Whenever there's talk about blogging horror stories, inevitably the conversation turns to people getting fired for blogging. What kinds of things can your boss fire you for? Aren't there laws to protect you for whistle-blogging about the rotten things your company is doing to the environment? If you...

Big news. As reported by the BBC, the European Parliament has voted down the Computer-Implemented Inventions Directive, a law that would have given broad authority to the European Patent Office to start issuing US-style software patents in the EU. Rejection of this law is a huge, huge victory for...

Proposing a federal law to stop local governments from filling the pot holes with free municipal WiFi:

Late in May, a member of Congress from Texas named Pete Sessions proposed a bill called the Preserving Innovation in Telecom Act, which would prevent municipal governments from offering people free...

Yesterday, nearly lost amid all the Grokster coverage, was an important ruling from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in the fight to resist the effort by trademark owners to control our computers whenever we visit their websites. EFF filed a friend-of-the-court brief in this case, with the...

One potential consequence of the MGM v. Grokster ruling may be an uptick in courts deciding fair use cases involving personal, noncommercial activities like "time-shifting" and "space-shifting."
A variety of new digital technologies are advertised and promoted for uses that the technology vendors believe to be fair uses. For...

Justice Stevens' Sony opinion discusses in some detail how patent law's "staple article of commerce" doctrine will be imported into copyright. The Grokster decision purports to import the active inducement standard from patent law, too. But it's unclear whether the Court actually has done so.
First, patent law requires...

In light of the decision, some on the petitioners' side argue (once again) that the standard only targets "bad actors," not harming any legitimate businesses. However, in some ways, the decision may make it difficult for legitimate businesses to avoid inducement.
In the respondents' press conference, Grokster counsel...