Law Commons^™

Disorderly Content, Ari Waldman

Washington Law Review

Content moderation plays an increasingly important role in the creation and dissemination of expression, thought, and knowledge. And yet, throughout the social media ecosystem, nonnormative and LGBTQ+ sexual expression is disproportionately taken down, restricted, and banned. The current sociolegal literature, which focuses on content moderation as a whole and sees echoes of formal law in the evolution of its values and mechanics, insufficiently captures the ways in which those principles and practices are not only discriminatory, but also resemble structures of power that have long been used to police queer sexual behavior in public spaces.

This Article contributes to the …

Patents And The Pandemic: Intellectual Property, Social Contracts, And Access To Vaccines, Peter Lee

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

Through enormous public support and private initiative, biopharmaceutical firms developed safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines in record time. These remarkable vaccines represent humanity’s best chance to end the devastating pandemic. However, difficult questions about ownership and access have arisen alongside the development and deployment of these vaccines. Biopharmaceutical companies have patented many of the technologies underlying these vaccines, thus seeming to pit intellectual property rights against the objective of wide and rapid dissemination of these critical resources. While prevailing debates have been framed in the language of intellectual property, this Article suggests that contract principles can help break the impasse …

Cyber-Silencing The Community: Youtube, Divino Group, And Reimagining Section 230, Layla G. Maurer

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

Social media platforms, once simple messaging boards, have grown to colossal size. They are now a vital source of communication and connection, particularly for marginalized groups such as the LGBTQ+ community. Social media holds incredible sway over the news, political discourse, and entertainment that we consume, and the platforms we use are now able to sculpt conversations simply by allowing or disallowing (i.e., moderating) specific types of speech or content.

One indirect form of moderation is demonetization, a means by which content creators are disallowed revenue from advertisements on their hosted media. The consequence of improper demonetization is not just …

Tiktok The Musical: Copyright Issues Raised By The "Ratatouille" Musical, Paige V. Gagliardi

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

TikTok the Musical: Copyright Issues Raised by the “Ratatouille” Musical, explores the growing trend in derivative works and the failures of current copyright law to address it. This article asserts that while derivative works are excellent creative outlets, a safe haven in a tumultuous world, allowing appropriation of copyrights via the fair use doctrine conflicts with the foundations of copyright law. This article argues that IP giants such as the Walt Disney Company have sent a dangerous message to the general public by allowing the TikTok trend of the #ratatouillemusical to become an actual musical: that unlicensed derivative works …

The New Bailments, Danielle D’Onfro

Washington Law Review

The rise of cloud computing has dramatically changed how consumers and firms store their belongings. Property that owners once managed directly now exists primarily on infrastructure maintained by intermediaries. Consumers entrust their photos to Apple instead of scrapbooks; businesses put their documents on Amazon’s servers instead of in file cabinets; seemingly everything runs in the cloud. Were these belongings tangible, the relationship between owner and intermediary would be governed by the common-law doctrine of bailment. Bailments are mandatory relationships formed when one party entrusts their property to another. Within this relationship, the bailees owe the bailors a duty of care …

Copyright Licensing And The Regulation Of China's Music Market: Searching For Transactional Efficiency And Fair Compensation, Chien-Chih (Jesse) Lu

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

China’s music copyright collecting society and its new music platforms, find points of commonality through constructing more efficient and profitable systems to generate more users and greater income. By undertaking a comparison of the various copyright regulations, cases, and statistics, this research aims to contribute to academic science by extracting frameworks and solutions from the United States and European licensing models and examining them in the context of China’s music market. It aims to discover rational approaches to connect rising technology and emerging economic incentives.

Appropriate solutions are proposed based on the influence of international treaties and legislative progress driven …

Revolt Against The U.S. Hegemony: Judicial Divergence In Cyberspace, Dongsheng Zang

Articles

This Article contributes to our understanding of the current state of cyber law. The global perspective demonstrates an almost uniform response to the U.S. law in cyberspace from all of America's major trading partners. In the past, comparative studies tended to focus on a single jurisdiction-typically, the European Union-and compared it with the United States. This approach, informative as it was, significantly understated the gravity of the differences between that jurisdiction and the United States. Fundamentally, it was based on an American-centric outlook with primary interests in building convergence models. In cyberspace, however, this is simply not helpful. In recent …

Modeling Through, Ryan Calo

Articles

Theorists of justice have long imagined a decision-maker capable of acting wisely in every circumstance. Policymakers seldom live up to this ideal. They face well-understood limits, including an inability to anticipate the societal impacts of state intervention along a range of dimensions and values. Policymakers cannot see around corners or address societal problems at their roots. When it comes to regulation and policy-setting, policymakers are often forced, in the memorable words of political economist Charles Lindblom, to “muddle through” as best they can.

Powerful new affordances, from supercomputing to artificial intelligence, have arisen in the decades since Lindblom’s 1959 article …