I’m happy to announce that the Fifth Edition of my casebook, Internet Law: Cases and Problems, is now available. This was a cleanup and consolidation year; the majority of the edits consisted of revising and tightening up sections that had become unwieldy with time. There are between thirteen and fifteen new cases, depending on how you count; at least nine older cases have left to make room. The second-most obvious changes are in the heavily rewritten sections on harmful speech and network neutrality, both of which seem to fall out of date every time I blink. There are new notes on spam, ICANN, the DMCA Section 1201 exemption process, and more. And as always, there are hundreds of smaller tweaks and refinements.
The book continues to be available through Semaphore Press as a pay-what-you-want DRM-free PDF download with a suggested price of $30. We continue to find that a substantial majority of law students choose to pay something for the book, and a substantial majority of those who pay choose to pay the suggested price. That says to me that the book’s audience considers the publishing model a fair one, something I consider important in this era of predatory textbook pricing.
I said above that the substantive revisions were the “second-most” apparent because the most evident change is that the book has received a significant redesign. We shifted our print-on-demand partner from Lulu to Amazon CreateSpace, which should mean more convenient ordering and better shipping terms. It also provided a good occasion to reconsider the book’s layout. As loyal readers of this blog know, I dislike the 8.5″ × 11″ format. The book is now a more comfortable 7″ × 10″ – a classic textbook size – with a more natural type size. I redid all of the spacing, indentation, headings, and other layout settings to match, and put Matthew Butterick’s fine sans-serif typeface Concourse to work for headings, case names, URLs, and other accents.
As always, please let me know what you think works and what doesn’t. To me, the release of one edition means it’s time to start gathering notes for the next.