What happens to your email after you die? Can the executor of your estate (or the administrator if you die without a will) gain access to your email account and read all of your email? That is the question at the heart of a lawsuit, Ajemian vs. Yahoo, that is heading to the Supreme Court, assuming that the Supreme Court agrees to hear it.

As the frenzy over the FCC’s December 14, 2017 vote on whether to repeal the Open Internet Order (OIO), which is being equated to the end of Net Neutrality, reaches a fevered pitch, here’s what the average Internet user needs to know. In our view, the furor over the possible (some say inevitable) repeal is akin to the Y2K hysteria, and the actual outcome probably just as anticlimactic. The sky is not going to fall.

I was recently interviewed, in my capacity as an Internet law and policy attorney, and head of the Institute for Social Internet Public Policy, for an article sponsored by RSA about the impact that GDPR (the EU’s General Data Protection Rules), which goes into effect in the European Union in May 2018, is going to impact, well, everything. And, in particular, about how it will impact U.S. based businesses, because, trust me, it will.

A few years ago we told you about some lawsuits against Mugshots.com and other websites which post the mug shots of those charged with crimes. While the particular lawsuit that we covered, Kaplan and Lashway v. Mugshots, et al, was settled, others were not, and now a Federal judge has ruled that the plaintiffs in a case out of Illinois and Florida against Mugshots.com and UnpublishArrest.com have made a strong enough case for it to move forward, despite the defendants’ motion to dismiss the entire lawsuit for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted (known to legal folks as a Rule 12(b)(6) motion).

We’ve talked about DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notices before, both how easy they are to file, and how easy it is to use them to falsify a situation and get content that you don’t like taken down, even if it isn’t actually violating somebody’s intellectual property rights such as copyright or trademark. Now, in a twist on this, it’s been proven that it is very easy to get Amazon to remove a product based only on a fake intellectual property claim from a fake law firm.

You remember Martin Shkreli, right? He’s the guy who founded Turing Pharmaceuticals, and then acquired the only marketing rights in the U.S. to pyrimethamine (a drug used by, among others, HIV patients), marketed in the U.S. as Daraprim, boosting the price by 5500% per dose. Well, he wasn’t convicted for doing that, but he was convicted for securities fraud, and has been out on bail while awaiting sentencing. Except, a post that he made on Facebook just got him sent to jail. For a post he made on social media. Let’s repeat that – someone is going to jail for a post they made on Facebook. Here’s what Martin Shkreli’s post said:

With little fanfare, this month the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) opened up a request for comments regarding our Federal anti-spam law, known as CAN-SPAM. For those who are not aware, the U.S. is the only first-world country that has not outlawed the practice of adding someone to a mailing list without first obtaining their express permission.

John Rayne Rivello really disagreed with much of what journalist Kurt Eichenwald had to say about Donald Trump; in fact so much so that Rivello, under the assumed name Ari Goldstein and Twitter handle ‘jew_goldstein’, intentionally induced a seizure in Eichenwald, who openly suffers from epilepsy. In what the press is now calling a ‘weaponized Tweet’, Rivello sent Eichenwald a strobing animated GIF, which caused Eichenwald to immediate suffer a seizure upon opening it. The text on the image said “You deserve a seizure for your posts.”

In an almost unprecedented move, a small town judge in Edina, Minnesota (population < 50,000) has authorized a warrant requiring Google to disclose any and all user or subscriber information for anybody who searched for the search term 'Douglas {last name}'. While Judge Gary Larson is not the Gary Larson of The Far Side fame, it does seem that this could be a situation straight out of that comic's universe.

Three principals of Canadian clothing company High on Life, who trespassed at Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone, as well as other locations, in order to post their deeds on social media, have been convicted of misdemeanor criminal trespassing and disorderly conduct, and sentenced to 5 years probation (all of them) and a week in jail (two of them). In addition to the trespass on the fragile Grand Prismatic Spring, Charles Ryker Gamble, Alexey Andriyovych Lyakh and Justis Cooper Price Brown all pleaded guilty to trespass violations in Zion National Park, Mesa Verde National Park, and Death Valley National Park. Additional trespasses on behalf of High on Life occurred at Corona Arch and Bonneville Salt Flats.

A law that was passed in California last year, and that went into effect on January 1, 2017, makes it illegal for anyone operating a motor vehicle to hold a cellphone in their hand while driving. Assembly Bill 1785 (“AB 1785”) criminalizes “driving a motor vehicle while holding and operating a handheld wireless telephone or a wireless electronic communication device.”

If you didn’t yet get a notice from Amazon about a credit from the settlement of the anti-trust price-fixing lawsuit against Apple and book publishers, you may be wondering “Am I entitled to the Amazon credit from the lawsuit settlement?”. You may even have come to the conclusion that you aren’t going to receive credit from the settlement, even though you are sure that you purchased ebooks from Amazon before April of 2012. Well, just because you haven’t received the notice yet, doesn’t mean that you don’t have a credit coming. Here’s how to find out if you are getting a credit from that lawsuit settlement.

Sick of all the politically themed pictures that are cluttering up your Facebook timeline? Wish there were a way to get rid of the politics from your timeline? To simply delete those political pics from your Facebook wall? Well, there is! And we discovered it! Here’s how to automatically remove the political pictures from your Facebook newsfeed. And we also tell you how to find and update your unbaby.me preferences!

A new report by the UK’s top Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, David Anderson, says that bulk interception and acquisition of Internet and communications data is of ‘vital utility’ to security and intelligence agencies.

A new proposal by the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) division would revise their current information collection system for foreigners applying to enter the United States by requesting information about the individual’s Facebook, Twitter, and other social media accounts. CBP is proposing that “Please enter information associated with your online presence – Provider/Platform – Social media identifier” be added to the applications for entry to the U.S..