Computer Law Commons^™

Novel Neutrality Claims Against Internet Platforms: A Reasonable Framework For Initial Scrutiny , Jeffrey Jarosch

Cleveland State Law Review

This Article examines a recent trend in which the Federal Trade Commission and other enforcement agencies investigate Internet platforms for behavior that is insufficiently “neutral” towards users or third parties that interact with the platform. For example, Google faces a formal FTC investigation based on allegations that it has tinkered with search results rather than presenting users with a “neutral” result. Twitter faces a formal investigation after the social media service restricted the ways in which third party developers could interact with Twitter through its application programming interface (“API”). These investigations represent a new attempt to shift the network neutrality …

Workplace Privacy And Monitoring: The Quest For Balanced Interests , Ariana R. Levinson

Cleveland State Law Review

We can see in 2001 that 77 percent of employers were engaged in monitoring. This may have increased slightly or decreased slightly, but whatever has happened, we know that this is a significant amount of employers--much greater than a majority--that are engaging in monitoring of their employees. We can also see the great rise in monitoring of computers and electronic files in a ten-year period between 1997 and 2007. Finally, we can see some of the newer technologies. In 2007, twelve percent of the reporting employers were monitoring the blogosphere, eight percent were monitoring GPS vehicle tracking, and ten percent …

Propertization, Contract, Competition, And Communication: Law's Struggle To Adapt To The Transformative Powers Of The Internet, David Barnhizer

Cleveland State Law Review

This Symposium focuses in part on the ideas of Margaret Jane Radin as a point of departure for the various contributions. A key part of the analysis includes the process she calls propertization in the context of intellectual property rules and the Internet. The approach taken in this introductory essay is twofold. The first part presents some key points raised by the Symposium contributors. Of course, that overview is necessarily incomplete, because the contributions represent a rich group of analyses about vital concerns relating to how our legal system should respond to the challenge of the Internet and information systems …

Diverging Perspectives On Electronic Contracting In The U.S. And Eu, Jane K. Winn, Brian H. Bix

Cleveland State Law Review

Margaret Jane Radin's paper discusses the ways modern technologies have prompted new thinking within and about property, and the way the legal response has failed to take sufficiently into account the countervailing considerations that have shaped earlier Property Law developments. Some new technologies have also caused intellectual and practical struggles within Contract Law. This paper will consider some of the developments of Contract Law related to these changes, in particular the transactions relating to the sale, leasing or free use of computer software and the purchase of computers. Part I of this paper introduces the topic and offers an overview …

A Comment On Information Propertization And Its Legal Milieu, Margaret Jane Radin

Cleveland State Law Review

My main purpose in this essay is to urge that policy arguments about property in the digital environment take explicit cognizance of other policy considerations that tend to bound propertization: contractual ordering, competition, and freedom of expression. These policy considerations form the legal milieu in which propertization is situated.

Rankings, Reductionism, And Responsibility , Frank Pasquale

Cleveland State Law Review

After discussing how search engines operate in Part I below, and setting forth a normative basis for regulation of their results in Part II, this piece proposes (in Part III) some minor, non-intrusive legal remedies for those who claim that they are harmed by search engine results. Such harms include unwanted high-ranking results relating to them, or exclusion from a page they claim it is their “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, …

Metaphor, Objects, And Commodities, George H. Taylor, Michael J. Madison

Cleveland State Law Review

As its two main Parts will evidence, this Comment remains the product of two distinct if overlapping voices. Part II returns to the conceptual origins of Radin's theory in her general critique of objectification and commodification. It asks whether a more positive concept of objectification can be recovered that is distinguishable from reification, the latter seeming to be the more appropriate locus of Radin's criticism. Part III's response to Radin is similar, but it tries to exemplify both our appreciation of and our differences from her work through more detailed analysis of intellectual property law and theory.

Capturing Ideas: Copyright And The Law Of First Possession, Abraham Drassinower

Cleveland State Law Review

Part II of this paper, entitled “Wish and Deed,” sets forth an account of the law of first possession through an analysis of the classic case of Pierson v. Post. Part III, entitled “Idea and Expression,” briefly sets forth an account of the idea/expression dichotomy in copyright law through discussion of the classic case of Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corporation. On that basis, Part III unfolds a correspondence between animus and factum in property law and idea and expression in copyright law. Part IV, entitled “Things and Speech,” suggests through discussion of the classic case of Feist that central doctrines …

Exporting Dmca Lockouts, Anupam Chander

Cleveland State Law Review

My goal here is limited. I do not attack the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA as wholly misguided; the desire to prevent widespread piracy of copyrighted works is understandable. At the same time, I do not mean to suggest that the critique I offer here is the sum of the adverse consequences of that statute, including for speech and education. My argument is limited to the threat posed by the export of the DMCA anti-circumvention rules, which do not explicitly guard against the anti-competitive use of those rules.Part I briefly sketches the difficulties created domestically by a DMCA inattentive to …

Cybertrespass And Trespass To Documents, Kevin Emerson Collins

Cleveland State Law Review

In this essay, I offer only a small contribution to the ongoing cybertrespass debate that I believe allows the debate to be seen from a different perspective. In other words, I add a new story to the mix. I explore what I call trespass to documents. The cases applying trespass to documents are real-space, pre-Internet variants of a subset of the cybertrespass cases. They demonstrate that property rights in the tangible medium on which information is inscribed have not historically been broad enough to trump the complicated balancing of interests that characterizes information law when free-speech and competition-policy concerns are …

Propertization Metaphors For Bargaining Power And Control Of The Self In The Information Age, Daniel D. Barnhizer

Cleveland State Law Review

This Article argues that the threatening consequences of this commodification and propertization of consumers' electronic selves represent only part of the picture. Information era technological developments provide more tools than ever available before by which consumers can place boundaries around their right to consent and exclude others from that arena. Thus, Internet-based contracting allows consumers to access a broad range of bargaining power inputs to protect their power to withhold consent. Instead of an amorphous, indefinable quality of contracting parties, bargaining power may now be characterized as a series of discrete inputs that can be identified, evaluated, exchanged and owned. …

Monism, Nominalism, And Public-Private In The Work Of Margaret Jane Radin, Christopher L. Sagers

Cleveland State Law Review

This essay begins by situating the distinction in history generally and in American legal thought. Its historical aspect seems important because it suggests that the distinction is not predetermined—it is historically and culturally contingent. That fact has been largely ignored in the American legal academy, and among most of the judiciary it is all but outright socialist treachery to suggest it.

The essay moves on to consider Radin's work itself. The prominence of the distinction is relatively obvious in some of her work on technological marketing and design issues, but I will suggest that in fact it runs quietly just …