Internet and e-mail policy and practice including Notes on Internet E-mail

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Home 19 Sep 2022 Why Facebook is not a common carrier Internet The ever-entertaining Fifth Circuit has recently upheld a strange Texas law that forbids most kinds of social media moderation. (Techdirt explains many of the reasons the court is wrong, so I won't try.) This brings us to the trendy question of whether Facebook, Twitter, et al. should be treated as common carriers. See more ...   posted at: 19:55 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/common.html 06 Mar 2022 How not to take Russia off the Internet Internet Last week the Ukrainian government sent a letter to ICANN asking them to revoke the “.ru”, “.рф” and “.su” top-level domains. It also said they were asking RIPE, which manages IP addresses in Europe, to revoke Russian IP addresses. Both ICANN and RIPE said no. Other people have explained why it would have been a policy disaster, but beyond that, neither would actually have worked. See more ...   posted at: 22:25 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/notru.html 12 Sep 2021 Cryptographic catastrophe theory Internet Technologists and law enforcement have been arguing about cryptography policy for about 30 years now. People talk past each other, with each side concluding the other side are unreasonable jerks, because of some fundamental incompatible assumptions between two conceptual worlds in collision. See more ...   posted at: 21:47 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/catastrophe.html 06 Apr 2021 The Supreme Court Decides that Compatible Software is Still Legal Copyright Law Back in the 1980s, everyone used the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet on their PCs. In 1989, Borland released a competitor, Quattro Pro. It used the same menu commands as 1-2-3 so that users could import their 1-2-3 spreadsheets with keyboard macros. Lotus sued Borland, and after a loss in the district court, Borland won on appeal, arguing that the keyboard commands are a "method of operation" and not subject to copyright. Lotus appealed to the Supreme Court, which deadlocked 4-4 (one justice was recused) in 1996. That meant the appeals court decision was affirmed but it did not set a formal precedent. Since then everyone assumed that settled the matter, you can't copyright the way a program works or its interfaces. Well, everyone except one guy in Hawaii. See more ...   posted at: 21:43 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/oragoog.html 18 Jan 2021 Why the Internet is Not Like a Railroad Internet When one person transmits the speech of another, we have had three legal models which I would characterize as Magazine, Bookstore, and Railroad. The Magazine model makes the transmitting party a publisher who is entirely responsible for whatever the material says. The publisher selects and reviews all the material it published. If users contribute content such as letters to the editor, the publisher reviews them and decides which to publish. The publishing process usually involves some kind of broadcast, so that many copies of the material go to different people. See more ...   posted at: 22:03 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/commoncast.html

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