The Wall Street Journal Law Blog referenced posts made by Professor Larry Lessig about the controversy surrounding Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Alex Kozinski:

The first is a post written last week by Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig, who for long has focused on law and technology, on his blog.

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Parsing “the Kozinski mess”: Lessig says the real Kozinski mess is “the total inability of the media — including we, the media, bloggers — to get the basic facts right, and keep the reality in perspective.” Lessig writes: “The real story here is how easily we let such a baseless smear travel - and our need is for a better developed immunity (in the sense of immunity from a virus) from this sort of garbage.”

The site, he says, “was not ‘on the web’ in the sense of a site open and inviting anyone to come in. It had a robots.txt file to indicate its contents were not to be indexed. That someone got in is testimony to the fact that security — everywhere — is imperfect. But this was a private file server, like a private room ….”

He concludes: “There is nothing for Chief Judge Kozinski to defend because he has violated no law, and we live in a free society (or so he thought when he immigrated from Romania). A free society should feed the right to be left alone, including the right not to have to defend publicly private choices and taste, by learning not to feed the privacy trolls.”