Law and the Internet 3rd edn

I'm very happy to announce that the above book is now at proof stage and on schedule to be out for the new academic year. Here is another look at the lovely cover courtesy of Randall Munroe of XKCD :-) Many thanks to all the contributors who worked so hard and waited so long for this. The full list of contents is:

Part I Introduction – Governance

Introduction: International Governance and the Internet
Antony Taubman

Part II Electronic Commerce

1. The Fall and Rise of Intermediary Liability Online
Lilian Edwards
2. The Changing Face of Electronic Consumer Contracts in the Twenty-First Century: Fit for Purpose?
Christine Riefa and Julia Hörnle
3. The Jurisdictional Challenge of the Internet
Julia Hörnle
4. EC regulation of audio-visual content on the Internet
Elizabeth Newman

Part III Intellectual Property

5. ‘Appropriate for the Digital Age’? Copyright and the Internet:
(1) Scope of Copyright
Hector L MacQueen
6. ‘Appropriate for the Digital Age’? Copyright and the Internet:
(2) Exceptions and Licensing
Hector L MacQueen
7. Search engines and copyright: Shaping information markets
Charlotte Waelde
8. Search Engines, Keyword Advertising and Trade Marks: Fair Innovation or Free Riding?
Tobias Bednarz and Charlotte Waelde
9. Domain Names and Trade Marks: an Uncomfortable Inter-relationship.
Caroline Wilson
10. Protection of Computer Software
Arne Kolb
11. Free and Open Source Software
Andrés Guadamuz
12. Scholarly communications and new technologies: open access
Charlotte Waelde
13. Competition, IP and the Internet
Abbe Brown


Part III Privacy, data protection and cyber-crime

14. Privacy & Data Protection1 : The Laws Don’t Work
Lilian Edwards
15. Consumer Privacy Law 1: Online Direct Marketing
Lilian Edwards
16. Consumer Privacy Law 2: Data Collection, Profiling and Targeting
Lilian Edwards
17. Privacy and Surveillance: Legal and Socioeconomic Aspects of State Intrusion into Electronic Communications
Judith Rauhofer
18. The Retention of Communications Data in Europe and the UK
Judith Rauhofer
19. A Criminological Introduction to Cyber-crime
Richard Jones
20. Pornography, Censorship and the Internet
Lilian Edwards
21. Information Security and Cyber-crime
Ian Brown, Lilian Edwards and Chris Marsden




Pending publication, I've uploaded the draft versions of several of the chapters for viewing - please note some or all of these are likely to come down after publication - so if you're interested, go look now!

Pornography, Censorship and the Internet - Liian Edwards

Consumer Privacy Law 2: Data Collection, Profiling and Targeting - Lilian Edwards and Jordan Hatcher

Information Security and Cybercrime - Ian Brown, Lilian Edwards and Chris Marsden

Ps I have also uploaded a couple of my filesharing and three strikes pieces to my SSRN page.

Death 2.0

Thomas Crampton, an Asia-based journalist and blogger, has posted a video he made after I gave a paper in Hong Kong in June 2009 at Peter Yu's Digital Converges Conference, on succession to digital assets , including social network profiles and emails etc, here.



There's also a write up to go with it here.

I'll be giving an updated version of this at GiKii in Amsterdam in September :-)

Breach of web site terms is NOT the crime of hacking

Via the excellent b2fxx, I hear that the Lori Drew case has been reversed on appeal. The judge has reportedly set aside the earlier jury verdict holding a Missouri woman, Lori Drew, responsible for driving a teenage girl to commit suicide, through exchanges in MySpace.

"A federal judge on Thursday overturned guilty verdicts against Lori Drew, issuing a directed acquittal on three misdemeanor charges.

Drew, 50, was accused of participating in a cyberbullying scheme against 13-year-old Megan Meier who later committed suicide. The case against Drew hinged on the government’s novel argument that violating MySpace’s terms of service was the legal equivalent of computer hacking. But U.S. District Judge George Wu found the premise troubling.

“It basically leaves it up to a website owner to determine what is a crime,” said Wu on Thursday, echoing what critics of the case have been saying for months. “And therefore it criminalizes what would be a breach of contract.”"

This was always likely to be a blip case brought on by a particularly unfortunate set of circumstances. But it's good to see it not being left in place long as any kind of precedent.