Cyberlaw Central

I attended the session this morning at INTA 2007 on Internet advertising, specifically the focus was on keywords but popups were discussed as well. The speakers were Peter Becker of Microsoft, Laura Covington of Yahoo, Lauren Fisher of AOL, and Rose Hagan of Google.

The most interesting part for me was a comparison of the different notice and takedown procedures implemented by each company. In particular, Google is unique in that it takes down all uses of a competitor’s trademark, even in cases of fair use such as in comparative advertising. While broader than what the law requires, it was easier for Google to administrate such a policy because, as the other speakers admitted, it is hard to scale a system which requires a balancing of factors like fair use.

I would have appreciated a more thorough analysis of whether using a trademark as a trigger for the display of an advertisement is a trademark use. Some courts say yes, and others say no. The speakers, of course, were advocating the more favorable to them “no”, but it is a complicated issue that deserved better.

Overall, the session was a good one, quite packed in terms of attendees. I was glad to have found a seat near the front.

John Welch and Marty Schwimmer have organized Meet the Bloggers III, which will be held on Monday, April 30th at 7:30 at the Billy Goat Tavern here in Chicago.  More details can be found here at the TTABlog.  I fully intend to attend, even if I may be a few minutes late.

Imagine you need to take a file with sensitive data on it with you on a trip, but the only method you have available is a small USB thumb drive. You get to your destination only to discover the drive fell out of your pocket somewhere along the way. What a disaster, the hardest for me would be having to explain to those affected by the data breach what happened to their data.

So, what’s the solution? Use Truecrypt to secure the drive. You can take a blank drive with no data on it, add the Truecrypt Traveller Disk software, and then create a “container” to hold the data which is encrypted. The idea is that the container should fill the rest of the drive. The Truecrypt software can very easily be set up to run from the USB drive on any Windows computer you attach it to (the only caveat is you have to be in administrator mode) and allow you to mount the drive. You only need to enter your password when mounting the drive - once attached, it works like any other drive, it selects the next available drive letter to use.

I think it works great, it’s a very elegant solution to the problem. The software is open source, and supports multiple encryption formats if you want to get arcane, but the defaults are plenty strong so long as you use a good long password with letters and numbers and symbols.

I’m interested in the impact of the digital world on our society.  In an interview with Tech Nation, Kevin Werbach of Wharton College and founder of the Supernova conference touches on that impact.  He also touches on some mistakes made during his tenure with the FCC, such as the Communications Decency Act.  Of course, that particular failure isn’t his fault, but he does he have an interesting perspective.

All in all, it’s an entertaining 20 minutes.  Too bad some of the issues aren’t covered in more depth, but it still is worth a listen.