Version 4.0 of Internet Law: Cases and Problems is now available. This is the 2014 update of my casebook, and it has been a busy year. I produced a special supplemental chapter on the NSA and the Fourth Amendment in December, and it was out of date within a week. The new edition has over twenty new cases and other principal materials and dozens of new questions and problems. Here is a partial list of what’s new:
- A technical primer on cryptography
- Coverage of venue in criminal cases, featuring U.S.. v. Auernheimer
- An excerpt from danah boyd’s It’s Complicated discussing the four affordances of speech in social media
- United States v. Petrovic on revenge porn
- Jones v. Dirty World on the (non)liability of websites for user-posted content
- Heavily revamped Fourth Amendment coverage, now introduced by the Supreme Court’s decision in Riley v. California (cell phone searches) and with a note on U.S. v. Jones (the mosaic theory and GPS tracking)
- Ehling v. Monmouth-Ocean Hospital on applying the Stored Communications act to Facebook posts
- Coverage of the pen register statute
- 29 pages of NSA coverage, featuring discussion of the NSA’s mission, the law and policy of national security wiretapping, the Section 215 telephone metadata program, and Fourth Amendment challenges to national security metadata collection
- In re Snapchat, a cutting-edge FTC privacy enforcement action (with pictures!)
- The CJEU Google Spain decision on the so-called “right to be forgotten”
- A concise set of materials on Bitcoin, with a technical primer and interpretive guidance documents from FinCEN and the IRS
- A short excerpt from ABC v. Aereo on the public performance right in copyright
- An all-new chapter on software patents, headlined by the Supreme Court’s decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank, with cases raising issues of obviousness, claim construction, patent assertion entities, standard-essential patents, and injunctions
- Reworked materials on network neutrality, with added excerpts from Chairman Powell’s “four freedoms” speech, the Madison River consent order, Comcast v. FCC, and Verizon v. FCC, along with a note on interconnection issues such as the Netflix-Comcast dispute
I have also gone over every question in the book, tightening up wording, removing redundancies, and focusing the inquiries on what really matters. As before, the book is available through Semaphore Press as a pay-what-you want DRM-free PDF download at a suggested price of $30. The price has stayed the same, but compared with the first edition you get now 55% more casebook for your dollar. The book is still targeted at law students but written, I hope, to be broadly interesting.
Download it while it’s hot!