I Don’t Just Write About Google Books, You Know


My blogging over the last few months or so may make me seem like Johnny One-Note, and it is true that Google Books issues have been absorbing a lot of my attention. But I do get out of the house now and then. I’ve been to some fun conferences in the last few months, and I’ve finally gotten my slides from them online.

  • This weekend, I went to Denver for two terrific events. The first was a Silicon Flatirons roundtable organized by Paul Ohm on intermediaries. I was asked to say a few words to set the stage, so I talked about the kinds of distinctions we might make among different online intermediaries. Due to the room setup, my slides went unused, but here are the slides I would have shown: Anatomizing Intermediaries.
  • The second event was a Cyber Civil Rights symposium organized by the Denver University Law Review. I tried to sidestep some of the customary debates over intermediary liability by thinking about unmasking harassers as an alternative to suing them. My comments will be published in the Law Review’s online component, but in the meantime, here are my slides: The Unmasking Option.
  • Last week, I went to Trebor Scholz’s The Internet as Playground and Factory conference, where I gave a slightly updated version of my Ethical Visions of Copyright Law talk.
  • I gave an updated version of my stump speech on Facebook to a October workshop at NYU on privacy regulation. The organizers—Ira Rubinstein, Helen Nissenbaum, and Kathy Strandburg—did a really crackerjack job in filling the room with interesting people. NYU is a hotbed of good work on privacy and privacy policy (see, e.g., Helen’s forthcoming book), although I don’t get the sense that the law school really understands what a good thing it has going. Anyway, my stump speech has evolved sufficiently since the days a year and a half ago when I was giving it as “Peer Produced Privacy Violations” that I thought I might usefully put online a fresh version of it. In the conclusion, I play with an idea that’s increasingly intriguing me: what if we treated Internet privacy the way we dealt with product safety? Along the way, I rant about how the kids these days really do care about privacy, if not in the ways we codgers always expect. Please enjoy The Myths of Privacy on Facebook.
  • I’ve also put online the slides from a longer talk on social network site privacy I gave this summer at a conference at the Open University of Catalonia. This one largely recapitulates the argument of Saving Facebook, but with pictures.
  • Back in August, I presented at the IP Scholars conference (on behalf of Paul Ohm and myself) a work-in-progress version of our book review of Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. Shortly after the conference (and partly as a result of feedback I received there), we decided to split the project into two parts. The first half, a positive review of the book itself, will be forthcoming in the Maryland Law Review in mid-2010. The second half, a larger assessment of the intellectual currents of Internet Law, is still on the assembly line; it has a motor and frame, but no wheels yet.

As always, my slides are available from my presentations page.