Law Commons^™

Hackback: Permitting Retaliatory Hacking By Non-State Actors As Proportionate Countermeasures To Transboundary Cyberharm, Jan E. Messerschmidt

National Security Law Program

Cyberespionage has received even greater attention in the wake of reports of persistent and brazen cyberexploitation of U.S. and Canadian firms by the Chinese military. But the recent disclosures about NSA surveillance programs have made clear that a national program of cyberdefense of private firms' intellectual property is politically infeasible. Following the lead

of companies like Google, private corporations may increasingly resort to the use of self-defense, hacking back against cross-border incursions on the Internet. Most scholarship, however, has surprisingly viewed such actions as outside the ambit of international law. This Note provides a novel account of how international law …

Copyright 1992-2012: The Most Significant Development?, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Fordham Intellectual Property Law & Policy Conference, its organizer, Professor Hugh Hansen, planned a session on “U.S. Copyright Law: Where Has It Been? Where Is It Going?” and asked me to look back over the twenty years since the conference’s inception in order to identify the most important development in copyright during that period. Of course, the obvious answer is “the Internet,” or “digital media,” whose effect on copyright law has been pervasive. I want to propose a less obvious response, but first acknowledge that digital media and communications have presented …

Self-Defensive Force Against Cyber Attacks: Legal, Strategic And Political Dimensions, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

When does a cyber attack (or threat of cyber attack) give rise to a right of self-defense – including armed self-defense – and when should it? By "cyber attack" I mean the use of malicious computer code or electronic signals to alter, disrupt, degrade or destroy computer systems or networks or the information or programs on them. It is widely believed that sophisticated cyber attacks could cause massive harm – whether to military capabilities, economic and financial systems, or social functioning – because of modern reliance on system interconnectivity, though it is highly contested how vulnerable the United States and …