H. Res. 554 is a bill sponsored by one Republican and one Democrat and would require that all non-emergency proposed federal legislation be posted 72 hours on the Internet, prior to any Congressional debate. As I have been saying to clients for years, don’t sign contracts without reading them — and it certainly makes [...]

The Copyright Office has proposed changes to the mandatory deposit requirements for copyright registration for online-only works — a huge category which encompasses websites, blogs, online journals and publications, and online photo archives.   While they vary for each category of copyrightable work, the mandatory deposit rules (37 CFR 202) typically require a copyright owner to [...]

Do you have an internet business? Do you sell into Nevada or Massachusetts? E-commerce companies who do business in these states, or with customers in these states, are now subject to data privacy laws requiring not only notification of data breaches — but encryption of stored or transmitted personal data.
In 2008 both Nevada and [...]

Social media’s social activist moment is officially here. Votereport.com is using Twitter and special applications for the iPhone and Android cell phones, to monitor polling conditions, voting wait times, voter registration problems, and voting machine dysfunction in the US presidential election.

Anyone with a Twitter account, or with an iPhone or Android phone, can participate:

http://twittervotereport.com/spread-the-word/

After hundreds of comments were received asking him to restore the blog archives, William Patry restored the public archives of the Patry Copyright Blog.  Patry’s blog contains over 800 articles on copyright case law, copyright legislative developments, and strategic approaches to contemporary copyright-related legal situations.  I highly recommend Patry’s blog — it’s required reading if [...]

William Patry, one of the most well-known and nationally respected copyright practitioners, has explained his reasons for terminating his long-standing Patry Copyright Blog in a final post:
http://williampatry.blogspot.com/
Patry cites the “depressing state of copyright law” and the direction of recent copyright law developments as among his personal and professional reasons for not continuing the blog.
His contributions [...]

Just ask Johnny Depp.

Finjan, a data security services firm, reported today that more than 500 megabytes of stolen medical and business data and Social Security Numbers (SSNs) have been found on “crimeservers” in Malaysia and Argentina. The data were stolen from systems for a major airline and a health care provider using widely available hacker toolkits, [...]

A number of news sources and commentators are reporting this week on a University of Washington white paper criticizing the recent development of using automated processes (’bots’ or monitoring agents) against BitTorrent and other heavy bandwidth users to generate automated DMCA takedown demands.  Many takedown demands are based solely on observed patterns of Internet [...]

It was inevitable, and now it’s “official”: the 2008 Economic Stimulus Payment is the new Nigerian scam.
A few of my clients this week reported receiving one or more phishing emails about the 2008 Economic Stimulus Payment from the US government. Then I received one myself this morning. (”Gee, how could the [...]