Law Commons^™

Privacy Concern In Google Voice Call Recording, Michael Katz, James Tuthill

Michael Katz

The Federal Communications Commission, taking note of AT&T's complaint, has written to Google with questions about its call blocking. But the implications for our privacy of software-managed call services like Google Voice are a much greater threat to consumers, and that's where the FCC should direct its energy - immediately.

Legal And Ethical Implications Of Employee Location Monitoring, Gundars Kaupins, Robert Minch

Robert P. Minch

Location technologies allow employers to monitor the location of employees. The technologies range from global positioning systems able to determine outdoor locations worldwide to sensor networks able to determine locations within buildings. Few international laws and no American laws directly address location monitoring. International privacy laws, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the USA Patriot Act and other laws involving Internet and e-mail monitoring might provide the pattern for future location monitoring legislation. Ethical considerations such as privacy, accuracy, inconsistency, security, and reputation also may affect future legislation. In writing corporate policies governing location monitoring, the employer’s business interests may outweigh …

Facebook And Risks To De-Contextualization Of Information, Franck Dumortier

Franck Dumortier

No abstract provided.

Digital Divide Older People And Online Legal Advice, Subhajit Basu, Joe Duffy, Helen Davey

Subhajit Basu

Many older people are not aware where and when advice is available. Furthermore they may be unaware that advice is needed

From Making Money Without Doing Evil To Doing Good Without Handouts: The Google.Org Experiment In Philanthropy, Shruti Rana

Shruti Rana

From its inception, Google has promoted itself as a company that dares to be different in its pursuit of innovation and information. The company’s new philanthropic arm, Google.org, promises to be just as pioneering in its search for social returns through the mechanism of profit. This Essay takes a closer look at the Google.org experiment in philanthropy. It argues that Google.org’s uniqueness lies not in its “hybrid” model that merges for-profit and charitable aims, but in the ways it seeks to use market mechanisms to harness the social benefits of information technology for the public good. Google.org also has enormous …

Fulfilling Technology's Promise: Enforcing The Rights Of Women Caught In The Global High-Tech Underclass, Shruti Rana

Shruti Rana

In the early 1980s, Malaysian women working in electronics factories began to experience hallucinations and seizures. Factory bosses manipulated their employees' religious and cultural beliefs, convincing the women that their bodies were inhabited by demons. In this manner, they avoided confronting the more likely causes: the rigid, paternalistic work environment, the intense production pressures placed on the women, and the lengthy shifts and potentially hazardous conditions that the women were forced to endure. This example illustrates the use of gender, religion, and to control and exploit women's labor in the high-tech industry. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated situation. This …

Survey Of The Law Of Cyberspace: Electronic Contracting Cases 2006-2007, Juliet Moringiello, William Reynolds

William L. Reynolds

In this annual survey, we discuss the electronic contracting cases decided between July 1, 2006 and June 30, 2007. In the article, we discuss issues involving contract formation, procedural unconscionability, the scope of UETA and E-SIGN, and contracts formed by automated agents. We conclude that whatever doctrinal doubt judges and scholars may once have had about applying standard contract law to electronic transactions, those doubts have now been largely resolved, and that the decisions involving electronic contracts are following the general law of contracts pretty closely.

Survey Of The Law Of Cyberspace: Electronic Contracting Cases 2005-2006, Juliet M. Moringiello, William L. Reynolds

William L. Reynolds

This article analyzes the judicial decisions involving Internet and other electronic contracts during the period from July 1, 2005 to June 30, 2006. The authors explain that this year's cases show a maturation of the common law of electronic contracts in that the judges are beginning to recognize the realities of electronic communications and to apply traditional contract principles to those communications unless the realities of the technology justifies a different result.

Digital Ethics In Bridging Digital Divide, Subhajit Basu

Subhajit Basu

Our information society is creating parallel systems: one for those with income, education and literacy connections, giving plentiful information at low cost and high speed: the other are those without connections, blocked by high barriers of time, cost and uncertainty and dependent upon outdated information. Hence it can be expressed the DD is nothing but a reflection of social divide. The question is what is the best strategy to construct an information society that is ethically sound? Most people have the views that ICT and underlying ideologies are neutral. This Technology has become so much naturalized that it can no …

How To Fix The Google Book Search Settlement, James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann

The proposed settlement in the Google Book Search case should be approved with strings attached. The project will be immensely good for society, and the proposed deal is a fair one for Google, for authors, and for publishers. The public interest demands, however, that the settlement be modified first. It creates two new entities—the Books Rights Registry Leviathan and the Google Book Search Behemoth—with dangerously concentrated power over the publishing industry. Left unchecked, they could trample on consumers in any number of ways. We the public have a right to demand that those entities be subject to healthy, pro-competitive oversight, …

Open Source Software Licensing Patterns, Halina Kaminski, Mark Perry

Mark Perry

No abstract provided.

A Non-Obvious Design - Reexamining The Origins Of The Design Patent Standard, Jason Du Mont

Jason John Du Mont

No abstract provided.

Preserving Identities: Protecting Personal Identifying Information Through Enhanced Privacy Policies And Laws, Robert Sprague, Corey Ciocchetti

Robert Sprague

This article explores the developing phenomenon of the ongoing collection and dissemination of personal identifying information (PII): first, explaining the nature and form of PII, including the consequences of its collection; second, exploring one of the greatest threats associated with data collection - unauthorized disclosure due to data breaches, including an overview of state and federal legislative reactions to the threats of data breaches and identity theft; third, discussing common law and constitutional privacy protections regarding the collection of personal information, revealing that United States privacy laws provide very little protection to individuals; and fourth, examining current practices by online …

Networked Activism, Molly Land

Molly K. Land

The same technologies that groups of ordinary citizens are using to write operating systems and encyclopedias are fostering a quiet revolution in another area – human rights advocacy. On websites such as Avaaz.org and Wikipedia, ordinary citizens are reporting on human rights violations and organizing email writing campaigns, activities formerly the prerogative of professionals. The involvement of amateurs has been heralded as revolutionizing a variety of industries, from journalism to photography. This article asks whether it has the potential to make human rights organizations irrelevant.

In contrast to much of the recent literature, this article provides a decidedly more skeptical …

Peer Producing Human Rights, Molly Land

Molly K. Land

Can there be a Wikipedia for human rights? The growth of collaborative technologies has spurred the development of projects such as Wikipedia, in which large groups of volunteers contribute to production in a decentralized and open format. The author analyzes how these methods of peer-based production can be applied to advance international human rights as well as the limitations of such a model in this field. An underlying characteristic of peer-based production, amateurism, increases capacity and participation. However, the involvement of ordinary individuals in the production of human rights reporting is also its greatest disadvantage, since human rights reports generated …

Technology & Uncertainty: The Shaping Effect On Copyright Law, Ben Depoorter

Ben Depoorter

This Article examines the symbiotic relationship between copyright law and technology. I describe how an environment characterized by rapid technological change creates two conditions that determine the direction and evolution of copyright law: legal delay and legal uncertainty. I explain how uncertainty over the application of existing copyright law to newly emerging technology catalyzes the actions of copyright owners and users. I argue that uncertainty and delay (1) have an enabling effect on anticopyright sentiments, (2) lead to a greater reliance on self-help efforts by content providers and users, and (3) induce legislative involvement in copyright law. In the final …

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 …

Facebook And Risks Of “De-Contextualization” Of Information, Franck Dumortier

Franck Dumortier

Participation in online social networking sites (hereafter “OSNS”) has dramatically increased in recent years. Services such as the well known Facebook and Myspace but also Frienster, WAYN, Bebo, Google’s Orkut and many others have millions of registered active users and are continuously growing. The most common model of such sites is based on the presentation of the participants’ profiles and the visualisation of their network of relations to others. Also, OSNS connect participants’ profiles to their public identities, using real names and other real-world identification signs (like pictures, videos, e-mail addresses, etc.) in order to enable interaction and communication between …

A Comment On James Grimmelmann’S Saving Facebook, Susan Freiwald

Susan Freiwald

This paper comments on Professor James Grimmelmann’s article Saving Facebook (94 Iowa L. Rev. 1137 (2009) http://http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/20). provides a useful analysis of the privacy debates surrounding this social networking web site. Grimmelmann provides valuable sociological and psychological material for future legislators to draw on in considering legislative control of Facebook and similar sites. Grimmelmann uses Facebook to provide concrete examples of privacy concerns to build on the more general framework provided by the works of Daniel Solove. The comment does take exception to Grimmelmann’s analysis in several points. Chief among these is Grinnlemann’s lack of evidence in support of his …