Legal History Commons^™

A Matter Of Facts: The Evolution Of Copyright’S Fact-Exclusion And Its Implications For Disinformation And Democracy, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

The Article begins with a puzzle: the curious absence of an express fact-exclusion from copyright protection in both the Copyright Act and its legislative history despite it being a well-founded legal principle. It traces arguments in the foundational Supreme Court case (Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service) and in the Copyright Act’s legislative history to discern a basis for the fact-exclusion. That research trail produces a legal genealogy of the fact-exclusion based in early copyright common law anchored by canonical cases, Baker v. Selden, Burrow-Giles v. Sarony, and Wheaton v. Peters. Surprisingly, none of them …

Poland’S Challenge To Eu Directive 2019/790: Standing Up To The Destruction Of European Freedom Of Expression, Michaela Cloutier

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

In 2019, the European Parliament and Council passed Directive 2019/790. The Directive’s passage marked the end of a fouryear- long legislative attempt to impose more liability for copyright violations on Online Service Providers, an effort which was controversial from the start. Online Service Providers fear that the 2019 Directive, especially its Article 17, will completely change the structure of liability on the Internet, forcing providers to adopt expensive content filtering systems. Free speech advocates fear that ineffective filtering technology will infringe upon Internet users’ rights to express themselves, and legal scholars have pointed out the Directive’s inconsistency with prior European …

Control Over Contemporary Photography: A Tangle Of Copyright, Right Of Publicity, And The First Amendment, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

Professional photographers who make photographs of people negotiate a tense relationship between their own creative freedoms and the right of their subjects to control their images. This negotiation formally takes place over the terrain of copyright, right of publicity, and the First Amendment. Informally, photographers describe implied understandings and practice norms guiding their relationship with subjects, infrequently memorialized in short, boilerplate contractual releases. This short essay explores these formal and informal practices described by contemporary professional photographers. Although the evidence for this essay comes from professional photographic practice culled from interviews with contemporary photographers, the analysis of the evidence speaks …

It Can't Wait: Exposing The Connections Between Forms Of Sexual Exploitation, Dawn Hawkins

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Cultural Democracy And The First Amendment, Jack M. Balkin

Northwestern University Law Review

Freedom of speech secures cultural democracy as well as political democracy. Just as it is important to make state power accountable to citizens, it is also important to give people a say over the development of forms of cultural power that transcend the state. In a free society, people should have the right to participate in the forms of meaning-making that shape who they are and that help constitute them as individuals.

The digital age shows the advantages of a cultural theory over purely democracy-based theories. First, the cultural account offers a more convincing explanation of why expression that seems …

Sealand, Havenco, And The Rule Of Law, James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann

In 2000, a group of American entrepreneurs moved to a former World War II anti-aircraft platform in the North Sea, seven miles off the British coast, and launched HavenCo, one of the strangest start-ups in Internet history. A former pirate radio broadcaster, Roy Bates, had occupied the platform in the 1960s, moved his family aboard, and declared it to be the sovereign Principality of Sealand. HavenCo's founders were opposed to governmental censorship and control of the Internet; by putting computer servers on Sealand, they planned to create a "data haven" for unpopular speech, safely beyond the reach of any other …

Information Anxieties, G. S. Hans

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

The constant access and instant publication that the Internet allows have given every pundit an online soapbox. This content explosion has created two related problems for consumers and industry: how to find valuable content online (whatever "valuable" means) and how to moderate the flow of the content itself. Tim Wu argues in The Master Switch that the second issue of content control and mediation has been fiercely debated in the United States as far back as the invention of the telephone in the late nineteenth century. Consumers, creators, companies, and government officials have disputed the appropriate regulations for the devices …

Internet Access Rights: A Brief History And Intellectual Origins, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

If there is anything we have learned from recent protest movements around the world, and the heavy-handed government efforts to block, censor, suspend, and manipulate Internet connectivity, it is that access to the Internet, and its content, is anything but certain, especially when governments feel threatened. Despite these hard truths, the notion that people have a "right" to Internet access gained high-profile international recognition last year. In a report to the United Nations General Assembly in early 2011, Frank La Rue, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, held that Internet access should be recognized as a "human right". …

Facebook, Paulo Ferreira Da Cunha

Paulo Ferreira da Cunha

Fascínios, possibilidades e perigos do Facebook e de tecnologias afins e seu uso. Sobretudo, a pseudo-democracia electrónica, tentação dos demagogos.

Mapping Online Privacy, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

Privacy scholars have recently outlined difficulties in applying existing concepts of personal privacy to the maturing Internet. With Web 2.0 technologies, more people have more opportunities to post information about themselves and others online, often with scant regard for individual privacy. Shifting notions of 'reasonable expectations of privacy' in the context of blogs, wikis, and online social networks create challenges for privacy regulation. Courts and commentators struggle with Web 2.0 privacy incursions without the benefit of a clear regulatory framework. This article offers a map of privacy that might help delineate at least the outer boundaries of Web 2.0 privacy. …

Margae, Inc. V. Clear Link Technologies, Jonathan Goodman

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Apuntes Generales Sobre La Libertad De Expresión En Internet, Germán M. Teruel Lozano

Germán M. Teruel Lozano

GENERAL NOTES ABOUT THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN INTERNET: This paper presents an overview of how Internet has revolutionized the setting of freedom of speech. In particular, it is focused in to main aspects: On one hand, the delimitation of freedom of expression in the new media, differentiating in particular between web pages dedicated to the dissemination of information, protected by the freedom of speech; and those that are intended to provide other telematics services, which should not have this protection. Secondly, it is also studied the legal status of this freedom when it is exercised through Internet.

Revisiting Beccaria's Vision: The Enlightenment, America's Death Penalty, And The Abolition Movement, John D. Bessler

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

In 1764, Cesare Beccaria, a 26-year-old Italian, penned . The treatise argued that state-sanctioned executions and torture violate natural law. As we near the 250th anniversary of its publication, author John D. Bessler provides a comprehensive review of the abolition movement, from before Beccaria's time to the present. Bessler reviews Beccaria's influence on Enlightenment thinkers and more importantly, on America's Founding Fathers. The Article also provides an extensive review of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence and then contrasts it with the trend in International Law towards the abolition of the death penalty. It then discusses the current state of the death penalty …

The Intent Element Of Inducement To Infringe Under Patent Law: Reflections On Grokster, Lynda J. Oswald

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

In June, 2005, the United States Supreme Court set forth an "inducement" rule in MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. that imposes secondary liability on "one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement." The Court emphasized the limitations of the liability standard it was setting forth, stating that the target was only "purposeful, culpable expression and conduct, and thus does nothing to compromise legitimate commerce or discourage innovation having a lawful promise." Yet, the liability standard set forth in Grokster …

The Temporal Dynamics Of Capable Of Substantial Noninfringing Uses, R. Anthony Reese

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

The copyright issues raised by "dual-use" technologies--equipment that can be used both in ways that infringe copyright and in ways that do not--first gained prominence in connection with the litigation over videocassette recorders that culminated in the Supreme Court's decision in Sony in 1984. Copyright owners had asserted that Sony's manufacture and distribution of VCRs rendered it liable for copyright infringement committed by customers using their Sony VCRs. The Supreme Court in Sony concluded that copyright law did not impose such secondary liability where the device in question was capable of substantial noninfringing uses (and that the VCR was such …

Imposing Geographical “Locateability” For Voice Over Internet Protocol, Andrea W.M. Louie

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Blogosphere And The New Pamphleteers, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

The future of the free dissemination of information lies in the blog, some may say. The internet has entirely transformed how we receive and consume information. It’s the newest incarnation of information dissemination. From the insights of Alexis de Tocqueville, “Feelings and opinions are recruited, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal influence of men upon one another.” Bloggers are a powerful force in the distribution of information and ideas and the creation of communities of conversation. Throughout history, the dissemination of information, news, opinions, and ideas has continuously transformed. In the 18th …

Internet Voting With Initiatives And Referendums: Stumbling Towards Direct Democracy, Rebekah K. Browder

Seattle University Law Review

Imagine that it is Tuesday, November 4, 2008, and you realize that you have not yet voted for the candidate that you want to be President of the United States. The polls close at 7 p.m., and it is already 6:45 p.m. Instead of rushing off to the nearest polling place, you simply go to your computer, log in, fill out a ballot, and email your ballot to your designated polling website. The whole process takes fewer than ten minutes, and you have done your civic duty. Leading proponents of Internet voting point to five possible benefits of electronic voting: …

Public Availability Or Practical Obscurity: The Debate Over Public Access To Court Records On The Internet, Arminda Bradford Bepko

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Whose Music Is It Anyway? How We Came To View Musical Expression As A Form Of Property, Michael W. Carroll

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Many participants in the music industry consider unauthorized transmissions of music files over the Internet to be theft of their property. Many Internet users who exchange music files reject this characterization. Prompted by the dispute over unauthorized music distribution, this Article explores how those who create and distribute music first came to look upon music as their property and when in Western history the law first supported this view. By analyzing the economic and legal structures governing music making in Western Europe from the classical period in Greece through the Renaissance, the Article shows that the law first granted some …

Can Our Current Conception Of Copyright Law Survive The Internet Age?, Edward Samuels

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Beyond Napster, Beyond The United States: The Technological And International Legal Barriers To On-Line Copyright Enforcement, Jeffrey L. Dodes

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Cyberspace And The "Devil's Hatband", Jonathan J. Rusch

Seattle University Law Review

In this Article, I maintain that while there is an ongoing conflict of legal traditions over the desirability of fences in cyberspace, there are definite virtues in the creation of such fences, so long as we understand the physical, psychological, and moral dimensions of that process. Part I will present a brief survey of the history of barbed wire in the Old West, paying particular attention to the contending legal traditions that affected the manner and extent of that growth in the West. These contending legal traditions, which related to "fencing in" versus "fencing out" cattle, played a key role …

Yesterday Once More: Skeptics, Scribes And The Demise Of Law Reviews, Bernard J. Hibbitts

Articles

This article responds to a series of commentaries on my 1996 Web-posted article Last Writes? Re-assessing the Law Review in the Age of Cyberspace (reprinted in 71 New York University Law Review 615 (1996)) collected in a Special Issue of the Akron Law Review (Volume 30, Number 2, Winter 1996). Last Writes? argued that the development of Internet technology allows and should encourage legal scholars to move away from traditional law review publication - with all of its well-publicized problems - towards a “self-publishing” system in which articles uploaded to the Internet by their scholarly authors could be archived centrally …