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Copyright In An Era Of Information Overload: Toward The Privileging Of Categorizers, Frank Pasquale
Copyright In An Era Of Information Overload: Toward The Privileging Of Categorizers, Frank Pasquale
Faculty Scholarship
Environmental laws are designed to reduce negative externalities (such as pollution) that harm the natural environment. Copyright law should adjust the rights of content creators in order to compensate for the ways they reduce the usefulness of the information environment as a whole. Every new work created contributes to the store of expression, but also makes it more difficult to find whatever work one wants. Such search costs have been well-documented in information economics. Copyright law should take information overload externalities like search costs into account in its treatment of alleged copyright infringers whose work merely attempts to index, organize, …
Rankings, Reductionism, And Responsibility, Frank Pasquale
Rankings, Reductionism, And Responsibility, Frank Pasquale
Faculty Scholarship
After discussing how search engines operate, and sketching a normative basis for regulation of the rankings they generate, this piece proposes some minor, non-intrusive legal remedies for those who claim that they are harmed by search engine results. Such harms include unwanted (but high-ranking) results relating to them, or exclusion from high-ranking results they claim they are 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, which would lead to the complainant's own comment on …