Blog
Extraterritoriality Got Run Over by Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer
In its recent ruling in Shropshire v. Canning, the Northern District of California denied defendant Aubrey Canning’s motions to dismiss plaintiff Elmo Shropshire’s claims against him for copyright infringement. Yes, that Elmo Shropshire—also known as Dr. Elmo, the...
Amazon’s New Kindle Will Be Competitive Against the iPad
Ever since the iPad's release in April 2010, Apple's competitors have been scrambling to release a credible competitor. When announcing the iPad 2, Apple's then CEO Steve Jobs bragged that the original iPad achieved above 90% market share, and he was right. After such...
An Apple Engineer Walks into a Bar…
It's been a big year for Apple. After passing Microsoft as the largest tech company by market capitalization last year, in August it leap-frogged Exxon to become the world's largest company, period. Later in the month, Steve Jobs announced his retirement as CEO, and...
Hollywood Under Fire for a Movie About Soldiers who are Actually Under Fire
Hollywood’s Leading Lady Kathryn Bigelow has had an impressive few years. She became the first woman in Oscar history to win the Best Director award in 2010 for her film The Hurt Locker (2008). This feat was made even sweeter given the fact that she beat out the...
What First-To-File Means For America
The America Invents Act of 2011 was approved by the House Judiciary Committee on April 14th, 2011 by a vote of 32-3, after being passed by the Senate in March. This act proposes some of the most significant changes for patent since at least 50 years. One of the most...
Threats and Technology
Norman Leboon was sentenced Thursday to 24 more months of jail, plus three years’ supervised release. His crime? Threatening Congressman Eric Cantor. What makes the case slightly relevant for this blog is the nature of the threat—a Youtube video. Unfortunately his...
What the Fukushima Daiichi Disaster Means for Nuclear Siting
The ongoing nuclear crisis at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has brought to mind nuclear disasters from the past, specifically, the accidents at Chernobyl in 1986 and Three Mile Island in 1979. While experts will work in the coming years to determine...
AT&T and T-Mobile Merger Confronts the Horizontal Merger Guidelines
Last week’s announcement that AT&T is buying T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom for $39 billion should raise serious antitrust concerns with regulators analyzing the deal under the horizontal merger guidelines of the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission....
A Closed Book
The Google Books Project has hit another snag - the amended settlement agreement between the Authors Guild and Google has not been approved by the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York. While not an unexpected result, it does put the future...
White House Steps up Enforcement Against “Illegal Streams”
On March 15th, the White House announced that it planned to vigorously combat copyright infringement. An interesting part of this announcement was the White House's proposal to step up efforts to combat so-called "illegal" video and audio streams. These illegal...
Copyright Troll Lawsuits Face Roadblock
The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported last week that over 40,000 unnamed "John Doe" defendants in California, Texas, Washington D.C., and West Virginia have been "effectively dismissed" in the P2P file-sharing lawsuits against them. This is the latest news in...
The Internet’s Revolution
In the midst of worldwide change, there is a recurring theme: The role of the Internet. What has happened lately? In Egypt, as protests began in late January, the government responded by shutting down the internet (through various means), hoping to quell the voice of...
Parsing the Pause that Refreshes
This American Life, the popular public radio show hosted by Ira Glass, devoted its entire hour this past weekend to the cracking the Coca-Cola formula, perhaps the most famous trade secret in the world. Long rumored to contain cocaine, Ira Glass and company have...
IP2K?
The New York Times has an article on Vint Cerf, who played a major role in the beginnings of what we now know as the Internet and currently serves as Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, and IPv6. For those who don't know, all web URLs...
The Closing of Open Mic Night
The Washtenaw Voice reports that a popular weekly music event at the Jolly Pumpkin, the popular Ann Arbor restaurant, has been shut down to copyright issues. Performers were informed by Jolly Pumpkin management that the event violated rights held by ASCAP, the...
Egypt Gov’t Kills Internet – WikiLeaks, Al Jazeera, Hacktivists Respond
Egyptian government shut off Internet to stop organized protests. Al Jazeera released photos, videos under CC license. WikiLeaks publishes Egyptian corruption cables. Anonymous faxes cables to dissidents.
Bing Is Not Google – Or Is It?
Wired and the Wall Street Journal have reported that Google has accused Bing, Microsoft's Internet search engine, of copying Google's search results. Google reports that Microsoft initially denied this claim; later, Wired revealed that Microsoft was dismissive of...
“Premature” lawsuits challenge FCC’s net neutrality rules
Now that a month has passed since the Federal Communications Commission issued their long-awaited order on net neutrality, the lawsuits have begun. Two companies, Verizon Communications and MetroPCS, have already filed suit in federal court, arguing that the FCC...
State of the Union: The Nation of Google and Facebook
During last week’s State of the Union address, President Obama (predictably) spent a great deal of time outlining a strategy for modernizing the U.S. economy and enhancing American competitiveness in an increasingly global market. In his speech, the President...
A “Far Cry” from fair play? p2p settlement suits raise new issues
Since the RIAA ended its campaign against music file sharers, a new group of lawsuits targeting users of p2p networks like BitTorrent have been making headlines. Private law firms representing copyright owners of motion pictures have, to date, served notices on...
Facebook Posts: Protected Concerted Activity under the NLRA?
The New York Times recently reported that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has filed a complaint against an employer for firing an employee over a Facebook post. According to the article, the employer, American Medical Response of Connecticut, fired one of...
Vodafone Caves to Egyptian Government
Egypt has taken the dramatic step of shutting down internet and cellular phone access in an effort to stop social networking from facilitating the protest movement across the country. Much like Tunisia last week, and Iran after the 2009 election, social networking...
Harsh Illinois Eavesdropping Statutes Send Citizens to Prison
Ignorance of the law is not a defense, as two Illinois citizens have recently discovered. Christopher Drew and Tiawanda Moore are both facing up to fifteen years in prison for crimes that they did not realize they were committing. The New York Times recently...
A Call to Sunny Arms
Solar panels use sunlight to provide clean, renewable power. And in contrast to the days when solar energy was only feasible for use in small electronics like calculators, today the technology has advanced to the point where it has far greater potential. The White...
Posts on the MTLR Blog are editorial opinion pieces written by student-editors of the Michigan Technology Law Review. The opinions expressed in these editorial posts are not espoused or endorsed by the University of Michigan or its Law School. To view scholarly Articles and Notes published by the Michigan Technology Law Review, please visit the MTLR home page.