Duame Morris: “Invalid Subpoenas Sent Via E-Mail“:

Thousands of company executives received e-mails mid-April that purported to be federal court subpoenas but instead appear to be part of a “phishing” scam to capture sensitive data. The invalid subpoenas: (a) bear the seal of the U.S. district court and docket numbers from real cases; (b) command an appearance before a grand jury; (c) identify the originating e-mail address as subpoena@uscourts.com; and (d) contain a link with an instruction to “download the entire document on this matter … and print it for your record.

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TechCrunch: “The Importance of a Good Name: Ditching Simluscribe For PhoneTag“:

The name SimulScribe totally sucks for our business. People have a real challenge remembering the name and they cannot spell it, which is a real problem considering that new customers need to type in our web address to sign up. When your company offers a consumer product that relies on viral marketing, a difficult name is a really bad thing. In fact, I’m constantly amazed at how well we have been able to do with such a shitty name.

Michael Carrier and Greg Lastowka: “Against Cyberproperty”

Ever since cyberproperty burst onto the legal scene a decade ago, courts and scholars have assumed that it is inevitable. This Article shows that it is not. Scholars have examined one element of the link between cyberproperty and property in asking whether cyberspace is the correct model for websites and e-mail servers. But remarkably, they have neglected the other property foundations of cyberproperty.
This Article shows that none of the primary theories supporting property – Locke’s labor theory, Hegel’s personhood rationale, and utilitarianism – justifies cyberproperty. It demonstrates that the concept lacks property’s limits. And it finds that existing statutory prohibitions against spam, electronic invasion, and copyright infringement are more narrowly targeted and less likely to quash competition and speech. The Article concludes that the time has come to abandon cyberproperty.

Those of you not put off by the blogging ‘inside baseball’ aspect to this post will be interested by the dispute between blogger/author/interviewer Shel Israel, author of ‘Naked Conversations,’ and the naked Shel Israel parody puppet. As noted by TechCrunch, the parody show seems to be doing better than the original, which does not please the original.

News.com: “YouTube’s Filtering Issues Still Not Moot“:

A year ago Wednesday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt delighted an audience of TV and radio broadcasters when he promised to roll out a system that would mean the end of piracy at YouTube.com
“We are in the process of developing tools which are called ‘Claim Your Content,'” Schmidt said at the National Association of Broadcasters 2007 conference. “If people tell us this is a licensed copy, our computers will automatically detect that an illegal copy has been uploaded and then automatically delete it.”
Schmidt went on to say YouTube was “close to turning this (system) on” and once that happened, copyright violation at the site “becomes a moot issue.” But following through on that promise has proven a challenge.