Internet Law Commons^™

Civil Rights In The Information Age, Danielle Citron

Danielle Keats Citron

[This book focuses] "on abuses made possible by anonymity, freedom from liability, and lack of oversight. The distinguished scholars assembled in this volume, drawn from law and philosophy, connect the absence of legal oversight with harassment and discrimination. Questioning the simplistic notion that abusive speech and mobocracy are the inevitable outcomes of new technology, they argue that current misuse is the outgrowth of social, technological, and legal choices. Seeing this clearly will help us to be better informed about our options." (copied from the book's description on the publisher's website)

Digital Discrimination, Danielle Citron

Danielle Keats Citron

Social network sites and blogs have increasingly become breeding grounds for anonymous online groups that attack women and minorities. The attacks include rape threats, privacy invasions, defamation, and technological attacks that silence victims. Victims go offline or assume pseudonyms to prevent future attacks, impoverishing online dialogue and depriving victims of the social and economic opportunities associated with a vibrant online presence. Although social and legal norms have dampened offline discrimination, the internet’s Wild West culture and architecture invites bigots to move their hatred to cyberspace. The Internet facilitates anonymity, loosening social norms that constrain noxious behavior. It brings people together …

Spam Works: Evidence From Stock Touts And Corresponding Market Activit, Jonathan Zittrain

Jonathan Zittrain

We assess the impact of spam that touts stocks upon the trading activity of those stocks and sketch how profitable such spamming might be for spammers and how harmful it is to those who heed advice in stock-touting e-mails. We find convincing evidence that stock prices are being manipulated through spam. We suggest that the effectiveness of spammed stock touting calls into question prevailing models of securities regulation that rely principally on the proper labeling of information and disclosure of conflicts of interest as means of protecting consumers, and we propose several regulatory and industry interventions. Based on a large …

Online Surveillance: Remembering The Lessons Of The Wiretap Act, Susan Freiwald

Susan Freiwald

This Article explores those features of electronic surveillance that have made it challenging to regulate effectively. In balancing interests, lawmakers must create a workable law for an exceedingly complex topic, rein in law enforcement agents without crippling them, and draw a line between prohibited and permitted conduct despite society's ambivalence about surveillance. This Article demonstrates that lawmakers met those challenges when they regulated traditional wiretapping, but they have failed to meet them in the online context. It argues that the law should extend the significant restrictions on wiretapping to online surveillance, just as judges did in the case of video …

Comparative Institutional Analysis In Cyberspace: The Case Of Intermediary Liability For Defamation, Susan Freiwald

Susan Freiwald

Almost every day brings reports that Congress is considering new cyberspace-targeted laws and the courts are deciding novel cyberspace legal questions. These developments lend urgency to the question of whether a particular cyberspace legal change should come through operation of new statutes, judicial decisions, or the free market. If we can develop sophisticated analytical methods to evaluate institutional competence in cyberspace, we can vastly improve the development of cyberspace law and public policy.

Comparative Institutional Analysis in Cyberspace: The Case of Intermediary Liability for Defamation promotes just such an approach. By describing and extending a recently proposed model of comparative …