Judge ruled against me on standing, on intervention, and on the subpoena. So uh Twitter is compelled to hand over @destructuremal's tweets

— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) April 23, 2012

In the strange case of the Manhattan D.A. subpoenaing Occupy Wall Street arrestees' Twitters, so far we've come to a place where the state can request copies of three months of the things that people have published on the Internet. That seems… reasonable! Not very chilling! (The Internet being the Internet and all!) What is bizarre is to see the D.A. prepare such a labor-intensive assault in the matter of a violation—these charges [...]

Today Louis Vuitton had its Paris show (it was train-themed! They built a giant train! All the models had (non-union) porters!). Meanwhile, Louis Vuitton's "director of civil enforcement for North America" is real mad at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Intellectual Property Group. They're holding a symposium later this month on fashion law and copyright, which is very fascinating! And their poster drew the ire of Vuitton, incorporating and parodying as it does their trademarked material. Vuitton's claim that the poster's "dilution" of their trademark is bizarre, and what's amazing about these discussions now is how willfully everyone wants to misread copyright law. And now I am [...]

An incredibly important story about fair use and copyright.

For the last 41 years, Jeffrey MacDonald, formerly a surgeon in the Green Berets, has been saying that he did not kill his wife and children. You may remember him from either the commissioned assassination performed by Joe McGinniss in Fatal Vision or perhaps the uncommissioned and far more articulate assassination of McGinniss in Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer. In a decision yesterday by the Fourth Circuit (PDF), MacDonald has been granted the right to present new evidence in federal court—a rather clear right, it seems, that the lower court didn't feel like extending. The sheer amount of time that has passed means that MacDonald's "new" [...]

How can the future have a government-regulated reputation market if you can't express copyright in your online persona(e)? California leads the way starting this brave new year, in which all your accounts are verified: it's now illegal to impersonate people online for nefarious purposes. Specifically: one is a criminal if one "knowingly and without consent credibly impersonates another actual person through or on an Internet Web site or by other electronic means for purposes of harming, intimidating, threatening, or defrauding another person." I think the trick will be in the issue of "harm"? And possibly "defraud"? I mean the good news is that bad things will [...]

For those playing along at home, Gawker Media settled with Sarah Palin's publisher, HarperCollins, last night. I would propose that the settlement consisted of Gawker saying "Yes, we already took the book excerpts down, don't push it," accompanied by a check made out to HarperCollins for zero dollars.

While other overclass miscalculations spark bailout after bailout, dissolving alpha-grade marital bonds is a far trickier business. There is, for instance, the matter of shielding your liquid assets from a grasping ex, to say nothing of the messy personal details that tend to come out in bitterly contested divorce proceedings.

Most of all, though, there’s the great preoccupation of the wealthy in every unpleasant public scrape: the question of one’s legacy. That’s the gist of an epic dispatch from the Financial Times’ Jane Croft and Michael Peel, explaining how the once-swinging precincts of elite London have found themselves in a sort of legal limbo, so [...]

Thank the atheist Cylon God once again for the Ninth Circuit: in US v Nosal, yesterday they ruled (PDF) that, among other things, the ridiculous user agreements that we all "sign" online aren't really something that should be crimes if we violate them. That's not crazy: up until quite recently, the court points out, minors couldn't even "legally" use any Google product. On Facebook, it would have been "illegal" for any user to give another his password. The dissent—and other courts—claim their conclusion is silly, because just because the government can prosecute something doesn't mean they will. But that's not really how America works: "The government assures [...]

I've always worried about the Sergey Aleynikov case. Convicted 15 months ago and sentenced to eight years in prison, Aleynikov's crime, while employed at Goldman Sachs, was uploading chunks of software to an encrypted server for storage—possibly accidentally including proprietary code while trying to retain open-source stuff. (For a good description of what happened, there's this account.) Some of the problems with this case include that juries and judges are crazily out of their depth in figuring out what his actions mean and which are customary and ordinary for programmers, and also the media is way worse: most of the headlines called him a "spy," which is [...]

“The last three years have been a contrarian’s delight—just when you expect the bananas to hit the fan." —Oh my God, right? Although in this case specifically, that is UC Berkeley law professor Frank Zimring, expressing his pleasure that violent crimes are hugely down in the U.S., despite massive unemployment and recession and fewer (well, comparatively fewer) people in prison. Yes it's true! The people are finally satisfied with the reality TV programming, so now there be less hurting of everybody up in here. Speaking of! The two NYC police officers on trial for rape? The case is now on the fifth day of jury deliberations, and [...]