Res Ipsa Lolquitur

Posted 06/28/2007 at 1:29pm | by

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Hi there. I'm Erin, and I'll be whisking you through the wonderful world of tech law here at Maximum PC. I'm a law student at New York University (go fightin' violets!) and a legal intern for the summer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Before that, I worked as a webdesigner for another PC magazine, and spent a lot of time online. So much time, in fact, that my dad made an AIM screenname to talk to me, because my AIM was more reliable than the phone.

Like everyone, I am a sucker for a good YouTube video and am a member of far too many web 2.0 things. I am one of a limited but growing number of legal geeks, which means that I can write in both Latin and Klingon.

As a geek, I felt like I could make a material contribution in the law. Too many of the legislators and judges making decisions about what is and should be legal don't understand the technologies at issue – what does copyright protection do when even passively reading a document on the internet requires making a copy in cache, for example? – and then we end up with bad law (*cough*) that stifles the wrong activities or freezes in place an outdated status quo. Enter the lawyers and policy makers who hack, code, mashup, or blog, however, and you start to see more legal room for innovation and creativity.

It works the other way, too – the more hackers, coders, mashers, and bloggers know about what's going on in the law, the more you can protect the rights and freedoms you still have, and the more you can influence what happens next.