Consumer Protection Law Commons^™

A Recent Renaissance In Privacy Law, Margot Kaminski

Publications

Considering the recent increased attention to privacy law issues amid the typically slow pace of legal change.

The Gdpr’S Version Of Algorithmic Accountability, Margot Kaminski

Publications

No abstract provided.

Disruptive Platforms, Margot Kaminski

Publications

No abstract provided.

When The Default Is No Penalty: Negotiating Privacy At The Ntia, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

Consumer privacy protection is largely within the purview of the Federal Trade Commission. In recent years, however, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) at the Department of Commerce has hosted multistakeholder negotiations on consumer privacy issues. The NTIA process has addressed mobile apps, facial recognition, and most recently, drones. It is meant to serve as a venue for industry self-regulation. Drawing on the literature on co-regulation and on penalty defaults, I suggest that the NTIA process struggles to successfully extract industry expertise and participation against a dearth of federal data privacy law and enforcement. This problem is most exacerbated …

Disclosure 2.0: Can Technology Solve Overload, Complexity, And Other Information Failures?, Erik F. Gerding

Publications

In recent years, securities law scholars have either renewed an old attack on mandatory issuer disclosure or questioned the effectiveness of securities disclosure in the context of modern financial instruments. Some scholars argue that mandatory disclosure rules prove ineffective because investors suffer from “information overload.” Others claim that securities disclosure cannot describe adequately the complexity of modern firms and finance. These academic criticisms of mandatory securities disclosure provide some of the intellectual underpinnings for recent efforts to roll back some mandatory securities disclosure rules, such as the SEC’s Disclosure Effectiveness initiative.

This Article questions these critiques of securities disclosure, including …

Who Regulates The Robots, Margot Kaminski

Publications

No abstract provided.

Robots In The Home: What Will We Have Agreed To?, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

A new technology can expose the cracks in legal doctrine. Sometimes a technology resists analogy. Sometimes, through analogies, it reveals inconsistencies in the law, or basic flaws in framing, or in the fit between different parts of the legal system. This Essay addresses robots in the home, and what they reveal about U.S. privacy law. Household robots might not themselves uproot U.S. privacy law, but they will reveal its inconsistencies, and show where it is most likely to fracture. Just as drones are serving as a legislative “privacy catalyst” — encouraging the enactment of new privacy laws as people realize …

Privacy & The Personal Prospectus: Should We Introduce Privacy Agents Or Regulate Privacy Intermediaries, Scott R. Peppet

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No abstract provided.

Freedom Of Contract In An Augmented Reality: The Case Of Consumer Contracts, Scott R. Peppet

Publications

This Article argues that freedom of contract will take on different meaning in a world in which new technology makes information about places, goods, people, firms, and contract terms available to contracting parties anywhere, at any time. In particular, our increasingly "augmented reality" calls into question leading justifications for distrusting consumer contracts and strengthens traditional understandings of freedom of contract. This is largely a descriptive and predictive argument: This Article aims to introduce contract law to these technologies and consider their most likely effects. It certainly has normative implications, however. Given that the vast majority of consumer contracting occurs in …

Beyond Fair Use, Gideon Parchomovsky, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

For centuries, the fair use doctrine has been the main--if not the exclusive--bastion of user rights. Originating in the English courts of equity, the doctrine permitted users, under appropriate circumstances, to employ copyrighted content without the rightsholder's consent. In the current digital media environment, however, the uncertainty that shrouds fair use and the proliferation of technological protection measures undermine the doctrine and its role in copyright policy. Notably, the enactment of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the circumvention of technological protection measures even for fair use purposes, has diminished the ability of fair use to counterbalance a copyright …