Cyberspace Law For Non-Lawyers

Larry Lessig, David Post, and Eugene Volokh

Your work is copyrighted THE MOMENT IT´S WRITTEN DOWN.

• You buy a piece of software and e-mail it to five friends.
• You download an article from a newspaper's Web page and post in on an electronic bulletin board.
• You take a post from one news group and forward it to another news group.
• You respond to someone's discussion list post, and quote part of his post in yours

Yes, as long as you make a citation and acknowledge your source.

1. Is your use noncommercial?
2. Is your use for purposes of criticism, comment, parody, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research?
3. Is the original work mostly fact (as opposed to mostly fiction or opinion)?
4. Has the original work been published (as opposed to sent out only to one or a few people)?
5. Are you copying only a small part of the original work?
6. Are you copying only a relatively insignificant part of the original work (as opposed to the most important part)?
7. Are you adding a lot new to the work (as opposed to just quoting parts of the original)?
8. Does your conduct leave unaffected any profits that the copyright owner can make (as opposed to displacing some potential sales OR potential licenses of reprint rights)?

No, it is unfair to copy others unpublished worked

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

Encryption is a technique for turning your message into gibberish, readable only by the person intended to read the message -- someone else who has the proper key. The most powerful forms of encryption have two keys: one public, the other private.

Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation at the hand of an intolerant society.

A trademark or trade mark is a distinctivesign or indicator used by an individual,business organization, or other legal entity to identify that the products or services toconsumers with which the trademark appears originate from a unique source, and to distinguish its products or services from those of other entities.

Specific exceptions to the protections against the "interception" of electronic communications that the Electronic Communication Privacy Act (ECPA) provides.

1. Is your use noncommercial?
2. Is your use for purposes of criticism, comment, parody, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research?
3. Is the original work mostly fact (as opposed to mostly fiction or opinion)?
4. Has the original work been published (as opposed to sent out only to one or a few people)?
5. Are you copying only a small part of the original work?

1. usually
2. gives a copyright owner the exclusive right to control copying
3. of a writing (or recording or picture or electronic transcription).

1. truths about you that have revealed to the public, either by giving some information over to someone else, or by being observed in public; or
2. truths about you that you have kept private.

once you start using it in connection with goods or services - that is, once you start putting it on copies of the newsletter that you distribute. Your design, in other words, *becomes* a trademark

No, there is no registration requirement and you are not required to do so

No, they will only be liable only if it's a "contributory infringer"

Electronic Communications Privacy Act. ECPA makes it illegal (with important exceptions we discuss below) for an individual or the government to intercept or disclose private electronic communications.

Defamation is a statement that harms the reputation of someone else. The important point is *reputation*: for a statement to defame, it must either lower the victim's standing in the eyes of the community, or tend to make others refrain from associating with the victim.

* If a work is COPYRIGHTED (which, as we saw, is an easy hurdle to jump),

* and you've made a COPY of it (which we'll talk about more below),

* and you weren't authorized to do so -- authorized by the copyright owner's express permission, by an implied license, or by the fair use doctrine -

* then you've violated the copyright law.

The "R" - or, more properly, the "R" in a circle (hard to reproduce in ASCII text!) - is reserved for those who have registered their trademark with the US Patent and Trademark Office.and "tm" designation in connection with their use of the trademark.