In yesterday's State of the Union address, President Obama made an important commitment to openness and transparency in government:
It's time to require lobbyists to disclose each contact they make on behalf of a client with my Administration or Congress.
This is welcome news. For the past...

What fingerprints does your browser leave behind as you surf the web?
Traditionally, people assume they can prevent a website from identifying them by disabling cookies on their web browser. Unfortunately, this is not the whole story.
When you visit a website, you are allowing that site...

If we ask whether a fact about a person identifies that person, it turns out that the answer isn't simply yes or no. If all I know about a person is their ZIP code, I don't know who they are. If all I know is their date of birth, I...

Too often, online services draft their "Terms of Service" (TOS) agreements in ways that are one-sided and overreaching. In Europe, however, regulators are beginning to step in to protect consumers. In late November, the U.K.'s Office of Fair Trading (or OFT) announced that Apple, Inc. agreed...

The next round of negotiations on ACTA start today in Guadalajara, Mexico. This week’s negotiations will apparently focus on civil enforcement, border measures, and enforcement procedures in the digital environment, and briefly, transparency.One of the main goals of ACTA is creating new harmonized international IP enforcement standards above those...

TechDirt's Mike Masnick is at the Midem music industry conference in Cannes this week. He put together a fantastic memo to the International Association of Entertainment Lawyers: "The Future Of Music Business Models (And Those Who Are Already There)".
Masnick writes that the mainstream entertainment industry's formula...

Secretary Clinton's speech last week on Internet Freedom was an important step in bringing online free expression and privacy to the forefront of the United States' foreign policy agenda.
But for all the strong language, it was also a speech of caveats: powerful statements like "we stand for...