Law Commons^™

Individualism Submerged: Climate Change And The Perils Of An Engineered Environment, Juliet P. Stumpf, Daniel J. Chepaitis, Andrea Panagakis

Juliet P Stumpf

Current approaches to addressing the negative impacts of climate change rely on collective capabilities. Welfare economics and contractualism, the two conventional perspectives that dominate the debate, support the pursuit of adaptive strategies such as large-scale geoengineering projects to reduce solar radiation or ameliorate sea-water inundation. In place of returning greenhouse gas emissions to natural levels, these approaches put the global climate system and compensation for losses resulting from climate change under the control of some group of fellow humans. In other words, they privilege mechanisms that increase each individual=s dependence on a collective decisionmaker and decrease the individual=s capacity to …

Indianizing Hollywood: The Debate Over Bollywood's Copyright Infringement, Hariqbal Basi

Hariqbal Basi

For decades, the mainstream Indian film industry, known as Bollywood, has remade copyrighted Hollywood films for the Indian audience without legal repercussions. This practice has gone unnoticed by Hollywood until recently, and accusations have since been brought against Indian filmmakers for copyright infringement. This note provides an in depth analysis of why these potentially infringing films have only become the subject of litigation over the last two years, cultural arguments advanced by Indian filmmakers for why their remakes should constitute original, and not infringing, works, and what the effects of litigation have been. As the two industries become increasingly intertwined, …

I Contenuti Digitali: Tecnologie, Diritti E Libertà, Nicola Lucchi

Nicola Lucchi

The book explores the laws and policies governing technology and the access to information. In recent years the content industry is facing a second "Gutenberg revolution". To meet the new consumers demands, in an environment reshaped by new technologies, information and knowledge are reinventing themselves and their business models. The book offers the opportunity to stimulate the knowledge and awareness concerning key strategic choices for the future of digital content. Over the past two decades, as the diffusion of digital technology has become more and more ubiquitous, its incredible methods of reproduction and distribution have created new important issues for …

Local Participatory Democracy In Israel: Toward A Digital Era, Jennifer Shkabatur

Jennifer Shkabatur

Numerous Israeli cities are amidst a participatory and economic crisis. The gist of the Article is that stronger citizen participation in municipal affairs can help mitigate the crisis, and that digital technologies should play a central role in this endeavor. As the use of digital technologies is still largely uncommon in this context, the Article contends that an effective institutional design for digital platforms is particularly important. Hence, the Article suggests criteria for the evaluation of digital participatory initiatives and develops two models of online citizen participation—consumerist and co-productive. Relying on a variety of American, German, and Israeli examples, the …

Exploring The Ethicality Of Firing Employees Who Blog, Sean Valentine, Gary Fleischman, Robert Sprague, Lynn Godkin

Robert Sprague

This exploratory study evaluates the ethical considerations related to employees fired for their blogging activities. Specifically, subject evaluations of two employee-related blogging scenarios were investigated with established ethical reasoning and moral intensity scales, and a measure of corporate ethical values was included to assess perceptions of organizational ethics. The first scenario involved an employee who was fired because of innocuous blogging, while the second vignette involved an employee who was fired because of work-related blogging. Survey data were collected from employed college students and working practitioners. The findings indicated that the subjects’ ethical judgments that firing an employee for blogging …

Regulating Online Buzz Marketing: Untangling A Web Of Deceit, Robert Sprague, Mary Ellen Wells

Robert Sprague

During the past fifteen years, the Internet has swelled into its own virtual world of commentary, opinion, criticism, news, music, videos, gaming, role playing, shopping, banking, finance, and digital commerce. Coupled with the growth of blogs and social networking sites, millions of Americans appear willing to share online their own thoughts and experiences regarding products, services and companies. In response to the public’s interest, companies have begun to rely more heavily in recent years on word of mouth marketing, often referred to as “buzz marketing,” a technique that attempts to generate conversations among and with current and potential customers. Marketers …

A Preliminary First Amendment Analysis Of Leglisation Treating News Aggregation As Copyright Infringement, Alfred C. Yen

Alfred C. Yen

The newspaper industry has recently experienced economic difficulty. Profits have declined because fewer people read printed versions of newspapers, preferring instead to get their news through so-called "news aggregators" who compile newspaper headlines and provide links to storied posted on newspaper websites. This harms newspaper revenue because news aggregators collect advertising revenue that newspapers used to enjoy. Some have responded to this problem by advocating the use of copyright to give newspapers the ability to control the use of their stories and headlines by news aggregators. This proposal is controversial, for news aggregators often do not commit copyright infringement. Accordingly, …

Crime And Punishment: Teen Sexting In Context, Julia Halloran Mclaughlin

Julia Halloran McLaughlin

Memory And Punishment, Orlando Carter Snead

O. Carter Snead

This article is the first scholarly exploration of the implications of neurobiological memory modification for criminal law. Its point of entry is the fertile context of criminal punishment, in which memory plays a crucial role. Specifically, this article will argue that there is a deep relationship between memory and the foundational principles justifying how punishment should be distributed, including retributive justice, deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, moral education, and restorative justice. For all such theoretical justifications, the questions of who and how much to punish are inextricably intertwined with how a crime is remembered — by the offender, by the sentencing authority, …

Debt As Venture Capital, Darian M. Ibrahim

Darian M Ibrahim

Venture debt, or loans to rapid-growth start-ups, is a puzzle. How are start-ups with no track records, positive cash flows, tangible collateral, or personal guarantees from entrepreneurs able to attract billions of dollars in loans each year? And why do start-ups take on debt rather than rely exclusively on equity investments from angel investors and venture capitalists (VCs), as well-known capital structure theories from corporate finance would seem to predict in this context? Using hand-collected interview data and theoretical contributions from finance, economics, and law, this Article solves the puzzle of venture debt by revealing that a start-up’s VC backing …

Law School & The Web Of Group Affiliation: Socializing, Socialization, & Social Network Site Use Among Law Students, Eric M. Fink

Eric M Fink

Online social network sites (“SNS”) have emerged as a significant socio-technical phenomenon in the past several years. Scholars from various disciplines have examined these sites to develop a better understanding of their social significance and implications from a variety of perspectives. Within the burgeoning field of SNS studies, one strand of work focuses on the place of SNSs in students’ educational experiences and the potential pedagogical applications of SNSs. However, the SNS phenomenon generally, and its educational/pedagogical significance in particular, have received scant attention from legal scholars. This article examines the place of SNSs within the contemporary law school experience, …

Youtube, Ugc, And Digital Music: Competing Business And Cultural Models In The Internet Age, Olufunmilayo B. Arewa

Olufunmilayo B. Arewa

YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and other websites that contain user-generated content (UGC) have become key reference points in broader debates about copyright in the digital era. UGC websites and other digital era players have created much destruction of cultural industry business models. The rise of Web 2.0 thus poses significant challenges to pre-digital era cultural industry business models, particularly because UGC may contain copyright protected content. The challenges of YouTube and other websites containing UGC and video content follow experiences in the music arena. The music industry was the first of the cultural industries to con- front the digital era, and …