Deeplinks

With the country's largest state prison system becoming the latest jurisdiction to ban inmates from having a social media presence, censorship of prisoner's digital speech is expected to increase substantially in the weeks and months to come.

A big problem with policies like the ban implemented by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice—beyond the violation of people's free speech rights—is that the public is only starting to learn how common it is for social media platforms to take down inmate profiles. Facebook, for example, recently published for the first time the number of prisoner pages it has suspended: "53 U.S. prisoner accounts and 74 U.K. prisoner accounts where governmental authorities identified either unlawful access to our service or safety issues."

As the law stands now, patent owners have almost complete control over which federal district to file a case in. That’s a major problem. It lets patent owners exploit significant differences between courts, an advantage that the alleged infringers in patent suits don’t have. It effectively leads to outcomes being determined not by the merits of a case, but rather by the cost of litigation. Just last week, the Federal Circuit declined to fix this problem, leaving it up to Congress or the Supreme Court to act.

Everybody knows that the digital locks of DRM on the digital media you own is a big problem. If you’ve bought a digital book, album, or movie, you should be able to do what you want with it—whether that’s enjoying it wherever you want to, or making it more accessible by changing the font size or adding subtitles, or loaning or giving it to a friend when you’re done. We intuitively recognize that digital media should be more flexible than its analog forebears, not less, and that DRM shouldn’t take away rights that copyright was never intended to restrict.