On May 28 2015, federal district judge Katherine Forrest sentenced Ross Ulbricht to life in prison for his role as the creator and administrator of the notable dark net website Silk Road. The site was an anonymous online marketplace that could run using encrypted connections over the Tor network. The Read more…
An open letter to all members of the House of Commons, Dear Parliamentarian, Ensuring the Rule of Law and the democratic process is respected as UK surveillance law is revised Actions Taken Under the Previous Government During the past two years, the United Kingdom’s surveillance laws and policies have come Read more…
Citations. Bibliographies. Footnotes. References. Academic publications are filled with them. They serve a number of purposes: Lend support to a statement and give authority to a line of argument. When disagreeing with an author, it is a good practice to cite the source so that others can corroborate that you Read more…
On 13 May 2014 the Court of Justice of the European Union made a ground-breaking decision in the case of Costeja Gonzalez v Google Spain (C-131/12), which heralded the creation of the Right to Be Forgotten. As you may remember, Mario Costeja González, a Spanish citizen, had wanted a newspaper Read more…
The Green Party in the UK has found itself in a bit of hot water with the creative sector when it made a policy statement that it would shorten copyright terms to 14 years. As far as I am aware, this is the first proposal of its kind outside of Read more…
My new favourite show is Orphan Black, a Canadian BBC production set in a world where human cloning was achieved 30 years ago. I’ve just finished watching the first season on Netflix, and I’m thoroughly hooked. Tatiana Maslany is the greatest actress of her generation. Just trust me and watch Read more…
This week, comedian John Oliver landed a huge journalistic exclusive when he travelled to Russia to interview none other than Edward Snowden. Here is the clip, but bizarrely it cannot be viewed in the UK at the time of writing, so fire up your VPNs or proxies. I have to Read more…
It has been often remarked in these pages that we seem to be going back in time when it comes to copyright case law. In particular, the fact that the Court of Justice of the European Union continues to decide cases about linking seems to me to be a baffling Read more…
As we reported last year, an English court recognised the existence of a tort of privacy (more accurately, the tort of misuse of private information) in the case of Vidal-Hall v Google. The case involved a group of Google users who sued the search engine alleging that it had misused Read more…
Every year we are presented with some truly delightful April Fool’s Day stories, and this year we have had quite a nice crop of Cyberlaw-related articles. Here are my favourites. The Alsace Pirate Party will become the Panda Party (in French): “…it is clear that the image “pirate” sometimes has Read more…