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A joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, George Washington School of Law, and Santa Clara University School of Law clinics. Do you know your online rights? Have you received a letter asking you to remove information from a Web site or to stop engaging in an activity? Are you concerned about liability for information that someone else posted to your online forum? If so, this site is for you. Chilling Effects aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities. We are excited about the new opportunities the Internet offers individuals to express their views, parody politicians, celebrate their favorite movie stars, or criticize businesses. But we’ve noticed that not everyone feels the same way. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some individuals and corporations are using intellectual property and other laws to silence other online users. Chilling Effects encourages respect for intellectual property law, while frowning on its misuse to “chill” legitimate activity.

http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi

Disturbing Number of Legal Flaws in so-called “DMCA Notices” Jennifer M. Urban of the USC Gould School of Law and Laura Quilter of the University of California-Berkeley (Boalt Hall) have found a disturbing number of legal flaws in so-called “DMCA notices”–which result in online materials being pulled from the Internet, generally without notice to the target. Urban and Quilter studied a sample of nearly 900 notices collected by the Chilling Effects project, and discovered that a third of them demanded removal when the target had a clear legal defense. The researchers released a summary report; the full research paper will appear in the March, 2006 edition of the Santa Clara Computer and High Technology Law Journal. HTML Full report can be found by clicking here

http://lawweb.usc.edu/news/releases/2005/legalFlaws.html
http://mylaw.usc.edu/documents/512Rep/

And for your amusement……… Legal threats against The Pirate Bay [a bit torrent site] and their hilarious responses that pOWNZ all the aggressors:
http://thepiratebay.org/legal.php

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in other news………
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I don’t know about you, but I hate calling tech support & customer service hotlines, and the worst of it is the wait. Paul English felt the same way and has put together a list of shortcuts on how to get to a human quickly. If enough people bypass these phone systems, maybe the big companies will finally get a clue and start providing real customer service again……
http://paulenglish.com/ivr/