Law

UDRP and Article 92(b) of EUROPEAN COUNCIL REGULATION (EC) No 40/94

It has been over a year since I posted "The Non-Parity of the UDRP", how little did I know then compared to now! Since that posting, the corporations and their lawyers have given me a crash course in the law and I have learned much. There are many tricks that corporations will play on a domain name registrant in order to silence criticism of the corporation and to violate the registrants right of freedom of expression without frontiers. The UDRP Administrative Proceedings is one such trick... more

Cost-Effectiveness: The Prerequisite for Cybersecurity Regulation

Cybersecurity regulation is coming. Whether regulations intended to enhance critical infrastructure protection will be based on existing statutory authority, new legislation, an Executive Order or a combination of legal authorities, however, is still unknown. Other aspects of the coming federal oversight of critical infrastructure cybersecurity that remain undetermined include the extent to which governance system will include voluntary characteristics and the time frame for initiation of new cybersecurity regulation. more

‘Pokemon’ Domain Names are a No-Go

The legal issues surrounding the sudden success of "Pokemon Go" -- one of the world's fastest-growing apps or games -- are popping up as quickly as unhatched Eggs at a PokéStop. Within days of the game's release, the National Safety Council issued a call that "urges pedestrians to exercise caution while playing the Pokémon Go augmented reality game" and "implores drivers to refrain from playing the game behind the wheel." more

US Senator Wyden Proposes Bill That Could Jail Executives Over Repeated Data Privacy Violations

U.S. Democratic Senator Ron Wyden released an early draft of a bill today that would subject company CEOs and senior executives to tough penalties including 10 to 20 years of imprisonment for failing to protect consumer data. more

CAN-SPAM Plaintiff Slammed With $800K Attorney Fee Award - Asis Internet v. Optin Global

A federal court granted a request for attorney's fees (in the amount of $806,978.84) against prolific CAN-SPAM plaintiff Asis Internet. I thought things were looking good for Asis - whose lawsuits have generated substantial blog fodder - when it recently obtained a 2.5 million dollar default judgment in a spam case. more

China to Require Face Scan for Internet Access and New Phone Numbers Starting December

Chinese citizens will be required to let telecommunications carriers to scan their faces in order to sign up for internet access or to get a new phone number. more

Can Large Language Models Use the Contents of Your Website?

Large Language Models (LLM) like GPT -- 4 and its front-end ChatGPT work by ingesting gigantic amounts of text from the Internet to train the model and then responding to prompts with text generated from those models. Depending on who you ask, this is either one step (or maybe no steps) from Artificial General Intelligence, or as Ted Chiang wrote in the New Yorker, ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. more

Important New Jersey Supreme Court Decision in Internet Privacy

The New Jersey Supreme Court has issued an important decision on Internet users' right to privacy. The case involves a dispute about whether an ISP violated a user's privacy rights by turning over subscriber information (name, address, billing details) associated with a particular IP address. It ends up that the subpoena served on the ISP was invalid for a variety of reasons. As the user had a 'reasonable expectation of privacy' in her Internet activities and identifying information, and because the subpoena served on the ISP was invalid, the New Jersey court determined that the ISP should not have turned over the personal data... more

Internet Governance and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Part 3: Article 6-12

Internet Governance like all governance needs to be founded in guiding principles from which all policy making is derived. There are no better fundamental principles to guide our policy making than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, (UDHR). This article is Part 3 of a series exploring the UDHR as a guide and template for the digital governance and digital citizenship. We discuss UDHR Articles 6 through 12 and address topics such as fundamental digital values, cyberlaw, policymaking and the role of tribunals in digital governance. more

Breaking Ground: Historic Launch of UN Global Mechanism for Cyberspace Governance

The international community has long struggled with the challenge of translating international law into actionable norms and practices in cyberspace. The conclusion of the United Nations Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) on the security of and in the use of information and communications technologies 2021-2025 marks a vital milestone in that ongoing process.  more

Washington State Passes Country’s Toughest Net Neutrality Legislation

Washington may be the first state to approve a net neutrality law that applies to all wired and wireless Internet providers in the state. more

Plumbing Neutrality

I've been having arguments about Network Neutrality with a lawyer. My position is that you can't adequately regulate ISPs to be neutral, because there's no agreement what "neutral" means in practice. He points out that the courts aren't interested in technical details like what packets are dropped, it's that all traffic has to be treated the same, and ISPs should just figure out how to do that. So I contemplated a city with Plumbing Neutrality with the simple rule that all people must be treated the same... more

Do You Care About Your Privacy?

ICANN is currently going through a complicated process in order to introduce more Top-Level Domains (TLDs). While the launch of new TLDs is something that a lot of people will welcome it is not without its issues. One of the areas that has been receiving quite a bit of attention is in relation to intellectual property rights. So what has this got to do with privacy? more

Preserving ICANN’s Independence Through Bold Action – Not Inaction

This week, the ICANN Board will vote on whether to approve the transfer of control of the .ORG domain to a private equity firm called Ethos Capital. This is a weighty decision for ICANN, since in order to approve the sale, it will have to convince itself that this is the right choice in the face of tremendous and widespread opposition, including from those who will be most affected by the sale. more

When an IP Address Does Not Equal Individual Culpability - Breaking Glass Pictures v Does, DAZ 2013

Something bad happens online. I can tie that something-bad back to an IP address. Do I know who did the bad thing? According to the Federal District Court in Arizona, I don't. An IP address may identify the owner of an Internet access account; it does not identify who was online at that particular time and who may be responsible for the actions in question. In Breaking Glass Pictures v Does, DAZ 2013, Plaintiff brought a claim for copyright infringement, wants early discovery, but the court is refusing. more