Law Commons^™

A Study Of Cyber-Violence And Internet Service Providers' Liability: Lessons From China, Anne S.Y. Cheung

Washington International Law Journal

Cyber-violence and harassment have been on the rise and have been a worrying trend worldwide. With the rise of blogs, discussion boards, and Youtube, we may become targets of false allegations or our movements and gestures may have been captured by modern technology at any moment to be broadcast on the Internet for a public trial of millions to judge. In China, netizens have resorted to cyber manhunt, known as the “human flesh search engine,” to expose details of individuals who have violated social norms one way or another, achieving social shaming, monitoring and ostracism. Individuals concerned have little legal …

Safe Haven No More: How Online Affiliate Marketing Programs Can Minimize New State Sales Tax Liability, Jennifer Heidt White

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

Affiliate marketing has become a popular and profitable way for online merchants to access potential buyers, especially where those merchants lack a physical presence in the buyer’s home state. By increasing market penetration and brand recognition, affiliates have contributed to the growth of e-commerce and, consequently, the growth of untaxed electronic purchases. As a result, affiliates recently became the focus of states looking to capture lost sales tax revenue from online sales. In 2008, New York became the first state to target affiliate marketing programs with a tax amendment that requires out-of-state vendors that solicit more than $10,000 worth of …

User Privacy And Information Disclosure: The Need For Clarity In "Opt-In" Questions For Consent To Share Personal Information, Suzanna Shaub

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

Many company Web sites obtain permission to disclose their users’ private information to third parties through the use of “opt-in” mechanisms, which require consumers to affirmatively grant consent to collect data from the user. These opt-in questions often ask general questions, such as whether the user would like to receive further information about the company or a product. Many companies construe an affirmative answer as consent to disclose personal information in accordance with its privacy policy. Although companies with this practice have generally avoided liability in the past, a recent case raises significant skepticism regarding the practice. In CollegeNET, Inc. …

The European Union's Data Retention Directive And The United States's Data Preservation Laws: Finding The Better Model, Kristina Ringland

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

The European Union’s Data Retention Directive (the “Directive”) seeks to assist law enforcement officials in their efforts to combat terrorism and to standardize disparate laws regarding data retention within the European Union (EU). The Directive requires companies to retain traffic and location data that identifies a subscriber or registered user of a Web site for a period of six to twenty-four months. Implementation of the Directive takes place at the national level and poses many challenges to providers of electronic communication services. There is no analogous United States federal law mandating data retention. The United States, however, has a data …

Are "Better" Security Breach Notification Laws Possible?, Jane K. Winn

Articles

This Article will evaluate the provisions of California's pioneering security breach notification law (SBNL) in light of "better regulation" or "smart regulation" criteria in order to highlight the costs of taking a narrowly focused, piecemeal approach and the benefits of taking a more comprehensive perspective to the problems of identity theft and information security. Just as the basic structure of SBNLs was borrowed from environmental law, this Article will borrow from decades of analysis of the impact of environmental regulation to evaluate the likely impact of SBNLs.

Just as environmental laws can be used to reduce externalities created through the …

A New Deal For End Users? Lessons From A French Innovation In The Regulation Of Interoperability, Jane K. Winn, Nicolas Jondet

Articles

In 2007, France created the Regulatory Authority for Technical Measures (lAutoritj de Rdgulation des Mesures Techniques or ARMT), an independent regulatory agency charged with promoting the interoperability of digital media distributed with embedded "technical protection measures" (TPM), also known as "digital rights management" technologies (DRM). ARMT was established in part to rectify what French lawmakers perceived as an imbalance in the rights of copyright owners and end users created when the European Copyright Directive (EUCD) was transposed into French law as the "Loi sur le Droit d'Auteur et les Droits Voisins dans la Société de l'Information" (DADVSI).

ARMT is both …