Traffic has been terrible on my commute lately as 28,000 students are returning to the University of Pittsburgh campus. The same story is certainly true at thousands of other colleges and universities. Students will settle in to a cornucopia of high speed Internet options, such as broadband...

Several actions in state legislatures as well as proposals in Congress are prompting a fresh look at Internet sales taxes and access taxes. While taxes have been a part of the telecommunications industry for years - take a look at your phone or cable bill for a sample of the various taxes and...

The possibility of the most significant restructuring of patent law in 56 years is growing increasingly likely. In January 2008, the Senate Judiciary Committee released a draft report on the Senate's patent reform proposal, Senate bill 1145. The draft report, described by one commentator as...

Google:(gü,gól), vb: To use the Google search engine to locate Internet information on just about anything. E.g. “The anxious Dad googled his daughter's blind date. Boy was he surprised!”Actually, googling Google anytime over the last several weeks would have brought you a wealth of new...

The Federal E-rate program was established in 1996 as part of a broad effort to bring high-speed Internet access to schools and libraries around the country, particularly in rural areas. Under the program, schools and libraries can receive grants which cover up to 90% of their Internet service...

(beginning with the middle of paragraph 2 and cont. through 4)For over four years a dispute has raged between Research in Motion (RIM), the Ontario, Canada based manufacturer of the BlackBerry, and NTP, a Virginia company which holds several patents covering wireless e-mail technologies. NTP...

“The fun never stops!” So says University of Pittsburgh law professor Bernard Hibbitts, founder, editor, and publisher of JURIST: Legal News and Research, (http://jurist.law.pitt.edu). JURIST is the 2006 winner of the People's Choice Webby Award for the best law Website. Prof Hibbitts has...

Copyright law seeks to find a balance between opposing interests. On the one side are the interests of copyright owners, those who have created works and are seeking both commercial return and creative control over those works. On the other side are the interests of users of copyrighted works,...

An open source alternative in law, economics and the social sciences has been the Social Science Research Network, or SSRN (www.ssrn.com). SSRN, a for-profit company, provides a venue for scholars to publish pre-print and other editions of their scholarly works for free, and allows users to...

It must be a challenge being Google these days. In barely 15 years, Google has gone from a tech start-up founded by a couple of grad students, to one of the most dominant forces in the information industry. Its market capitalization of over a quarter of a trillion – that's “T”-trillion –...