Law Commons^™

Gender Biases In Cyberspace: A Two-Stage Model For A Feminist Way Forward, Shlomit Yanisky-Ravid, Amy Mittelman

Shlomit Yanisky-Ravid Professor of Law

Increasingly, there has been a focus on creating democratic standards and procedures in order to best facilitate open exchange of information and communication online—a goal that fits neatly within the feminist aim to democratize content creation and community. Collaborative websites, such as blogs, social networks, and, as focused on in this Article, Wikipedia, represent both a Cyberspace community entirely outside the strictures of the traditional (intellectual) proprietary paradigm and one that professes to truly embody the philosophy of a completely open, free, and democratic resource for all. In theory, collaborative websites are the solution that social activists, Intellectual Property opponents …

E-Obviousness, Glynn S. Lunney Jr.

Glynn Lunney

As patents expand into e-commerce and methods of doing business more generally, both the uncertainty and the risk of unjustified market power that the present approach generates suggest a need to rethink our approach to nonobviousness. If courts fail to enforce the nonobviousness requirement and allow an individual to obtain a patent for simply implementing existing methods of doing business through a computer, even where only trivial technical difficulties are presented, entire e-markets might be handed over to patent holders with no concomitant public benefit. If courts attempt to enforce the nonobviousness requirement, but leave undefined the extent of the …

Introducing A Takedown For Trade Secrets On The Internet, Elizabeth Rowe

Elizabeth A Rowe

This Article explores, for the first time, an existing void in trade-secret law. When a trade-secret owner discovers that its trade secrets have been posted on the Internet, there is currently no legislative mechanism by which the owner can request that the information be taken down. The only remedy to effectuate removal of the material is to obtain a court order, usually either a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction. When a trade secret appears on the Internet, the owner often loses the ability to continue to claim it as a trade secret and to prevent others from using …

Technology And Intellectual Property: New Rules For An Old Game?, Elizabeth A. Rowe

Elizabeth A Rowe

This foreword to the first issue of 2009 for the Journal of Technology Law and Policy discusses the questions presented by the merger of technology and intellectual property and considers how best the two areas should co-exist.

Saving Trade Secret Disclosures On The Internet Through Sequential Preservation, Elizabeth A. Rowe

Elizabeth A Rowe

When an employee discloses an employer's trade secrets to the public over the Internet, does our current trade secret framework appropriately address the consequences of that disclosure? What ought to be the rule that governs whether the trade secret owner has lost not only the protection status for the secret, but also any remedies against use by third parties? Should the ease with which the Internet permits instant and mass disclosure of secrets be taken into consideration in assessing the fairness of a rule that calls for immediate loss of the trade secret upon disclosure? Given that trade secret law …

Aereo's Errors, Ira Steven Nathenson

Ira Steven Nathenson

This article scrutinizes the many troubling errors made by the United States Supreme Court in its decision in American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo, Inc. Aereo’s streaming television service allowed subscribers to watch broadcast television on a computer, tablet, or smartphone without requiring them to be directly connected to cable, satellite, or a local antenna. Aereo’s system was designed to comply with existing copyright law by using thousands of antennas, each of which was designated for only one subscriber at a time. Aereo was sued for copyright infringement by a number of leading television broadcasters. The United States Supreme Court, …

Migración A La Nube: ¿Está Segura Nuestra Información?, Rodolfo C. Rivas Rea Esq., Marco A. Vargas Iñiguez Esq.

Rodolfo C. Rivas

The authors discuss the benefits and risks of moving your business data to the cloud through case studies and offer practical tips to protect business confidential information stored in the cloud. //////////////////////// Los autores estudian los beneficios y los riesgos de almacenar datos e información en la nube a través de casos de estudio y ofrecen consejos prácticos para proteger la información comercial confidencial almacenada en la nube.

A Pragmatic Approach To Intellectual Property And Development: A Case Study Of The Jordanian Copyright Law In The Internet Age, Rami Olwan

Rami Olwan

On October 4, 2004, Brazil and Argentina requested that WIPO adopt a development-oriented approach to IP and to reconsider its work in relation to developing countries. In October, 2007, WIPO member States adopted a historic decision for the benefit of developing countries, to establish a WIPO Development Agenda. Although there have been several studies related to IP and development that call for IP laws in developing countries to be development-friendly, there is little research that attempts to provide developing countries with practical measures to achieve that goal. This article takes the copyright law in Jordan as a case study and …

Copyright Tussle And Search Engines, Anoop Kumar Yadav

anoop kumar yadav

The Intellectual Property Laws (I.P. Laws) have, to a great extent, proved to be successful in nipping the copyright infringement in its bud. The I.P. Laws provide umbrella jurisprudence, which seek to protect the creativity of the authors. But despite that, it has been widely observed that the I.P. Laws have failed to cover other aspects of the intellectual property. For example, the liability of the search engines for the copyright infringement has remained out of the ambit of the I.P. Laws. The paper is focused on drawback of the Information Technology laws in various nations. Further, it also suggests …

Super-Intermediaries, Code, Human Rights, Ira Nathenson

Ira Steven Nathenson

We live in an age of intermediated network communications. Although the internet includes many intermediaries, some stand heads and shoulders above the rest. This article examines some of the responsibilities of “Super-Intermediaries” such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, intermediaries that have tremendous power over their users’ human rights. After considering the controversy arising from the incendiary YouTube video Innocence of Muslims, the article suggests that Super-Intermediaries face a difficult and likely impossible mission of fully servicing the broad tapestry of human rights contained in the International Bill of Human Rights. The article further considers how intermediary content-control procedures focus too …

Licensing As Digital Rights Management, From The Advent Of The Web To The Ipad, Reuven Ashtar

Reuven Ashtar

This Article deals with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provision, Section 1201, and its relationship to licensing. It argues that not all digital locks and contractual notices qualify for legal protection under Section 1201, and attributes the courts’ indiscriminate protection of all Digital Rights Management (DRM) measures to the law’s incoherent formulation. The Article proposes a pair of filters that would enable courts to distinguish between those DRM measures that qualify for protection under Section 1201, and those that do not. The filters are shown to align with legislative intent and copyright precedent, as well as the approaches recently …

Decentralizing Culture: The Effect Of Digital Networks On Copyright And Music Distribution, Benjamin Gibert

Benjamin Gibert

The advance of technology profoundly impacts how people interact with culture as the proliferation of digital networks transforms the effects of copyright in modern societies. This paper argues that the oligopolistic conditions of content markets and the legal discourse of intellectual property law have historically enabled copyright holders to promote a limited conception of art and obscure the complexities of copyright theory. While conceptual ambiguity is inevitable in the construction of aesthetic legal categories, current practices impose too many restrictions. The practical choices made concerning copyright in cyberspace will determine the evolution of culture in increasingly networked societies. The music …

Barricading The Digital Frontier: Copyright, Technology And The War On Music Piracy, Benjamin Gibert

Benjamin Gibert

The Internet is changing the way vast numbers of people experience culture today. Providing tools to interact with, manipulate and freely redistribute content, technology is dissolving conventional divisions between creators and consumers of cultural artefacts. As new technological and legislative mechanisms are deployed to stop digital piracy, there is a need to reflect on the meaning of copyright, piracy and culture in the context of digital technologies. This paper discusses the relationship between copyright and cultural participation. It refers to the music industry in order to depict the changing patterns of consumption behavior precipitated by the rise of digital networks …

Introduction, Symposium, Internet Expression In The 21st Century: Where Technology & Law Collide, Tonya M. Evans, Michael R. Dimino, Nicole M. Santo

Tonya M. Evans

No abstract provided.

An Interpretive Framework For Narrower Immunity Under Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act, Gregory M. Dickinson

Gregory M Dickinson

Almost all courts to interpret Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act have construed its ambiguously worded immunity provision broadly, shielding Internet intermediaries from tort liability so long as they are not the literal authors of offensive content. Although this broad interpretation effects the basic goals of the statute, it ignores several serious textual difficulties and mistakenly extends protection too far by immunizing even direct participants in tortious conduct.

This analysis, which examines the text and history of Section 230 in light of two strains of pre-Internet vicarious liability defamation doctrine, concludes that the immunity provision of Section 230, though …

Symposium, Internet Expression In The 21st Century: Where Technology & Law Collide: Introduction, Michael R. Dimino, Tonya M. Evans-Walls, Nicole M. Santo

Michael R Dimino

Chapter 7 - Restricting Fair Use To Save The News, Ryan T. Holte

Prof. Ryan T. Holte

Ryan T. Holte in “Restricting Fair Use to Save the News: A Proposed Change in Copyright Law to Bring More Profit to News Reporting” examines the present condition of the media and the economic and public policies behind protecting news. He further discusses current means of protecting information through copyright and misappropriation law, before proposing a change in the Copyright Act to better allow the news industry to reap profits from news reporting.

Hack Your Blog (Lightning Talk), Laura Quilter

Laura Quilter

A short 101-level lightning talk on "hacking your blog" for Software Freedom Day, Boston, 2009.

Protecting Rights Online, Molly Land

Molly K. Land

Although the human rights and access to knowledge (A2K) movements share many of the same goals, their legal and regulatory agendas have little in common. While state censorship online is a central concern for human rights advocates, this issue has been largely ignored by the A2K movement. Likewise, human rights advocates have failed to examine the cumulative effect of expanding copyright protections on education and culture. These disparate agendas reflect fundamentally different views about what states should regulate and the role of international institutions. Overcoming this divide is critical to ensuring the movements can draw on their respective strengths to …

Internet Killed The Copyright Law: Perfect 10 V. Google And The Devastating Impact On The Exclusiive Right To Display, Deborah B. Morse

Deborah Brightman Morse

Never has the dissonance between copyright and innovation been so extreme. The Internet provides enormous economic growth due to the strength of e-commerce, and affords an avenue for creativity and the wide dissemination of information. Nevertheless, the Internet has become a plague on copyright law. The advent of the digital medium has made the unlawful reproduction, distribution, and display of copyrighted works essentially effortless. The law has been unable to keep pace with the rapid advance of technology. For the past decade, Congress has been actively attempting to draft comprehensible legislation in an effort to afford copyright owners more protection …

La Voip Y La Nueva Ley, Juan Carlos Riofrío Martínez-Villalba

Juan Carlos Riofrío Martínez-Villalba

No abstract provided.

Relevancia Del Uso Indebido De Marca En Internet, Gabriel Martinez Medrano

Gabriel Martinez Medrano

No abstract provided.

A Era Pós-Napster, Ivo T. Gico

Ivo Teixeira Gico Jr.

O artigo analisa questões referentes à divugação não autorizada de obras artísticas pela internet e os problemas enfrentados pela indústria fonográfica, contrastando o direito ao acesso à informação, controle e seu papel fundamental na construção de uma democracia. The article examines issues relating to unauthorized disclosure of artistic works on the Internet and the problems faced by the music industry, opposed by the access to information rights, control and its fundamental role in the building of a democracy.