Law Commons^™

Cybertrespass And Trespass To Documents, Kevin Emerson Collins

Cleveland State Law Review

In this essay, I offer only a small contribution to the ongoing cybertrespass debate that I believe allows the debate to be seen from a different perspective. In other words, I add a new story to the mix. I explore what I call trespass to documents. The cases applying trespass to documents are real-space, pre-Internet variants of a subset of the cybertrespass cases. They demonstrate that property rights in the tangible medium on which information is inscribed have not historically been broad enough to trump the complicated balancing of interests that characterizes information law when free-speech and competition-policy concerns are …