Course pages are run through Lexis Blackboard, http://www.lexisnexis.com/lawschool.   You’ll need a Lexis ID to enroll, which will be provided to you at school.  In the meantime, the syllabus and first assignment for Civil Procedure I can be found here. 

This site, digital garbage, is my blog on law and technology, popular culture, photography, and whatever.  I also maintain a home page is at http://nathenson.org.  I post frequently to Twitter and Flickr, and much less frequently, to YouTube.

My home page is at http://nathenson.org.

This site, digital garbage, is my academic blog on law and technology.

I also run a personal blog at http://nathenson.org/blog.

Course pages are available to STU students through Blackboard at http://webcourses.lexisnexis.com.   You’ll need to get your Lexis ID from the law library.

UPDATE: Lexis is in the process of updating its main law school homepage.  The update has led to problems for users of Internet Explorer 7.  If you have difficulty logging into Blackboard, try using Mozilla Firefox.

Shortly afterward, he received an e-mail message from Comcast, thanking him for the feedback and adding that it was working on a new interactive guide that might “illuminate the issues that you are currently experiencing.”

[He] found it all a bit creepy.  “The rest of his e-mail may as well have read, ‘Big Brother is watching you,’ ” he said.

A woman’s Twitter complaint about Comcast led to a quick but unexpected response:

“It’s one thing to spit vitriol about a company when they can’t hear you,” she said in an interview.  It’s another, she said, when the company replies.  “I immediately backed down and softened my tone when I knew I was talking to a real person.”

I can see why some people might be creeped out by Comcast’s outreach efforts, but they shouldn’t be.   People keep assuming that the relative anonymity of the web will keep their postings effectively invisible.  That’s naive.  There’s nothing anonymous about the Internet when postings are quickly found by those who want to see what you’re doing (such as prosecutors, as Kaimipono Wenger blogged about recently), or by companies who want to know what you’re saying about them.  The sooner people realize that “relative” web anonymity is not really anonymity at all, the more savvy they’ll hopefully become about their online postings.

Plus, done tactfully and personally, direct outreach by companies might be a good thing.  Direct emails?  Sure.  Public comments on blogs or Facebook walls?  Not so good.  It might embarrass already-angry customers and put them on the defensive.  Worse, it might trigger flame wars involving others.  But a direct email is far less confrontational, and far more likely to lead to satisfied, albeit occasionally creeped-out customers.

It’s our blog and so we made an editorial decision, like we do every single day. We didn’t attempt to silence Violet. We unpublished our own work. There’s a big difference between that and censorship.

We hope you’ll respect our choice to keep the reasons behind this private. We do understand the confusion this caused for some, especially since we fight hard for openness and transparency. We were trying to do the right thing quietly and respectfully, without embarrassing the parties involved.

Clearly, that didn’t work out. In attempting to defuse drama, we inadvertently ignited more. Mind you, we weren’t the ones splashing gasoline around; but we did make the fire possible. We’re sorry about that. In the meantime, Boing Boing’s past content is indexed on the Wayback Machine, a basic Internet resource; so the material should still be available for those who would like to read it.

Oddly, BoingBoing speaks in terms of “unpublishing” rather than deletion.   (Their policy page states “We reserve the right to unpublish or refuse to unpublish anything for any or no reason.”)  Sure, “unpublishing” sounds less big-brothery than deletion, but I don’t really see the difference.

Moreover, “unpublishing” isn’t quite accurate: BoingBoing doesn’t mean “unpublished” in the sense of a book (or blog posting) that has yet to be published.  They mean disabling public access to something that has already been posted, like in the DMCA 512(c) sense where material is removed or access to it is disabled.  (WordPress does have an “unpublishing” function, but that’s still a misnomer.)  A more accurate term might be deposting, depublishing, or good ‘ol deletion.

Nevertheless, it’s useful to explore a potential distinction between deletion and depublishing, and other questions raised when a blogger wants to remove posted materials:

• As a starting point, what is the meaning of “publication” in an age where materials can be changed or removed?
• Under what circumstances is depublication justified?
• What practices are needed to distinguish “depublication” from “deletion?”  Is a reservation of rights declaring a right of depublication sufficient?  Should a notice be posted where the materials used to be (as Dan Markel suggests)?
• BoingBoing notes that the removed materials remain on the Wayback Machine web archive.  Do web archives help to justify depublication?
• Does depublication serve an important social function by severing the association between author and depublished content?

Hat tip to Noam Cohen.  And a disclaimer: I did make some edits to this post after posting.

That’s a fantastic idea, and one that solves the problem of what to do with interesting reads that are worth pointing out, but for which I don’t want to write a full blog post.

I’ve created a microblog for this site here.  A mini-feed can be found in the sidebar, and I’ve also created a dedicated page on this site with an expanded list of recent tweets here.

What happens to . . . web logs if a person dies and their executor notifies [the weblog's host] of their demise. Can one leave their account, username, password and API key number to another person in their will?

What a great question! It reminds me of the case last year of Lance Corporal Justin Ellsworth, who died in Iraq. After his death, his family asked Yahoo for access to his emails. Yahoo refused. After a court ordered Yahoo to hand over the contents of the account, Yahoo complied. But the parallel to Ellsworth has its limits. With emails, there are significant concerns over privacy: it just cannot be assumed that every deceased person wants his or her executors and heirs poring through their private and potentially embarrassing emails.

In contrast, blogs are intended for some level of public consumption and the privacy issues generally don’t run as high. (Though even with blogs, privacy concerns can exist, such as with David Lat, the formerly anonymous “Article III Groupie” who writes Underneath Their Robes.) Indeed, although many blogs are quickly abandoned, others are intended to serve as lasting statements of authorship, whether professional or personal (or both). As timethief noted in a later post, “Blogging is now and will remain part of what defined me as a unique individual.” But blogs aren’t books or magazines. After we’re gone, existing copies of books we wrote can continue to exist without additional effort on the part of our estates or heirs. And our estates and heirs can’t force consumers to return legally acquired copies of books.

But the book analogy is hard to apply to blogs. Blogs aren’t material objects and they’ll disappear without maintenance or preservation. But long-term maintenance isn’t really practical, at least yet, for blogs whose owners have passed away. If hosting accounts aren’t kept active, or applicable payments stop, or hosting providers go out of business, or computers fail, or blogging code & databases become incompatible with future technologies, our blogs — like other web-only publications — may disappear or break. Plus, a blog might be shut down by an author’s estate or heirs, unless perhaps some sort of enforceable provisions can be made by the author that the blog be maintained posthumously.

Communal blogs like The Volokh Conspiracy stand a better chance of lengthy lives, since maintenance tasks can be undertaken as new members arrive. But most other sites, even highly successful ones like Howard Bashman’s How Appealing, are run by only one person. For an estate or heir, long-term maintenance after an author’s demise is not necessarily simple or — excuse the pun — appealing. In a rare case, successful blogs like Bashman’s could be valuable estate assets that would encourage continued maintenance and even eventual profitable transfer, but most blogs will utterly lack any such kind of maintenance incentive. (Of course, this is all illustrative, and Eugene and Howard should be blogging for many decades to come!)

This raises the question of digital preservation. Because long-term maintenance may not always be feasible, digital preservation of old sites becomes really important, and the utility of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine can’t be overstated. But I think that Wayback Machine is just the beginning of a dialogue over how — and when — to preserve web-only materials. Putting copyright issues to the side for the moment, the Internet Archive doesn’t archive all sites, and when it does, it archives some sites more often than others. Plus, it’s not entirely clear whether the Wayback Machine is currently capable of properly archiving all types of blogs: the Internet Archive states that sites that are database-driven or that generate dynamic web pages can’t be archived. I’d think this limitation could apply to at least some blogs (such as this WordPress blog, which is driven by a PHP & MySQL database).

But a quick review of the Wayback Machine suggests that, despite the disclaimer, the Internet Archive may be improving its ability to archive blogs — here’s links to a WordPress-run site that was archived incorrectly in March 2004, but appears to be much better represented in an archive from November 2004. Hopefully, the Internet Archive is continuing to improve its capability to archive different kinds of webpages. Needless to say, as web publishing technologies evolve, it will remain a struggle to find ways to accurately and authoritatively preserve such materials. My quick review of a number of blawgs suggests that some appear to have been pretty nicely archived, whereas others have not. I’ll address this more in a future post.

Thus, I think that timethief’s question — a really good one — leads to additional questions about whether web-only materials should be kept online, and if so, to even more questions about how, where, and by whom they should be maintained or preserved. I don’t think the answers to these questions are easy or obvious.

Quick answer #1: Because he wrote so much more beautifully than I ever will.

Quick answer #2: Because I wanted a placeholder.

Not-so-quick answer #3: When working on the blog’s design, I wanted something — anything — to serve as a placeholder. Shakespeare seemed like a good idea: because I’m interested in the technical, policy, and legal problems of preserving information, Shakespeare’s works seemed a textbook example of what should be preserved.

So I found a Shakespeare website and gleefully exercised my right to copy, clip, and paste from the public domain. Sidebar: it would have been even more interesting if I had clipped from a DRM’d CD-ROM of Shakespeare’s works, but that’s another post and another day . . . .

And an admission: Although I was an english & philosophy major in my undergraduate days, it’s been a very, very long time since I thought about Shakespeare. (Notwithstanding Shakespeare in Love, which was great). Having absolutely no idea what might be relevant or useful, I simply looked at the the first thing I found, Shakespeare’s first sonnet.

But serendipity is a funny thing. Considering that I’m currently writing about digital preservation, and further considering that so much of what we electronically preserve is forgettable noise and infoglut — or digital garbage! – I thought Shakespeare’s language was a keeper. Which, of course, it is.