Law Commons^™

Defining Hate Speech, Andrew Sellars

Faculty Scholarship

There is no shortage of opinions about what should be done about hate speech, but if there is one point of agreement, it is that the topic is ripe for rigorous study. But just what is hate speech, and how will we know it when we see it online? For all of the extensive literature about the causes, harms, and responses to hate speech, few scholars have endeavored to systematically define the term. Where other areas of content analysis have developed rich methodologies to account for influences like context or bias, the present scholarship around hate speech rarely extends beyond …

Protecting One's Own Privacy In A Big Data Economy, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

Big Data is the vast quantities of information amenable to large-scale collection, storage, and analysis. Using such data, companies and researchers can deploy complex algorithms and artificial intelligence technologies to reveal otherwise unascertained patterns, links, behaviors, trends, identities, and practical knowledge. The information that comprises Big Data arises from government and business practices, consumer transactions, and the digital applications sometimes referred to as the “Internet of Things.” Individuals invisibly contribute to Big Data whenever they live digital lifestyles or otherwise participate in the digital economy, such as when they shop with a credit card, get treated at a hospital, apply …

Private Lawmaking In Commercial Cyberspace, Eliza Mik

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No discussion of “Law and Technology” would be complete without at least one essay centred on the Internet. While the Internet no longer captures our imagination with the same force as it did 20 years ago, we cannot assume that it no longer creates (or perpetuates?) multiple legal problems. When we talk about the Internet we must, however, refrain from the popular “Internet metanarrative” that often leads to superficial arguments and unhelpful generalisations.1 We must always remain aware of the multiplicity of the Internet’s technical applications and the wide range of legal contexts in which the term gains significance. Discussing …

Reader Privacy In Digital Library Collaborations: Signs Of Commitment, Opportunities For Improvement, Anne Klinefelter

Faculty Publications

Libraries collaborate to digitize collections large and small in order to provide information with fewer geographical, temporal, or socio-economic barriers. These collaborations promise economy of scale and breadth of impact, both for access to content and for preservation of decaying print source material. Some suggest this increased access to information through the digital environment comes at the expense of reader privacy, a value that United States librarians have advanced for nearly eighty years. Multiplying risks to digital reader privacy are said to weaken librarians’ commitment to privacy of library use and to overwhelm libraries’ ability to ensure confidential access to …

Violating Of Individual Privacy: Moroccan Perceptions Of The Ban Of Voip Services, Tyler Delhees

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

On January 6, 2016, the Moroccan telecommunications regulatory agency, the ANRT, announced a ban onVoice Over Internet Protocol(VoIP) calling services such as Skype, WhatsApp, and Viber. The ban triggered sweeping opposition among the Moroccan public, opening discussion of digital rights, censorship, and Internet governance. Considering liberal democratic rights in the 2011 Moroccan Constitution and a history of censorship, this study analyzes the official justification of the ANRT alongside additional explanations involving business interests and the security services. The purpose of this study is to gauge the perceptions of Moroccans on the decision of the ANRT and provide a holistic explanation. …

Digital Self-Ownership: A Publicity-Rights Framework For Determining Employee Social Media Rights, Susan Park, Patricia Sánchez Abril

Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Imagine an upandcoming company hires you as one of its first employees. Passionate about your employer, you put in long hours doing everything from marketing to accounting to event planning. You are also proud of your employer's product, so you begin to publicize it to your friends through your social network accounts. (In fact, the company's founder is also one of your Facebook friends.) You tell your friends about the product launch, invite them to marketing events, and eventually blog about your industry, amassing a significant social media following while creating buzz about your employer. But one day, during layoffs …

Multi-Stakeholder Approach Needed To Tackle Cyberthreats, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Being a hyper-connected society, our national security is also increasingly being redefined by threats in the cyberspace. Cyberattacks have evolved from a nontraditional security threat to a new domain of intense conflict, involving deception and sabotage.

Just Cause Discipline For Social Networking In The New Guilded Age: Will The Law Look The Other Way?, William A. Herbert, Alicia Mcnally

Publications and Research

We live and work in an era with the moniker of the New Gilded Age to describe the growth in societal income inequality. The designation is not limited to evidence of the growing gap in wealth distribution, but also the sharp rise in employment without security, including contingent and part-time work. This article examines the state of workplace procedural protections against discipline as they relate to employee use of social media in the New Gilded Age. In our times, reactions to the rapid distribution of troublesome electronic communications through social networking tend to eclipse patience for enforceable workplace procedures. The …

Vat In The Gcc - Missing Trader Frauds, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Musaad Alwohaibi

Faculty Scholarship

All VATs are susceptible to missing trader (MT) fraud. VATs adopted in an economic community are particularly more susceptible. The EU, for example, loses in excess of €100b annually to this fraud. Given the anticipated adoption of a European-style credit-invoice VAT in the GCC by January 1, 2018, this paper offers a technology-based solution involving the real-time tracking of taxable transactions with centrally collected (securely encrypted) data flows that are risk-analyzed by artificial intelligence (AI).

Data Institutionalism: A Reply To Andrew Woods, Zachary D. Clopton

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In "Against Data Exceptionalism," Andrew K. Woods explores “one of the greatest societal and technological shifts in recent years,” which manifests in the “same old” questions about government power. The global cloud is an important feature of modern technological life that has significant consequences for individual privacy, law enforcement, and governance. Yet, as Woods suggests, the legal challenges presented by the cloud have analogies in age-old puzzles of public and private international law.

Identifying these connections is a conceptual advance, and this contribution should not be understated. But, to my mind, the most telling statement in Woods’s excellent article comes …

Personal Property Servitudes On The Internet Of Things, Christina Mulligan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sex, Videos, And Insurance: How Gawker Could Have Avoided Financial Responsibility For The $140 Million Hulk Hogan Sex Tape Verdict, Christopher French

Journal Articles

On March 18, 2016, and March 22, 2016, a jury awarded Terry Bollea (a.k.a Hulk Hogan) a total of $140 million in compensatory and punitive damages against Gawker Media for posting less than two minutes of a video of Hulk Hogan having sex with his best friend’s wife. The award was based upon a finding that Gawker intentionally had invaded Hulk Hogan’s privacy by posting the video online. The case has been receiving extensive media coverage because it is a tawdry tale involving a celebrity, betrayal, adultery, sex, and the First Amendment. The case likely will be remembered by most …

Democratizing Startups, Seth C. Oranburg

Law Faculty Scholarship

President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (“JOBS Act”) of 2012 into law to “help entrepreneurs raise the capital they need to put Americans back to work and create an economy that’s built to last.” The goal is to “democratize startups” by making capital available to diverse entrepreneurs in new geographies. Yet the net effect of securities regulations and market conditions is the opposite. Startup companies are encouraged to stay private so capital is consolidating in large, mature firms instead of recycling into new startups. Evidence of consolidation is that once-rare “Unicorns” (billion-dollar startups) now number at least 170. …

Of Reasonable Readers And Unreasonable Speakers: Libel Law In A Networked World, Lyrissa Lidsky, Ronnell Anderson Jones

Faculty Publications

Social-media libel cases require courts to map existing defamation doctrines onto social-media fact patterns in ways that create adequate breathing space for expression without lincensing character assassination. This Article explores these challenges by investigating developments involving two important constitutional doctrines - the so-called opinion privlege, which protects statements that are unverifiable or cannot be regarded as stating actual facts about a person, and the actual malice rule, which requires defamation plaintiff's who are public officials or public figures to prove that the defendant made a defamatory statement with knowledge of or reckless disregard for, its falsity. Given the critical role …

Against Data Exceptionalism, Andrew Keane Woods

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

One of the great regulatory challenges of the Internet era—indeed, one of today's most pressing privacy questions—is how to define the limits of government access to personal data stored in the cloud. This is particularly true today because the cloud has gone global, raising a number of questions about the proper reach of one state's authority over cloud-based data. The prevailing response to these questions by scholars, practitioners, and major Internet companies like Google and Facebook has been to argue that data is different. Data is “unterritorial,” they argue, and therefore incompatible with existing territorial notions of jurisdiction. This Article …

Antitrust And Information Technologies, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Technological change strongly affects the use of information to facilitate anticompetitive practices. The effects result mainly from digitization and the many products and processes that it enables. These technologies of information also account for a significant portion of the difficulties that antitrust law encounters when its addresses intellectual property rights. In addition, changes in the technologies of information affect the structures of certain products, in the process either increasing or decreasing the potential for competitive harm.

For example, digital technology affects the way firms exercise market power, but it also imposes serious measurement difficulties. The digital revolution has occurred in …

“Spooky Action At A Distance”: Intangible Injury In Fact In The Information Age, Seth F. Kreimer

All Faculty Scholarship

Two decades after Justice Douglas coined “injury in fact” as the token of admission to federal court under Article III, Justice Scalia sealed it into the constitutional canon in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife. In the two decades since Lujan, Justice Scalia has thrown increasingly pointed barbs at the permissive standing doctrine of the Warren Court, maintaining it is founded on impermissible recognition of “Psychic Injury.” Justice Scalia and his acolytes take the position that Article III requires a tough minded, common sense and practical approach. Injuries in fact must be "tangible" "direct" "concrete" "de facto" realities in time and …

Making Civilian Drones Safe: Performance Standards, Self-Certification, And Post-Sale Data Collection, Henry Perritt, Albert Plawinski

All Faculty Scholarship

With millions of small drones in private hands, the FAA continues its struggle to develop an effective regulatory regime to comply with Congress’s mandate to integrate them into the national airspace system. Thousands of individuals and small businesses have obtained authorization from the FAA—"section 333 exemptions"—allowing them to fly their drones commercially. Farmers, TV stations, surveyors, construction-site supervisors, real estate agents, people selling their properties, and managers seeking cheaper and safer ways to inspect their facilities, want to hire the exemption holders, but many are holding back until the FAA clarifies the groundrules.The FAA understands that its traditional approach for …

Experience, Not Logic: Adapting Spoliation Doctrine To The Brave New World Of Digital Documents, Roni A. Elias

Student Works

The adversarial system requires full discovery as an essential element of a fair and accurate litigation process. Not surprisingly, spoliation—the destruction of evidence with a culpable state of mind—is an anathema to the most fundamental principles governing litigation procedure and in turn may warrant harsh sanctions.

The doctrines governing how courts respond to spoliation are well established. But these venerable rules were mostly devised for a discovery process that involved the production of paper documents. The information revolution that accompanied the dramatic expansion of computers to produce and store every kind of document forever transformed the discovery process. As computer …

Undetected Conflict-Of-Laws Problems In Cross-Border Online Copyright Infringement Cases, Marketa Trimble

Boyd Briefs / Road Scholars

Professor Marketa Trimble presented her paper, “Undetected Conflict-of-Laws Problems in Cross-Border Online Copyright Infringement Cases" at the 16th Annual Intellectual Property Scholars Conference held at Stanford Law School in Palo Alto, CA, on August 12, 2016. The presentation was one of five in a session devoted to Empirical Copyright.

Abstracts and information about other sessions at the conference are available on the Intellectual Property Scholars Conference website.

Liability For Mobile Health And Wearable Technologies, Lindsay Wiley, Nicolas Terry

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Most of the legal commentary regarding mobile health has focused on direct regulation leveraging existing laws and regulators such as HIPAA privacy through HHS-OCR or device regulation by the FDA. However, much of the mobile health revolution likely will play out in lightly regulated spaces bereft of most of the privacy, security, and safety rules associated with traditional health care. This article examines the potential for common law liability models to bridge these gaps (even on a temporary basis). Part II of this paper provides an introduction to the terminology used, and presents a brief typology of the apps appearing …

Knowledge Commons (2016), Michael J. Madison, Katherine J. Strandburg, Brett M. Frischmann

Book Chapters

This chapter describes methods for systematically studying knowledge commons as an institutional mode of governance of knowledge and information resources, including references to adjacent but distinct approaches to research that looks primarily to the role(s) of intellectual property systems in institutional contexts concerning innovation and creativity.

Knowledge commons refers to an institutional approach (commons) to governing the production, use, management, and/or preservation of a particular type of resource (knowledge or information, including resources linked to innovative and creative practice). Commons refers to a form of community management or governance. It applies to a resource, and it involves a group or …

Information Abundance And Knowledge Commons, Michael J. Madison

Book Chapters

Standard accounts of IP law describe systems of legal exclusion intended to prompt the production and distribution of intellectual resources, or information and knowledge, by making those things artificially scarce. The argument presented here frames IP law instead as one of several possible institutional responses to the need to coordinate the use of intellectual resources given their natural abundance, and not necessarily useful or effective responses at that. The chapter aims to shift analytic and empirical frameworks from those grounded in law to those grounded in governance, and from IP law in isolation to IP law as part of resource …

Understanding Access To Things: A Knowledge Commons Perspective, Michael J. Madison

Book Chapters

This chapter explores the related ideas of access to knowledge resources and shared governance of those resources, often known as commons. Knowledge resources consist of many types and forms. Some are tangible, and some are intangible. Some are singular; some are reproduced in copies. Some are singular or unique; some are collected or pooled. Some are viewed, used, or consumed only by a single person; for some resources, collective or social consumption is the norm. Any given resource often has multiple attributes along these dimensions, depending on whether one examines the resource’s physical properties, its creative or inventive properties, or …

The Privacy Policymaking Of State Attorneys General, Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Platform Neutrality: Enhancing Freedom Of Expression In Spheres Of Private Power, Frank A. Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Modularity Theory And Internet Regulation, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Modularity is often cited as one of the foundations for the Internet’s success. Unfortunately, academic discussions about modularity appearing in the literature on Internet policy are undertheorized. The persistence of nonmodular architectures for some technologies underscores the need for some theoretical basis for determining when modularity is the preferred approach. Even when modularity is desirable, theory must provide some basis for making key design decisions, such as the number of modules, the location of the interfaces between the modules, and the information included in those interfaces.

The literature on innovation indicates that modules should be determined by the nature of …

Copyright For Literate Robots, James Grimmelmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Almost by accident, copyright has concluded that copyright law is for humans only: reading performed by computers doesn't count as infringement. Conceptually, this makes sense: copyright's ideal of romantic readership involves humans writing for other humans. But in an age when more and more manipulation of copyrighted works is carried out by automated processes, this split between human reading (infringement) and robotic reading (exempt) has odd consequences and creates its own tendencies toward a copyright system in which humans occupy a surprisingly peripheral place. This essay describes the shifts in fair use law that brought us here and reflects on …

Intellectual Property In News? Why Not?, Sam Ricketson, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

This Chapter addresses arguments for and against property rights in news, from the outset of national law efforts to safeguard the efforts of newsgathers, through the various unsuccessful attempts during the early part of the last century to fashion some form of international protection within the Berne Convention on literary and artistic works and the Paris Convention on industrial property. The Chapter next turns to contemporary endeavors to protect newsgatherers against “news aggregation” by online platforms. It considers the extent to which the aggregated content might be copyrightable, and whether, even if the content is protected, various exceptions set out …

The Secession Of The Successful: The Rise Of Amazon As Private Global Consumer Protection Regulator, Jane K. Winn

Articles

In 2005, the Americans for Fair Electronic Commerce Transactions (“AFFECT”) coalition issued a list of 12 principles it hoped would contribute to a new consensus about what constitutes fairness in online consumer transactions. A decade later, a cursory review of different jurisdictions indicates that, while there has been little discernable progress in the direction of the principles in the United States, other jurisdictions such as the European Union have made more progress.

However, the one jurisdiction in the world that comes closest to implementing all 12 principles across the full spectrum of consumer transactions is not a government at all, …