded, community-gardening, anti-surveillance activists in Philly whose house was raided, initially without a warrant. In fairness, the facts are disputed: for instance, local police are calling a structure on the top floor of the raided house a possible "bunker," whereas resident Daniel Moffat (pictured) is calling it a definite "greenhouse."

Nestled in among the latest round of public comments solicited by the Federal Trade Commission on “behavioral advertising” was a little gem: a filing by the Newspaper Association of America arguing that online news outlets have a First Amendment right to track the activities of website visitors in order to target advertisements to them.

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?”