A new study finds that TV ads attacking state supreme court justices during elections influence both who makes the bench and how the law is laid down. 

Yesterday, Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer announced updates to the way that Facebook conducts research.

A new Delaware law allows users to leave their digital assets to their descendants.

The EU's Right to Be Forgotten law means that Google can be forced to hide links to unflattering stories about people. The BBC's Robert Peston wrote yesterday that he'd received notice from Google that his work was being censored under the new laws:

Playing video games online, you're likely to run into cheaters. Aimbot, wallhacks, NoClip, they can render a server unplayable. However, they're little more than a pain in the ass, and penalties for getting caught can be pretty severe, including having accounts that cost a lot of money banned from using certain games. In Japan, they'll just arrest you.

This week, the Supreme Court ruled on two media technology cases, one that may save the bacon of Big Broadcast and Cable, and another that privacy advocates are heralding as a win. Bob talks with Slate's Dahlia Lithwick about the impact of these decisions.

Many men on Tinder like to post profile pictures of themselves cuddling tigers. 

New York Times reporter James Risen is facing potential jail time for refusing orders from the government to divulge a confidential source, and the Supreme Court won’t intervene on his behalf. Bob talks with University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone about what the situation means for the Obama administration and the press.

[Hey TLDR folks, PJ here. Amanda Levendowski is a friend of the show and a revenge porn braniac. She wrote a nice post about how Arizona's new revenge porn law actually has pretty troubling implications for journalists, which we're re-publishing here with permission.]

Governor Jan Brewer signed HB 2515 into law, making Arizona the ninth state to criminalize revenge porn. Here’s what the law says:

Unlawful to intentionally disclose, display, distribute, publish, advertise or offer a photograph, videotape, film or digital recording of another person in a state of nudity or engaged in specific sexual activities if the person knows or should have known that the depicted person has not consented to the disclosure.

Last week brought us two patent troll stories.

Do you remember Lycos? It was sort of the proto-Google, and was, for a time in the late 90's, the most visited site on the web. Those days are now long gone, but patents that were once owned by Lycos are now being used to force Google to fork over a hefty chunk  of its revenue.

The Supreme Court is weighing how much defendants convicted of possessing images of child pornography should have to pay in restitution to the victims depicted in those images. The case involves a woman known as “Amy,” whose uncle raped her when she was a young girl and circulated photographs of the abuse online. He eventually went to jail, but those photos became among the most widely viewed child porn in the world. Karen Duffin reports on Amy’s quest for restitution.

 

Middlesex Times

UPDATE: read indictment below.

Time Magazine is reporting that Hunter Moore has been indicted by a grand jury for conspiracy to “access a protected computer without authorization to obtain information for private financial gain.” There aren't many details available and I haven't seen a copy of the indictment online, but will update the story as that information comes in. In the meantime, I've embedded Bob's interview with Moore from December of 2011 below:

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The first Twitter Libel case in the United States went on trial last week. The actress and recording artist Courtney Love is accused of defaming her former lawyer in a 2010 tweet. Bob speaks to Ellyn Angelotti, a lawyer and member of the Poynter Institute's faculty, who says the decision in this case could set a social media precedent for defamation -- and explains how the libel standard for print could apply to an 140-character format.

Adam Matot is an Assistant Principal in Oregon. Last summer, he was arrested for allegedly leaving the scene of an accident while driving under the influence. Some of his students created a parody Facebook account mocking him, and he filed a lawsuit against them under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, arguing that they'd damaged his reputation by impersonating him online. 

This week, the case was dismissed. The judge ruled that parody Facebook accounts aren't illegal. Or at least this one isn't. Here's Venkat Balasubramani, from the Technology & Marketing Law Blog:

Reviewing the CFAA case law, the court says that plaintiff’s cause of action is premised on defendants’ use of protected computers beyond the scope of authorization (i.e., use in a way that “exceeded authorized access”). Finding that Nosal, Brekka, and US v. Drew all frowned upon this as a legal theory (particularly when restrictions are contained in terms of use agreements), the court rejects the claim. 

Middle schoolers of the world, please continue to tease your administrators online. 

The most serious kind of subpoena - called a 'National Security Letter' - used to have a lifetime gag-order automatically attached. That is until Nicholas Merrill appealed his and won the right to talk about it. Despite 50,000 national security letters a year, there are only three organizations that have ever won the right to say they got one. In a segment that originally aired in January of 2011, Nick Merrill tells Bob why he's the exception and the rule.