A little bit off topic — hope you don’t mind… I had a great time being on FourCast yesterday (video embedded below) with hosts Tom Merrit and Scott Johnson, and with Shannon Morse. We talked about encountering rogue planets with subterranean life, nanobots affecting thoughts and feelings, and heads up displays that keep you from [...]
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Impostor bids in online auction sufficient allegation of interrupted service under CFAA
Yoder v. Equipmentfacts, 2011 WL 2433504 (N.D.Ohio June 14, 2011) [This is a post by Jackson Cooper. Jackson graduated from DePaul University College of Law in May 2011 with a certificate in intellectual property and information technology law. Jackson also recently passed the Kentucky bar exam and will begin practicing soon. You can find him [...]
NLRB’s Facebook firing decision had little to do with Facebook
Hispanics United of Buffalo, Case No. 3-CA-27872 (NLRB, September 2, 2011) Folks are talking about the decision handed down by an Adminstrative Law Judge (ALJ) at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) last week, finding that a nonprofit employer violated federal law by terminating five employees over a Facebook status update and comments thereto. It [...]
Lost sales were not “loss” under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
CustomGuide v. CareerBuilder, LLC, 2011 WL 3809768 (N.D.Ill. August 24, 2011) Plaintiff and defendant had discussed a licensing arrangement whereby defendant would provide certain of plaintiff’s materials online. The parties never entered into that agreement. But plaintiff claimed that defendant went ahead and accessed the materials stored on plaintiff’s computer system, and thereby caused plaintiff [...]
Court won’t let marijuana activist change his legal name to njweedman.com
In re Robert Edward Forchion, Jr., 2011 WL 3834929, (Cal.App. 2 Dist. August 31, 2011) A long time marijuana activist (who now self-identifies as a “marijuana capitalist”) asked a California court to legally change his name to match the domain name of his website — njweedman.com. The court denied the request. The court gave three [...]
Wikileaks, decentralized distribution, and the lack of meaningful remedies for unauthorized disclosure
Apart from the difficult question of liability — that is, whether Julian Assange should hang for his actions — the decentralized nature of the distribution methods of Wikileaks content gives us a meaningful opportunity to consider the remedies that should be imposed upon an actor like Wikileaks in those cases in which liability should attach. [...]


