Streaming While Teaching: The Legality of Using Person Streaming Video Accounts for the Classroom

Educators are constantly seeking new sources of relevant material to illustrate doctrinal and practice topics. With the growing understanding of students’ different learning styles, as well as the expansion of high-speed network connections and large displays in the classroom, streaming video has begun gaining popularity as an educational tool. Films, television programs, and real-time and archived legislative and court sessions may provide examples (both positive and negative) to enhance pedagogy. One increasingly common source for streaming content is a commercial video provider such as Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu. Even where such providers do not offer educational or institutional services, educators may have personal accounts with the service to which they can connect from the classroom in order to show movies and television shows to students. The benefits are clear: little or no cost to either the school or the students, an ever-growing catalog of titles, and avoiding the delay of ordering and obtaining desired titles on DVD or VHS.The ease and low cost of streaming services, however, do not necessarily translate into permissibility; faculty use of personal Netflix or similar streaming accounts in the classroom may not be legal. While certain provisions within U.S. copyright law (notably 17 U.S.C. § 110(1)) permit display of otherwise protected works in a not-for-profit classroom setting, the statutory exceptions, and the contracts underlying the service membership, may operate to prohibit this use of personal streaming accounts. The author explores using streaming technology in the classroom from the legal, ethical, and institutional policy perspectives

Busting Blocks: Revisiting 47 U.S.C. § 230 to Address the Lack of Effective Legal Recourse for Wrongful Inclusion in Spam Filters

Consider a company that uses e-mail to conduct a majority of its business, including customer and vendor communication, marketing, and filing official documents. After conducting business in this manner for several years, one day the company discovers that its most recent e-mails were not delivered to recipients using a major Internet Service Provider (“ISP”) because the company was recently listed on an automated block list as a sender of unwanted bulk commercial e-mail (“spam”)

Shooting from the Hip: Managing the Risks of Portable Computing and Smartphones in Your Business

This e-book was written to be a real-world, practical guide to some of the legal and other risks that every organization faces from the use by its workforce of portable computers and smartphones. While it discusses technology, it’s not overly technical, and while it talks about laws and regulations, it’s not written in legalese. Shooting From the Hip is meant to be useful, and used, by executives, telecommuters, technology professionals, doctors and lawyers, not-for-profit directors—everyone whose work has been transformed by the always-on, always-online world of Wi-Fi and 3G, notebooks and laptops, BlackBerries, iPhones and Treos

Busting Blocks: Revisiting 47 U.S.C. §230 to Address the Lack of Effective Legal Recourse for Wrongful Inclusion in Spam Filters

This paper discusses the growth and increasing significance of e-mail in the business and personal environment, and how unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail, also known as spam, has become a significant drain on technical and economic resources. It analyzes the statutory and self-help efforts to combat spam, with a specific focus on block lists and automated spam filters, and describes how alleged spammers have brought lawsuits in U.S. courts claiming they had been wrongfully included within block lists and filters. Finally, it describes some possible claims under U.S. law, then argues for a revision to current statutes to mandate a higher standard of care among block list vendors and ensure recourse to courts when self-help remedies for mistaken block listing fail

Shooting from the Hip: Managing the Risks of Portable Computing and Smartphones in Your Business

This e-book was written to be a real-world, practical guide to some of the legal and other risks that every organization faces from the use by its workforce of portable computers and smartphones. While it discusses technology, it’s not overly technical, and while it talks about laws and regulations, it’s not written in legalese. Shooting From the Hip is meant to be useful, and used, by executives, telecommuters, technology professionals, doctors and lawyers, not-for-profit directors—everyone whose work has been transformed by the always-on, always-online world of Wi-Fi and 3G, notebooks and laptops, BlackBerries, iPhones and Treos

Busting Blocks: Revisiting 47 U.S.C. §230 to Address the Lack of Effective Legal Recourse for Wrongful Inclusion in Spam Filters

This paper discusses the growth and increasing significance of e-mail in the business and personal environment, and how unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail, also known as spam, has become a significant drain on technical and economic resources. It analyzes the statutory and self-help efforts to combat spam, with a specific focus on block lists and automated spam filters, and describes how alleged spammers have brought lawsuits in U.S. courts claiming they had been wrongfully included within block lists and filters. Finally, it describes some possible claims under U.S. law, then argues for a revision to current statutes to mandate a higher standard of care among block list vendors and ensure recourse to courts when self-help remedies for mistaken block listing fail

Streaming While Teaching: The Legality of Using Person Streaming Video Accounts for the Classroom

Educators are constantly seeking new sources of relevant material to illustrate doctrinal and practice topics. With the growing understanding of students’ different learning styles, as well as the expansion of high-speed network connections and large displays in the classroom, streaming video has begun gaining popularity as an educational tool. Films, television programs, and real-time and archived legislative and court sessions may provide examples (both positive and negative) to enhance pedagogy. One increasingly common source for streaming content is a commercial video provider such as Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu. Even where such providers do not offer educational or institutional services, educators may have personal accounts with the service to which they can connect from the classroom in order to show movies and television shows to students. The benefits are clear: little or no cost to either the school or the students, an ever-growing catalog of titles, and avoiding the delay of ordering and obtaining desired titles on DVD or VHS.The ease and low cost of streaming services, however, do not necessarily translate into permissibility; faculty use of personal Netflix or similar streaming accounts in the classroom may not be legal. While certain provisions within U.S. copyright law (notably 17 U.S.C. § 110(1)) permit display of otherwise protected works in a not-for-profit classroom setting, the statutory exceptions, and the contracts underlying the service membership, may operate to prohibit this use of personal streaming accounts. The author explores using streaming technology in the classroom from the legal, ethical, and institutional policy perspectives