Writing a letter with a pen has an odd feeling in a digital age. You pick your words carefully, without a delete key. You urge your hands to recall their best handwriting. You ponder about forms of address and how much space to leave; should I fill...

It’s now (probably) legal to publicly sing the world's most popular song, thanks to an opinion handed down yesterday by a federal judge in Los Angeles. After years of litigation, the court held that the lyrics...

Update: Gov. Brown signed S.B. 178 on October 8, 2015. This open letter was crossposted to Medium.
Dear Gov. Brown,
Electronics, computers, satellites, biotechnology, robotics – these are no longer dreams. They are the driving imperative that is restructuring the world economy. These new technologies...

UPDATE: On May 20, 2016, the Michigan Court of Appeals held that Twitter parodies are protected by the First Amendment, affirming the trial court’s decision to throw out Todd Levitt’s lawsuit against the creator of a parody Twitter account. The court held that “a reasonable reader, viewing the statements...

On Friday, Google reported on its online security blog the faulty issuance of a certificate for google.com and www.google.com by Symantec, a prominent Certificate Authority. This misissuance is significant not only because it represents a breach in the core Internet trust mechanism; it was also the first of its...

Academic researchers by necessity spend a lot of their time thinking about how to minimize harm in the conduct of their research. Prompted by the dark history of abuses in human subjects research, research ethics have become a deeply ingrained part of methods training and institutional review.
But...