Law Commons^™

The Americans With Disabilities Act In Cyberspace: Annlving The "Nexus" Approach To Private Internet Websites, Richard E. Moberly

Mercer Law Review

In recent years, the increasing importance of the Internet has drawn attention to the exclusion of certain parts of society from participating fully in the advantages brought about by the Internet's technological advances. This "digital divide," as some have labeled it, particularly excludes some individuals with disabilities, such as those with visual, auditory, or muscular impairments, who are unable to access many features of today's Internet. Although private efforts encourage websites to adopt voluntary standards to make the Internet more accessible to these individuals, no clear governmental directive specifically aimed at privately-owned websites currently requires broad accessibility for the disabled. …

Dinner Speech - Reading Too Much Into Nothing: The Metaphor Of Place And The Internet, David Hricik

Mercer Law Review

When I was asked to speak at this dinner, I realized I was doing something I had never done before. Normally, I am given the task of speaking for ninety minutes early in the morning at Continuing Legal Education (CLE) conferences for patent lawyers. The challenge is always first, how to wake them up, especially when they are often tired and may have had a heavy dinner and drinks the night before with other attendees and, next, how do I keep them awake for ninety minutes?

Screen-Scraping And Harmful Cybertrespass After Intel, George H. Fibbe

Mercer Law Review

The topic for this Symposium, "The Internet: Place, Property, or Thing-All or None of the Above," touches on a debate that has existed since the early days of the Internet. There is no question that people commonly understand their experience using the Internet with the help of spatial metaphor--e.g., "sites" and "addresses" that we "visit," and programs called "robots," "crawlers," and "spiders." Leaving metaphor aside, many of the constituent parts of the Internet, especially computer servers, are items of private personal property.

Indeed, the debate over metaphor is reminiscent of the scene from the movie Field of Dreams in which …

Filtering Software In Public Libraries: Traditional Collection Decision Or Congressionally Induced First Amendment Violation?, Christopher Harne

Mercer Law Review

In United States v. American Library Ass'n, the United States Supreme Court held that filtering provisions of the Children's Internet Protection Act ("CIPA" or "Act") are constitutional and are a valid exercise of Congress's spending power because they do not induce public libraries to violate their patrons' First Amendment rights. The Court also held that CIPA does not place unconstitutional conditions upon public libraries' receipt of federal funding.