When the FCC’s “Restoring Internet Freedom Order,” which repealed net neutrality protections the FCC had previously issued, was published on February 22nd, it was interpreted by many to mean it would go into effect on April 23. That’s not true, and we still don’t know when the previous net...

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, thinks people want targeted advertising. The “overwhelming feedback,” he said multiple times during his congressional testimony, was that people want to see “good and relevant” ads. Why then are so many Facebook users, including leaders of state in the U.S. Senate...

Update: Canadian authorities announced on May 7 that they dropped all charges against the teen they had previously accused of unauthorized use of a computer service for downloading public records from a government website. Canadian authorities should drop charges against a 19-year-old Canadian accused of “unauthorized use of a...

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board has issued a ruling [PDF] invalidating claims from US Patent No. 6,690,400, which had been the subject of the June 2016 entry in our Stupid Patent of the Month blog series. The patent owner, Global Equity Management (SA) Pty Ltd. (GEMSA),...

Almost three years ago, the global domain name authority ICANN chartered a working group to consider how to build a replacement for the WHOIS database, a publicly-accessible record of registered domain names. Because it includes the personal information of millions of domain name registrants with no built-in protections for...

For tech lawyers, one of the hottest questions this year is: can companies use the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—an imprecise and outdated criminal anti-“hacking” statute intended to target computer break-ins—to block their competitors from accessing publicly available information on their websites? The answer to this question has wide-ranging...

S.B. 822, Senator Scott Wiener’s net neutrality bill, is currently pending in the California legislature. It’s a bill that prioritizes consumers over large ISPs, creating strong net neutrality protections. Unsurprisingly, AT&T and the rest of the giant telecom companies don’t like it. And unfortunately for Californians, the report on...