The Archives

• Legal Theory

  Federal Felony-o-matic!

  11.30.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Courtesy of Harry Lewis, author of the very insightful book Blown to Bits:

  Ethical or not, it looks like using [fake names to protect your privacy online] could set you up for doing some hard time in a federal penitentiary. Lori Drew was convicted of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act because the jury deemed that by creating a fake identity as a boy, she had gained “unauthorized access” to the servers of MySpace, whose Terms of Service state that registration information must be truthful. By that logic, anyone using Bug Me Not is setting themselves up for indictment on the same charge.

  The rest of the post, including some context if you’ve never heard of the wonderful web service Bug Me Not, is available at Mr. Lewis’s website here.  And if you’re a little shaky on the technological side of some of these issues, I recommend Blown to Bits to help you understand the issues of the day.

• The News

  Terms of Service

  11.29.08 | Permalink | 3 Comments

  We’ve all heard of the Megan Meier story, yes?  A thirteen year old girl killed herself because she was tormented by a fictional sixteen year old boy.  The boy was actually the online alter ego of a pair of adults, one of which has just been convicted of a federal crime.

  As it happens, my very first post on Almost Legally was about the silliness of the term “cyber bullying,” and yet, here we sit five months later; cyber bullying is apparently not only real, but a federal crime.

  Why? 

  [more]

• The News

  Legal Jujitsu

  11.18.08 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  The record companies have made headlines for threatening extremely high-stakes and time-consuming litigation against people who have illegally downloaded songs on the internet.  The maximum statutory penalty is $150,000 per song you downloaded.  At that rate, the record company’s offer to settle the whole kerfuffle at $4,000 seems positively like a bargain.

  This strategy relies on the threat of a horrible outcome (downloading a single 12 song album leaves you open to as much as $1.8 million in liability) to prevent these pirates of the internet from attempting to defend their dastardly digital deeds in court. Do note that the record companies, despite the fact that roughly 800% of all albums in America are downloaded illegally, still have enough collective resources to make defending such a lawsuit extremely expensive.

  But what if the tables were turned, and the record companies were staring down the business end of a high-stakes and painfully drawn-out lawsuit?

  [more]

• The News

  Competition

  11.05.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  The RIAA has spent millions of dollars on litigating copyright infringement suits against people who illegally download music.  Companies like Viacom use litigation to remove their copyrighted material from sites like YouTube.com. And you can’t blame them.  They don’t want their copyrighted stuff generating money for anyone else.

  With their awesome size and economic strength, media conglomerates had it easy for a long time.  Customers who wanted content had to consume it on terms dictated by the RIAAs and the Viacoms.  With regard to delivering this content, (i.e. in CD format, or in the hour-long drama format) the conglomerates only had one another to compete with.

  Oh, and then in 1993, Vice President Gore invented the internet or something, and the media conglomerates started buying antacids in bulk: because technology changed everything.

  [more]

Almost Legally

The fairest of uses

Tag Cloud