Law Commons^™

Rankings, Reductionism, And Responsibility, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

After discussing how search engines operate, and sketching a normative basis for regulation of the rankings they generate, this piece proposes some minor, non-intrusive legal remedies for those who claim that they are harmed by search engine results. Such harms include unwanted (but high-ranking) results relating to them, or exclusion from high-ranking results they claim they are due to appear on. In the first case (deemed inclusion harm), I propose a right not to suppress the results, but merely to add an asterisk to the hyperlink directing web users to them, which would lead to the complainant's own comment on …

Why Have A Telecommunications Law? Anti-Discrimination Norms In Communications, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

This paper describes a vision of what telecommunications laws’ central goals should be in coming decades, and what kind of legal instruments will serve those goals. The telecommunications law, I suggest, has been preoccupied with three projects: allocating rights, managing discrimination, and achieving various social goals, like indecency regulation. This paper argues that in the future the main point of the telecommunications law should be as an anti-discrimination regime, and that the main challenge for regulators will be getting the anti-discrimination rules right.

The view advanced here, while much popularized over the last decade, has deeper roots reaching back to …

The Copyright Paradox, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Copyright law has become an important part of American industrial policy. Its rules are felt by every industry that touches information, and today that means quite a bit. Like other types of industrial policy, copyright in operation purposely advantages some sectors and disadvantages others. Consequently, today's copyright courts face hard problems of competition management, akin to those faced by the antitrust courts and the Federal Communications Commission.

How should courts manage competition using copyright? Over the last decade, writers have begun to try to understand the "other side" of copyright, variously called its innovation policy, communications policy, or regulatory side.Here …