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EFF's Teaching Copyright curriculum was created to help teachers present the laws surrounding digital rights in a balanced way. Teaching Copyright provides lessons and ideas for opening your classroom up to discussion, letting your students express their ideas and concerns, and then guiding your students toward an understanding of the boundaries of copyright law. In five distinct lessons, students are challenged to: * Reflect on what they already know about copyright law. * See the connection between the history of innovation and the history of copyright law. * Learn about fair use, free speech, and the public domain and how those concepts relate to using materials created by others. * Experience various stakeholders' interests and master the principles of fair use through a mock trial. Teaching Copyright will require your students to think about their role in the online world and provide them with the legal framework they need to make informed choices about their online behavior.

But the settlement would also create a class that includes millions of people who will never come forward. For the majority of books -- considered "orphan" works -- no one will claim ownership. The author may have died; the publisher might have gone out of business or doesn't respond to inquiries; the original contract has disappeared. Google would get an explicit, perpetual license to scan and sell access to these in-copyright but out-of-print orphans, which make up an estimated 50 to 70 percent of books published after 1923. No other provider of digital books would enjoy the same legal protection. The settlement also creates a Book Rights Registry that, in conjunction with Google, would set prices for all commercial terms associated with digital books. Broad access is the greatest promise of our digital age. Giving control over such access to one company, no matter how clever or popular, is a danger to principles we hold dear: free speech, open access to knowledge and universal education. Throughout history, those principles have been realized in libraries, publishers and legal systems. There are alternatives. Separate from the Google effort, hundreds of libraries, publishers and technology firms are already digitizing books, with the goal of creating an open, freely accessible system for people to discover, borrow, purchase and read millions of titles. It's not that expensive. For the cost of 60 miles of highway, we can have a 10 million-book digital library available to a generation that is growing up reading on-screen. Our job is to put the best works of humankind within reach of that generation. Through a simple Web search, a student researching the life of John F. Kennedy should be able to find books from many libraries, and many booksellers -- and not be limited to one private library whose titles are available for a fee, controlled by a corporation that can dictate what we are allowed to read.

Dan Solove's publications list. Links to all his SSRN articles.

* Intellectual freedom is the right of every individual both to hold and express opinions and to seek and receive information; it is the basis of democracy; and it is at the core of library service. * Freedom of access to information, regardless of medium and frontiers, is a central responsibility of the library and information profession. * The provision of unhindered access to the Internet by libraries and information services supports communities and individuals to attain freedom, prosperity and development. * Barriers to the flow of information should be removed, especially those that promote inequality, poverty, and despair.

CHENNAI: The Cyber Crime Cell of the Chennai Central Crime Branch has registered a case on a complaint filed by a city advocate against Airtel mobile communication service that it was sending obscene messages to his phone without his consent. The police registered the case on a complaint filed by the advocate, V.S.Suresh of George Town here, to the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (CMM), Egmore. The CMM, R.Killivalavan, had forwarded the complaint to the City Central Crime Branch for registering an FIR, investigating the matter and filing the final report. The case has been registered against the Chief Executive Officer, Bharati Airtel Limited for offences, including under Sections 292 (Sale, etc., of obscene books) and 294 (Obscene acts and songs) of IPC.

Google has banned subscribers to its Korean blogging platform, Textcube (www.textcube.org), from uploading songs onto their blogs, citing the country's new anti-file sharing provisions aimed at thwarting online piracy. This is the first time that the U.S. giant has disabled its bloggers from posting music files on their personal Web pages. Last month, Google blocked users from posting videos and comments on the Korean site of YouTube (kr.youtube.com), its online video service. This was to avoid the new regulations that mandate Internet users to make verifiable real-name registrations on all Web sites with more than 100,000 daily visitors, which means they have to submit their resident registration codes, the Korean equivalent of social security numbers.

April 1, 2009: China's powerful State Administration of Radio, Film and TV has tightened its grip on the biz by ordering all online content providers to apply for a license before broadcasting material on the Internet.

South Korea's democracy seems to be deteriorating by the day - this time with the proposed 18-month incarceration of a blogger critical of the South's economic policy. The 31-year-old blogger's crime: falsely reporting that South Korea had barred banks from purchasing U.S. currency. The authorities said the blogger, Park Dae-sung, will find out his sentence on April 20 for posting the inaccurate story that prosecutors said undermined the county's credibility, The Associated Press reports.

The bank has instructed Wall Street law firm Chadbourne & Parke to pursue blogger Mike Morgan, warning him in a recent cease-and-desist letter that he may face legal action if he does not close down his website. Florida-based Mr Morgan began a blog entitled "Facts about Goldman Sachs" - the web address for which is goldmansachs666.com - just a few weeks ago.

At the end of March The Pirate Bay added new functionality to reach out to millions of Facebook users. Just over a week later and the world's largest social networking site has blocked all links to torrents on the world's largest and most infamous BitTorrent tracker.