Law Commons^™

Creating Effective Broadband Network Regulation, Daniel L. Brenner

Daniel L. Brenner

ABSTRACT: The Internet is central to the business and pastimes of Americans. Calls for increased regulation are ongoing, inevitable, and often justified. But calls for “network neutrality” or “nondiscrimination” assume with little hesitation federal agency competence to give predictable and accurate meaning to these terms and create regulations to implement them. This article’s chief contribution to Internet policy debate is to focus attention on the likelihood of successful FCC Internet regulation -- a key assumption of some advocates. The article analyzes three characteristics that hobble the FCC, the likeliest federal agency to provide prescriptive rules. First, the record for the …

How To Save The Recording Industry?: Charge Less, Zac Locke

Zac Locke

“How much is music worth?” It is painfully clear that the traditional fifteen dollars charged for a packaged CD is too much. CD sales declined another fourteen percent in 2007, on top of years of similar erosion. As selling music online becomes the way of selling music of the future, record labels, music publishers and music e-tailers must find the ideal price point for their product. This Article defines the ideal price point at the price where the profit is maximized while making it easier for consumers to buy a song rather than download it for free. Technology, through replacing …

The Harry Potter Lexicon And The World Of Fandom: Fan Fiction, Outsider Works, And Copyright, Aaron Schwabach

Aaron Schwabach

Fan fiction, long a nearly invisible form of outsider art, has grown exponentially in volume and legal importance in the past decade. Because of its nature, authorship, and underground status, fan fiction stands at an intersection of issues of property, sexuality, and gender. This article examines three disputes over fan writings, concluding with the recent dispute between J.K. Rowling and Steven Vander Ark over the Harry Potter Lexicon, which Rowling once praised and more recently succeeded in suppressing. The article builds on and adds to the emerging body of scholarship on fan fiction, concluding that much fan fiction is fair …

Who Are These People? New Generation Employees And Trade Secrets, Elizabeth A. Rowe

Elizabeth A Rowe

Traditional approaches to examining the efficacy of trade secret protection in the workplace are often focused on technological and process based measures. Indeed, much attention has focused on the use of technology, by itself, to stem trade secret misappropriation. This Article offers a novel approach to the problem by incorporating contextual factors that might be important to trade secret protection and focuses on the people. It also, for the first time, applies sociological theories about employee theft to trade secret misappropriation. Working from the outside in, the Article examines first the reported societal effects on the values of those workers …

Interstate Intercourse: How Modern Assisted Reproductive Technologies Challenge The Traditional Realm Of Conflicts Of Law, Sonia B. Green

Sonia Bychkov Green

New technologies have always posed challenges to established legal norms. Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) in particular pose legal and ethical challenges to the law, and create never before seen legal problems. Although the ABA House of Representatives recently approved the Model Act Governing Assisted Reproductive Technology, differences in laws and rules will continue to exist. The legal issued involved are wide-ranging, including: liability issues arising from the failure of ART technology, parentage issues, disposition of embryos, and many others. As ART becomes more widely used, it is also used more in an interstate and international context. Thus, when a dispute …

Rethinking "Reasonable Efforts" To Protect Trade Secrets In A Digital World, Elizabeth Rowe

Elizabeth A Rowe

The very technological tools in use today that increase the efficiency with which companies do business create challenges for trade secret protection. They make trade secrets easier to store, easier to access, easier to disseminate, and more portable, thus increasing the risks that trade secrets will be destroyed. While secrecy is the sine qua non of trade secret protection, it can be difficult to accomplish. There is a tension between the need to keep information secret and modern technological methods that allow the information to be easily accessed, reproduced, and disseminated. In trade secret misappropriation cases, courts evaluate the sufficiency …

Last-Mile Dilemma: How Network Neutrality Legislation Could Create Barriers To Innovation, Nicholas R. Brown

Nicholas R Brown

This paper takes a look at the various concepts of Network Neutrality and their affects on the end user. And then investigates proposed policy solutions and how that policy may hinder future Internet innovation.

What Google Knows: Privacy And Internet Search Engines, Omer Tene

Omer Tene

Search engines are the dominant actors on the Internet today and Google is undoubtedly, the undisputed king of search, evoking ambivalent feelings. It is adored for its ingenuity, simple, modest-looking interface, and superb services offered at no (evident) cost. Yet increasingly, it is feared by privacy advocates who view it as a private sector "big brother," posing what one commentator dubbed “the most difficult privacy problem in all of human history.” Google is an informational gatekeeper, harboring previously unimaginable riches of personal data. Billions of search queries stream across Google servers each month, the aggregate thoughtstream of humankind online. Google …

Law's Misguided Love Affair With Science, Robin Feldman

Robin C Feldman

The allure of science has always captivated members of the legal profession. Its siren’s song has followed us throughout much of American legal history. We look to science to rescue us from the experience of uncertainty and the discomfort of difficult legal decisions, and we are constantly disappointed.

The notion of what constitutes science and what it would take to make law more scientific varies across time. What does not vary is our constant return to the well. We are constantly seduced into believing that some new science will provide answers to law’s dilemmas, and we are constantly disappointed.

This …

The Technology Of Law And Economics, John H. Moran

John H Moran

The article suggests that the field of Technology drives the fields of Economics and Law. It relies on Richard Posner's law and economics ideas, but also argues that technologists have increasing influence on the emerging world order, to the detriment of the existing government and banking based power structure.

Technical Capacity, Policymaking And Food Standards: An Overview Of Indian Experience, Nupur Chowdhury, Sanjay Kumar

Nupur Chowdhury

The SPS Agreement in the WTO gives legal validity to the CODEX standards. Since the developed countries have been at the forefront of setting the food standards in the CODEX, the developing countries have been increasingly engaged in the CODEX, and also in the WTO, with an objective to increase their exports of the agricultural and food products. But such objective and desire have often been stymied by the lack of institutions which can sustain the intense technical negotiations at the CODEX. If these participations are not qualitatively satisfactory, the very objective of such participations is not fulfilled. But since …

Fighting The Food Crisis: Feeding Africa One Family At A Time, Karol C. Boudreaux, Adam Aft

Karol C. Boudreaux

Food riots have exploded. Prices for staple goods—wheat, maize, rice—have risen dramatically. 1 in 3 people in sub-Saharan Africa confront hunger and malnutrition, persistent threats. Many of the hungry are Africa’s smallholder farmers, subsistence farmers whose productivity has fallen over the past three decades while agricultural productivity rates have soared in other parts of the word. This article asks: what kinds of strategies, both legal and practical, will it take to effectively address the problem of a food crisis in sub-Saharan Africa? Scholars and politicians point to the need for a Green Revolution for Africa, a new effort to increase …