Law Commons^™

The Problem Of Modern Monetization Of Memes: How Copyright Law Can Give Protection To Meme Creators, Mark Marciszewski

Pace Intellectual Property, Sports & Entertainment Law Forum

Some legal questions answered in this article on the horizon for the courts and lawyers is how should courts apply copyright law to popular media made by small scale creators and shared on the internet, otherwise known as "memes."

Part II of this article will focus on validity of potential copyright protection in internet memes. It will start by describing the increased monetization surrounding memes and how this monetization calls for greater interest for meme creators to protect their work. It will then describe the merits of individual copyright interests in internet memes.

Part III of this article will focus …

To Protect Freedom Of Expression, Why Not Steal Victory From The Jaws Of Defeat?, Evelyn Mary Aswad

Washington and Lee Law Review

Global social media platforms are grappling with whether to align their corporate speech codes with international human rights law. Facebook’s June 2019 report that summarized worldwide feedback about its proposed independent oversight board for content moderation noted a split in stakeholder opinions on this topic. The UN’s top expert on freedom of expression as well as many civil society members recommended that Facebook anchor its content moderation in the international human rights law regime. Others expressed concern that this legal regime would not be sufficiently protective of speech and contained inconsistencies that create problems for content moderation.

Those concerns were …

Section 230 Immunity: How The Trump Era Has Exposed The Current Conflict Between The First Amendment And The Good Samaritan Clause In The Modern Public Square, Brandon Salter, Dhillon Ramkhelawn

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bad Actors: Authenticity, Inauthenticity, Speech, And Capitalism, Sarah C. Haan

Scholarly Articles

“Authenticity” has evolved into an important value that guides social media companies’ regulation of online speech. It is enforced through rules and practices that include real-name policies, Terms of Service requiring users to present only accurate information about themselves, community guidelines that prohibit “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” verification practices, product features, and more.

This Article critically examines authenticity regulation by the social media industry, including companies’ claims that authenticity is a moral virtue, an expressive value, and a pragmatic necessity for online communication. It explains how authenticity regulation provides economic value to companies engaged in “information capitalism,” “data capitalism,” and “surveillance …

Hargis V. Bevin, Gabriella Castellano

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Trimming The Fat: The Gdpr As A Model For Cleaning Up Our Data Usage, Kassandra Polanco

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Nascent Competitors, C. Scott Hemphill, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

A nascent competitor is a firm whose prospective innovation represents a serious threat to an incumbent. Protecting such competition is a critical mission for antitrust law, given the outsized role of unproven outsiders as innovators and the uniquely potent threat they often pose to powerful entrenched firms. In this Article, we identify nascent competition as a distinct analytical category and outline a program of antitrust enforcement to protect it. We make the case for enforcement even where the ultimate competitive significance of the target is uncertain, and explain why a contrary view is mistaken as a matter of policy and …

The Facebook Oversight Board: Creating An Independent Institution To Adjudicate Online Free Expression, Kate Klonick

Faculty Publications

For a decade and a half, Facebook has dominated the landscape of digital social networks, becoming one of the most powerful arbiters of online speech. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, over two billion users leverage the platform to post, share, discuss, react to, and access content from all over the globe. Through a system of semipublic rules called “Community Standards,” Facebook has created a body of “laws” and a system of governance that dictate what users may say on the platform. In recent years, as this intricately built system to dispatch the company’s immense private power over …

Symposium: The California Consumer Privacy Act, Margot Kaminski, Jacob Snow, Felix Wu, Justin Hughes

Publications

This symposium discussion of the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review focuses on the newly enacted California Consumer Privacy Act (CPPA), a statute signed into state law by then-Governor Jerry Brown on June 28, 2018 and effective as of January 1, 2020. The panel was held on February 20, 2020.

The panelists discuss how businesses are responding to the new law and obstacles for consumers to make effective use of the law’s protections and rights. Most importantly, the panelists grapple with questions courts are likely to have to address, including the definition of personal information under the CCPA, the application …