AP: “A federal judge on Monday struck down key parts of an Arkansas law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors. U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks found that elements of the law are unconstitutional. “I respect the court’s ruling and will appeal,” Arkansas Attorney General Tim… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Legal Research
The battle over copyright in the age of ChatGPT
Boston Review: “Questions of AI authorship and ownership can be divided into two broad types. One concerns the vast troves of human-authored material fed into AI models as part of their “training” (the process by which their algorithms “learn” from data). The other concerns ownership of what AIs produce. Call these, respectively, the input and… Continue Reading
How I Use My RSS Feed for Bluesky and Mastodon
Lifehacker: “It’s understandable if you’re a little burnt out on social media at the moment. I put off setting up a Bluesky account for years, mostly because I didn’t want yet another service to think about. At the same time, though, a lot of interesting people have shifted their posting to alternative sites like Bluesky… Continue Reading
Review of DOJ Process to Obtain Records of Members of Congress, Media
DOJ Oversight and Review Division 25-01. Redacted For Public Release. A Review of the Department of Justice’s Issuance of Compulsory Process to Obtain Records of Members of Congress, Congressional Staffers, and Members of the News Media: “In the spring and summer of 2017, CNN.com (CNN), The New York Times, and The Washington Post published articles… Continue Reading
Senate Judiciary Committee Investigative Report on Ethical Crisis at the Supreme Court
The culmination of a 20-month investigation, the staff report features new information and a comprehensive analysis of the ongoing ethics challenge at the Supreme Court. The Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by U.S. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), released the findings of its 20-month investigation into the ethical crisis at the Supreme Court, including the… Continue Reading
The Breachies 2024: The Worst, Weirdest, Most Impactful Data Breaches of the Year
EFF: “Every year, countless emails hit our inboxes telling us that our personal information was accessed, shared, or stolen in a data breach. In many cases, there is little we can do. Most of us can assume that at least our phone numbers, emails, addresses, credit card numbers, and social security numbers are all available… Continue Reading
Gisèle Pelicot, person of the year 2024
The New European [unpaywalled] – Our 2024 Person of the Year has changed the rules, reversed the language and given women permission to reject shame …But then Gisèle Pelicot did the unthinkable. She demanded that the court show the tapes to her rapists and journalists while she faced her attackers. She stared the rules in the… Continue Reading
What is your digital footprint and how can you protect it?
Proton VPN Blog: “Whenever you do something online, you leave a trail of information behind that can be used to uniquely identify and track you. This is your digital footprint(new window). In this article, we’ll look at: What is a digital footprint? Digital footprint examples Why does your digital footprint matter? How to check your… Continue Reading
Every AI Copyright Lawsuit in the US, Visualized
Wired: “WIRED is following every copyright battle involving the AI industry—and we’ve created some handy visualizations that will be updated as the cases progress. In May 2020, the media and technology conglomerate Thomson Reuters sued a small legal AI startup called Ross Intelligence, alleging that it had violated US copyright law by reproducing materials from… Continue Reading
Publishers Battle for the C-Suite
The New York Times [unpaywalled] – “Numerous media outlets, looking for new lucrative lines of business, are pursuing newsletters and events aimed specifically at top executives. When the digital news start-up Semafor began in 2022, its founders talked about reaching a vast global audience of 200 million college-educated, English-speaking people. But their latest push is… Continue Reading
Even laypeople use legalese
MIT News – “MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style. Legal documents are notoriously difficult to understand, even for lawyers. This raises the question: Why are these documents written in a style that makes them so impenetrable? MIT cognitive scientists believe they have uncovered the answer to that question. Just as… Continue Reading
Introducing DiscoverGov: GPO’s New Discovery Search Tool
GPO is pleased to introduce DiscoverGov, our new, web-based search tool. DiscoverGov provides simple, one-stop searching across multiple U.S. Federal Government databases, including GPO’s Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) and GovInfo. It will retrieve reports, articles, and citations while providing direct links to selected resources and publications available online. Come meet DiscoverGov as we release… Continue Reading
