Obey the Law When I speak about technology and online behavior, one of the first things I say is, “if it isn’t ok offline, it isn’t ok online.”  I have been saying this for many years. At first I said it about copyright law because people seemed to believe no copyright existed online.  Now I […]

Whenever I lecture on social media, invariably Philadelphia Bar Association Opinion 2009-02 comes up. So while the opinion isn’t new (it is from 2009) I thought I would take a moment and share its import with you. Regardless of whether you practice in Pennsylvania, the opinion is based in sound reasoning and I recommend you […]

With all of the talk on social media there is an interesting issue that will arise sooner or later (and might already have done so in an unreported case.) You Do the Research Let’s say someone comes to you to represent them in a case, can be in any area but especially domestic, employment, personal […]

I have been following an interesting situation in Maryland for a while now.  The Department of Corrections is requiring, for new employees and those re-certifying, complete access to potential employee’s Facebook accounts.  This doesn’t just mean Maryland wants privacy settings to be set so it can review potentially public information, it means Maryland wants to […]

I have gotten some questions and comments so I would like to follow-up on my post of yesterday on Social Media in Civil Cases. I welcome your thoughts, this is a complicated and uncertain area. First, a note about MySpace.  I did some research on MySpace and found its policy to be the same as […]

I have been asked about obtaining account information from Facebook in a civil lawsuit.  This is an interesting issue; e.g. whether you can get information from Facebook itself. (This would be when privacy settings are such that you cannot see the data yourself, or you don’t have access to the data through other legitimate means.) […]

Nolo had an update on Facebook that is an excellent follow-up to my post about copyright yesterday. The question asked of Nolo involved whether a statute could be posted in its entirety. The answer, correctly, is yes. Anything in the public domain can be posted in full. A statute is in the public domain because […]

I just got a call from a family member.  Someone took a picture she took of one of her dogs off her Website, put it on license plate frames and is selling the frames on eBay.  What should she do? I wish all family legal questions were this easy. This violation of copyright is incredibly […]