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International Law

Freedom to Differ

A blog that speaks freely about legal issues facing the media and the internet. It mainly covers issues relating to the legal regulation of the internet and the media, but at times Constitutional law issues and politics are discussed. While the focus is on Australia, developments in other nations around the world are considered as well.

Post Frequency: 25.4/day

Last Entry: April 01, 2011 at 09:11:39

Governments beware: hyperpolitics is here!

Posted on November 01, 2008
In a very insightful piece, Mark Pesce describes how the recent internet filtering controversy is a good example of hyperpolitics:In less than a week's time, Conroy has found himself in deeper and hotter water than ever before in his ministerial career...

Privacy by geography

Posted on November 01, 2008
TechCrunch's Michael Arrington reports on a fascinating project looking at privacy settings on Flickr: This picture was presented by Elizabeth Churchill, Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo at a meeting I am attending today. It shows the privacy settings of a sample of a million Flickr users from 2005...

R18+ for games

Posted on November 01, 2008
Electronic Frontiers Australia has launched a new website, R18+ for games , as part of a campaign for the introduction of an R18+ rating for video games in Australia:Australia is the only Western country without an R rating for computer and video games...

Academics try the Radiohead model

Posted on November 01, 2008
Michael Madison describes an interesting new form of legal publishing:Profs. Lydia Loren and Joe Miller (Lewis & Clark) have launched Semaphore Press, which intends to release downloadable law school casebooks on a ?Radiohead? model: students should pay what they feel is appropriate, and please don?t share the file with others...

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New IP podcast

Posted on November 01, 2008
UCLA Professor Doug Lichtman has launched a new podcast, Intellectual Property Colloquium. This is how he describes it:The project is called the Intellectual Property Colloquium, and it is essentially an online audio program devoted to intellectual property topics...

Great Twitter moments

Posted on November 01, 2008
For Mashable David Sparks lists 16 great Twitter moments, including this gem:Suss out someone?s dating potential Andrea (real name and Twitter ID withheld) went out on a first date with a guy. The date went well, and they talked about going out again...

The Great E-Barrier Reef

Posted on November 01, 2008
Eugene Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy, one of the leading legal blogs in the United States, has blogged about the Australian Government's proposal to filter the internet. He also coined the phrase the "Great E-Barrier Reef" to label the policy (at least I think he was the first to use...

"Clearly, the sky is falling. The question now is how many people will be left to cover it."

Posted on October 30, 2008
In the New York Times David Carr chronicles the demise of old media:Stop and think about where you are reading this column. If you are one of the million or so people who are reading it in a newspaper that landed on your doorstop or that you picked up at...

Linking is not defamation

Posted on October 30, 2008
Earlier this week British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Stephen Kelleher delivered an important ruling for free speech on the internet. In Crookes v Wikimedia Foundation Inc., 2008 BCSC 1424, Wayne Crookes sued Jon Newton, the operator of p2p.net, for defamation for linking to four articles that Crookes alleged were defamatory...

Australian censorship

Posted on October 30, 2008
Many Australians are rightly outraged at the policy of their to introduce mandatory internet filtering. This is normally I topic I would have blogged about here in great detail (the name of the blog is, after all, inspired by a US Supreme Court decision on the First Amendment) but due...

Public Law Weekend

Posted on October 30, 2008
Update: Unfortunately I can't access the internet in the auditorium so I cannot live blog the weekend. I will post a summary of the day sometime this evening.I will be live blogging the thirteenth annual Public Law Weekend held by the Centre for International and Public Law at the ANU...

Op-ed piece on internet filtering

Posted on October 29, 2008
I have an op-ed piece in today's The Courier Mail looking at the Australian Government's internet filtering policy. You can read it here.

Privacy settings and Facebook

Posted on October 29, 2008
At apophenia, danah boyd acknowledges a feature of Facebook that is one of it's great strengths and one of it's weaknesses:Facebook's privacy settings are the most flexible and the most confusing privacy settings in the industry. Over and over again, I interview teens (and adults) who think that they've set...

DMCA turns 10

Posted on October 29, 2008
Ten years ago yesterday, on 28 October 1998, the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act was signed into law. The Electronic Frontier Foundation marked the occasion with its report, Unintended Consequences: Ten Years Under the DMCA.

UNSW thinking about stopping free wi-fi ... what is this really about?

Posted on October 28, 2008
The Fairfax papers have a story today about the University of New South Wales considering stopping its free wi-fi internet for students because so many students are using it to download illegal files:The University of NSW has threatened to axe its free wireless internet service because students are bringing in...

Support Movember

Posted on October 27, 2008
During Movember (the month formerly known as November) I'm growing a Mo. That's right I'm bringing the Mo back because I'm passionate about tackling men's health issues and being proactive in the fight against men's depression and prostate cancer. To donate to my Mo you can either: Click here and...

Taste we can believe in

Posted on October 27, 2008
Over at Madisonian.net, Ann Bartow highlights a trade mark parody we can believe in:

Social media and the law

Posted on October 25, 2008
My QUT colleague Axel Bruns is live blogging a conference in Germany on the political dimensions of Web 2.0: "Das Internet zwischen egalit�rer Teilhabe und �konomischer Vermachtung". The opening keynote by Karl-Heinz Ladeur on social media and the law sounded particularly fascinating, in large part to a couple of novel...

Lessig on copyright and politics

Posted on October 25, 2008
During the week the New York Times published an op-ed piece from Larry Lessig explaining how copyright law is being used as a tool for censorship:Copyright law has become a political weapon because of a statute passed a decade ago: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act...

ACTA update

Posted on October 25, 2008
During the week my QUT colleague Nic Suzor attended a briefing session hosted by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Read Nic's summary of the briefing here. The main points Nic took away from the meeting were as follows: Negotiations will...

Some election themed videos

Posted on October 25, 2008
These two US Presidential election themed videos have been viral video hits over the past few days. The first features Will Ferrell returning to Saturday Night Live as George W Bush giving his endorsement to John McCain and Sarah Palin:The second asks wassup:

If the MPAA did handbags

Posted on October 25, 2008
Techdirt writes about a very clever - and funny - spoof:Lauren sent in an amusing spoof put together by a website about handbags, looking at how the handbag industry would be different if it had the equivalent of the MPAA around. It's an amusing little satire, with things like demands...

There is something wrong here

Posted on October 22, 2008
Unfortunately I think this diagram of the life-and-death cycle of a social media campaign by David Armano, author of the Logic+Emotion marketing blog and VP for experience design at Critical Mass, accurately represents how many people in the social media sphere view lawyers: (Via Web2...

There is something wrong here

Influential Australian Twitterers

Posted on October 19, 2008
ShiftedPixels - The Online Influence Agency and @Nickhac have put together a list of Australia's most influential Twitterers. I'm currently number 59 and falling ... Social Media Marketing Agency - Shifted Pixels Social Media Monitoring - BuzzNumbers Nick Holmes a Court Web...

Palin on Saturday Night Live

Posted on October 19, 2008
Sarah Palin made two appearances on Saturday Night Live this weekend:Sarah Palin opens the show: The Palin Rap: But Sarah Palin was not the only political figure to have some fun this weekend - both Barack Obama and John McCain made fun of each other and themselves at the Alfred...

Influential Australian Twitterers

Palin on Saturday Night Live

High Court begins hearing Ice TV

Posted on October 16, 2008
The High Court began hearing the Ice TV appeal today before six justices (Justice Kirby didn't sit). The hearing will continue tomorrow. The transcript of the first day of oral argument is already available on AustLII here (interestingly the Court gave leave to Telstra and the Australian Digital Alliance to...

High Court begins hearing Ice TV

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