Dear Digest Readers,

As we are sure you have noticed, Digest has undergone a makeover. We hope you enjoy its new appearance, and we will continue refining it in the coming weeks. Please feel free to give us feedback at any time at digest.jolt@gmail.com. A special thanks goes to Dave LeRay, Catherine Roach, Jeff Dunn, Charlie Stiernberg, Dorothy Du, and Andrew Crocker for enabling this transition.

- The Digest Staff

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The Digest will be taking a short break from our regular coverage over the next two weeks as JOLT kicks off its 1L and transfer recruiting season. While we take our hiatus from regular coverage, we hope you enjoy reading the Digest Comments we posted over the last three weeks. Comments are longer opinion pieces on especially significant issues in law and technology. These pieces are written entirely by members of our staff, on topics they believe warrant closer examination ... Read More...

By Tim Grayson White House Presses for Copyright Reform, Privacy “Bill of Rights” On Wednesday, the White House released a 20-page white paper (PDF), aimed at helping Congress tackle the increasingly complex issues surrounding copyright and intellectual property laws. As CNET reports, one of the paper’s main purposes was to urge Congress to definitively establish streaming unauthorized media as a felony. Making such “illegal streaming” a felony would empower the FBI to tap the phones, Internet connections, and other communication ... Read More...

By Vivian Tao Supreme Court Hears Oral Arguments in HIV Test Patent Dispute Mercury News reports that oral arguments in the Supreme Court began this week over whether a Stanford University researcher’s patent on an HIV test belongs to Stanford or pharmaceutical company Roche. Researcher Mark Holodniy developed the test while he was employed as a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine. The dispute centers around whether he could transfer Stanford’s patent rights while working as a visiting researcher at Cetus laboratories, ... Read More...

By Greg Tang TSA Offends Travelers with Body Scanners, Fails to be Accountable The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) commented on the TSA’s use of body scanners in airports across the country, which has raised serious public concerns over the indignity and invasiveness of the body scanners and pat-down searches. The EFF expressed skepticism over the effectiveness of the body scanners in detecting terrorist attacks like the Christmas Day Bomb of 2009, citing various sources, including a TSA document, that have ... Read More...