Law Commons^™

Ocularcentrism And Deepfakes: Should Seeing Be Believing?, Katrina G. Geddes

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

The pernicious effects of misinformation were starkly exposed on January 6, 2021, when a violent mob of protestors stormed the nation’s capital, fueled by false claims of election fraud. As policymakers wrestle with various proposals to curb misinformation online, this Article highlights one of the root causes of our vulnerability to misinformation, specifically, the epistemological prioritization of sight above all other senses (“ocularcentrism”). The increasing ubiquity of so-called “deepfakes”—hyperrealistic, digitally altered videos of events that never occurred—has further exposed the vulnerabilities of an ocularcentric society, in which technology-mediated sight is synonymous with knowledge. This Article traces the evolution of visual …

23andme: Attack Of The Clones And Other Concerns, Claire M. Amodio

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

A few years ago, ancestry websites took the world by storm. People were fascinated with their history and heritage and wanted to find out more about where they came from. Then along came 23andMe, which allowed people to not only unearth their familial roots, but also bring to light unknown medical conditions or predispositions to certain medical issues. 23andMe then took the unprecedented step of teaming up with a pharmaceutical company to create drugs with its users’ genetic information. After this announcement, some users were caught off guard, having had no idea that their genetic information—something so sensitive and uniquely …

Algorithmic Parenting, Eldar Haber, Tammy Harel Ben Shahar

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

Growing up in today’s world involves an increasing amount of interaction with technology. The rise in availability, accessibility, and use of the internet, along with social norms that encourage internet connection, make it nearly impossible for children to avoid online engagement. The internet undoubtedly benefits children socially and academically and mastering technological tools at a young age is indispensable for opening doors to valuable opportunities. However, the internet is risky for children in myriad ways. Parents and lawmakers are especially concerned with the tension between important advantages and risks technology bestows on children.

New technological developments in artificial intelligence are …

Symposium: Mental Health And The Legal Profession: Foreword And Dedication, Deborah W. Denno, Bruce A. Green

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Electoral College: Time For A Change?, John D. Feerick

Fordham Law Review

Fifty-three years ago, I wrote an article for the Fordham Law Review advocating for a popular vote for president. My experience serving as staff advisor to an American Bar Association (ABA) commission on Electoral College reform influenced my views. The House of Delegates authorized the commission in February 1966. A year later, after study and consideration, the ABA recommended such a reform, as did Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, then serving as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on constitutional amendments. This Article returns to the subject of reform by examining in Part I the elections of this century …

The German Netzdg As Role Model Or Cautionary Tale? Implications For The Debate On Social Media Liability, Patrick Zurth

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

What can be done against discrimination, bullying, insults, and the spread of dangerous fake news on social media platforms? While platforms in the United States enjoy broad discretion on how to approach that issue, there are both legal and political debates regarding social media regulation. Germany, by contrast, advances the opposite approach: requiring social media providers to block or remove illegal content. The Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz (“NetzDG,” “Network Enforcement Act,” the “Act”) of 2017 outlines a specific procedure for implementing such a claim. The Act is the first of its kind in the western democratic states. Other countries have invoked or discussed …

Taxing Big Data: A Proposal To Benefit Society For The Use Of Private Information, Ziva Rubinstein

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

Artificial intelligence, the technology that is currently shaping our world, relies on the data that each individual supplies. In 2017, the Economist magazine asserted that “the world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data.” This assertion is supported by the current data market, which became a hundred-billion-dollar industry in the data broker market alone. However, despite its immense value, individuals are not compensated when their data is collected, shared, or when that data is used to replace them in the job market. Further, companies are legally avoiding taxes on this resource, both during its collection and on the …

Cartouches, Catalogs, & Courtrooms: Using A Recent Legal Challenge In Egyptian Court To Examine Unanswered Questions In Cultural Heritage, Lawrence Keating

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

Ancient Egypt is known to the world for its rich culture steeped in arcane mysticism and for the dazzling treasures it left behind, which now populate the world’s most prominent cultural institutions. These and other cultural heritage objects, which capture and inspire masses as easily today as they did in their own time, are subject to growing controversy over their protection and utilization. As this debate moves from academic circles to the arena of public discourse, the need to revise legislation controlling cultural heritage objects is becoming increasingly clear. This Note uses a recent law- suit concerning an international exhibition …

Plus Or Minus America: Spanski, Geoblocking Technology, And Personal Jurisdiction Analysis For Nonresident Defendants, Daniel Canedo

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

The use of a geoblock—technology that restricts access to websites based on user location—is a controversial topic, and one that plays a role in defining the scope under which nonresident defendants may be subjected to the personal jurisdiction of U.S. courts in copyright infringement cases. For example, a recent D.C. Court of Appeals case, Spanski Enterprises, Inc. v. Telewizja Polska, S.A., involved a Polish television network whose geoblock setting, known as “minus America,” failed to restrict website access in violation of a Canadian company’s exclusive rights under the U.S. Copyright Act. Cases like Carsey-Werner Co., LLC v. British Broadcasting Corp. …

Conventional Protections For Commercial Fan Art Under The U.S. Copyright Act, Rachel Morgan

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

For many years, artists and consumers of pop culture have channeled their artistic skills into creating derivative works of their favorite fictional stories and characters. In the United States, fans of Japanese anime and manga have made a living selling artwork of their favorite characters at anime conventions, large gatherings that bring in fellow fans from all around the country. Despite the prevalence of this practice, there is a glaring legal issue: these fictional characters are the intellectual property of the authors who created them, and fan art is blatant copyright infringement. However, there are still many economic advantages to …

Something Old, Something New: Forecasting Willing Buyer/Willing Seller’S Impact On Songwriter Royalties, Daniel Abowd

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

Mechanical royalties payable to songwriters for digital reproductions of their works on services such as Spotify and Apple Music are determined through a convoluted quasi-trial in front of an administrative body called the Copyright Royalty Board (“CRB”). The CRB is itself governed by statutory rate standards that constrain the types of evidence and analyses it may consider when setting royalty rates.

In 2018, Congress passed a much-heralded, consensus piece of music legislation called the Music Modernization Act (“MMA”). The MMA attacked a broad swath of issues across the music industry, including, most visibly, establishing a blanket license for digital mechanical …

Fairness, Copyright, And Video Games: Hate The Game, Not The Player, Shani Shisha

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

Creative communities often rely on social norms to regulate the production of creative content. Yet while an emerging body of literature has focused on isolated accounts of social norms operating in discrete, small-scale creative industries, no research to date has explored the social norms that pervade the world’s largest content microcosm—the sprawling video game community.

Now a veritable global phenomenon, the video game industry has recently grown to eclipse the music and motion picture industries. But despite its meteoric rise, the video game industry has provoked little attention from copyright scholars. This Article is the first to explore the shifting …

People’S Electric: Engaged Legal Education At Rutgers-Newark Law School In The 1960s And 1970s, George W. Conk

Fordham Urban Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Shareholder Primacy And The Moral Obligations Of Directors, Mark J. Loewenstein, Jay Geyer

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

One of the most written-about and important topics in corporate law is the fiduciary obligations of corporate directors. Increasingly, critics of American capitalism have urged that corporations, and implicitly, corporate directors, act in a more socially responsible fashion and thus eschew the notion that shareholder primacy is the exclusive guide to a director’s fiduciary duty. Under this view, directors must consider the effect of their actions on “stakeholders” other than shareholders and be guided by morality—doing the right thing—when making business judgments.

When directors move away from shareholder primacy, however, decision-making becomes more difficult and problematic. This article analyzes the …

Bending The Investment Advisers Act's Regulatory Arc, Joseph A. Franco

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

The Investment Advisers Act of 1940 (“IAA”) and its regulatory purview have changed dramatically over the life of the statute. The statute began as a simple registration scheme with barebones conduct integrity prohibitions for wealth managers and purveyors of investment newsletters. Although the statute’s original minimalist cast was deficient, the IAA’s regulatory scope has undergone a fundamental transformation, both in terms of the expanding class of advisers covered by the statute’s substantive provisions and the statute’s expansive structural integrity requirements. Over a span of decades, the IAA’s focus has been reoriented so that it is directed at least as much, …

Humanity Constrains Loyalty: Fiduciary Duty, Human Rights, And The Corporate Decision Maker, Malcolm Rogge

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

This article considers whether the values contained within the idea of human rights have normative priority over economic values as they are inscribed in shareholder-oriented interpretations of the duty of loyalty in corporate law. While stakeholder theorists have sought to expand the ambit of the fiduciary duty—arguing generally that corporate fiduciary law permits managers to take into account a broad range of stakeholder interests—this article shifts the frame of analysis: It proposes that the range of corporate fiduciary loyalty is constrained by human rights as normative values that are distinct from the strictly economic values that are given primacy in …

The Insider Trading Prohibition Act: A Small Step Towards A Codified Insider Trading Law, Kayla Quigley

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

Many have called for reform to insider trading law, as the current judge-made doctrine is ambiguous, complicated, and ultimately permissive of many instances of trading on nonpublic information. Indeed, Congress has attempted several times to pass a uniform insider trading statute. Most recently, in December 2019, the House of Representatives passed the Insider Trading Prohibition Act (“ITPA”). The legislation codifies many current principles of insider trading jurisprudence while also expanding potential insider trading liability. Moreover, it attempts to fix gaps in the law that various cases, such as United States v. Newman, have declined to address.

Among other flaws, …

Move Over Ipos: Unicorn Direct Listings May Be The New Mythical Beasts In Town, Tatum Sornborger

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

Most people think of “going public” as an Initial Public Offering (IPO), but as IPOs have boomed and busted over the past decade, the direct listing has emerged as an unconventional but viable way to raise capital. The direct listing approach was uncovered by one rebellious “unicorn,” a term used to describe privately held companies with valuations exceeding one billion dollars. By circumventing the traditional IPO process, Spotify prompted both the SEC and major stock exchanges to examine direct listings and promulgate rules for future offerings. Though these rules are still developing, companies now have a clear path to follow …

Emerging Circuit Split Over Modification Of Mortgages On Multi-Use Real Properties, Michal Zabadal

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

For many decades, healthy levels of residential mortgage loans (“RMLs”) and their regulation have been among the major drivers of the economy. Because of the importance of RMLs for the condition of the national financial system and the general well-being of the society, it is essential that lenders are reasonably incentivized to originate these loans. A well-designed promise of higher recovery on RMLs in times of distress can be a compelling motivator. The Bankruptcy Code seeks to deliver on that promise by treating RMLs more favorably. It does that by barring the debtor-in-bankruptcy from modifying a claim secured by a …

The Seventh Circuit Missed The Bullseye In Walleye, Peter Rosenberg

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

The structure of agency relationships in a transaction should have no bearing on the outcome when the only difference between two hypothetical transactions is solely the facial structure. In the same vein, investor protection is at the forefront of the securities laws; commonly used limiting language for market announcements should not be enough to absolve a company from fraudulent disclosures, e.g., “preliminary results.”

In Walleye Trading LLC v. AbbVie, Inc., a Seventh Circuit decision, the Court did the opposite and found that, based on pleadings at the motion to dismiss stage, an issuer is not liable for the misstatements …

The Cyan Decision And Its Impact On State-Level Securities Class Actions, B. John Torabi

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

The Supreme Court’s decision in Cyan, Inc. v. Beaver County Employees Retirement Fund^† preserved the Securities Act of 1933’s bar on removing securities class actions brought in state court to federal court. The unanimous ruling cut against a nearly quarter-century long trend of pushing securities class action litigation to the federal courts. Cyan was resolved purely through statutory interpretation, leaving many of the underlying policy questions to be resolved by state courts and in future rulings.

This Note examines the intention of the drafters of the Securities Act of 1933 in designing a disclosure-focused regulatory scheme with a private …

Who Makes Esg? Understanding Stakeholders In The Esg Debate, Matthew Diller, Stephanie Betts, Lorenzo Corte, David M. Silk, Scott V. Simpson, Lisa M. Fairfax, Carmen X. W. Lu, David H. Webber, Leo E. Strine, Jr., Sean J. Griffith

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

No abstract provided.

The Virus, Risk, And Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities: Examining Dodd-Frank’S Impact In The Midst Of A Pandemic, Owen Haney

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

When lawmakers sought to reshape the financial industry through the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010, they specifically attacked the “moral hazard” in the asset-backed securities market that they believed was partly responsible for the collapse of global financial markets. Congress identified several practices in asset-backed securitizations that posed a risk to the world economy. In particular, regulators believed that the “originate-to-distribute” model, whereby loan originators—those parties armed with the best knowledge regarding the quality of the loans in the transaction and who consequently set underwriting standards—could sell off the loans without bearing any risk should those borrowers (homeowners …

Fixing Esg: Are Mandatory Esg Disclosures The Solution To Misleading Ratings?, Javier El-Hage

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

This Note provides an overview of the debate around the current state of ESG disclosure practices, and the perceived need for the SEC to establish a system of mandatory ESG disclosures. Part I explores the inherent difficulty of defining ESG, the problematic nature of quantifying and measuring ESG factors, and the tools currently being used by market-leading ratings firms and investment vehicles. In particular, this part addresses the inconsistencies of ESG self-reporting, the influence of this practice on the ensuing ratings, and the potential for investors to be misled as a result.

Part II of the Note explores the possible …

Mark Of The Devil: The University As Brand Bully, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

In recent years, universities have been accused in news stories of becoming “trademark bullies,” entities that use their trademarks to harass and intimidate beyond what the law can reasonably be interpreted to allow. Universities have also intensified efforts to gain expansive new marks. The Ohio State University’s attempt to trademark the word “the” is probably the most notorious. There has also been criticism of universities’ attempts to use their trademarks to police clearly legal speech about their activities. But beyond provocative anecdotes, how can one assess whether a particular university is truly bullying, since there are entirely legitimate reasons for …

Defensive Patent Litigation Strategy For Chinese Companies: A Review Of The Extraterritorial Reach Of The United States Patent Laws, Lisa D. Zang

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

China has experienced an extraordinary transformation from a poor, developing nation into a global economic power. With China becoming one of the U.S.’s largest trading partners, however, Chinese companies have become increasingly enmeshed in U.S. patent litigations. Although the U.S. patent laws are intended only to govern conduct within the nation’s borders, the line between domestic and foreign economic activities has become increasingly blurred. Modern sales transactions often span multiple countries, and in such situations, it may not be clear whether the U.S. patent laws apply. For Chinese companies facing exposure to U.S. patent litigations, it is critical to understand …

Democratizing Platform Privacy, Sari Mazzurco

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

The online platform political economy—that is, the interrelationship of economic and political power in the exchange of online services for personal information—has endowed platforms with overwhelming power to determine consumers’ information privacy. Mainstream legal scholarship on information privacy has focused largely on an economic problem: individual consumers do not obtain their “optimal” level of privacy due to a bevy of market failures. This Article presents the political issue: that platforms’ hegemonic control over consumers’ information privacy renders the rules they impose illegitimate from a democratic perspective. It argues platform hegemony over consumers’ information privacy is a political problem, in the …

Free Speech In The Modern Age, [email protected]

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Abridging The Fifth Amendment: Compelled Decryption, Passwords, & Biometrics, Raila Cinda Brejt

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

Technological developments change the way we perform tasks by creating more efficient solutions to old problems and giving rise to opportunities not previously possible. Advances in communications technology have made the world feel smaller and more accessible. These changes also affect the methodology of both criminal activity and the investigative procedures of law enforcement. Our fundamental rights are challenged as judges and state actors try to strike the perfect balance between longstanding values and contemporary problems. This Note considers the Fifth Amendment challenges that arise when law enforcement attempts to obtain evidence from a criminal defendant’s encrypted device. This Note …

Should They Stay Or Should They Go? African Cultural Goods In France’S Public Domain, Between Inalienability, Transfers, And Circulations, Clara Cassan

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

France’s colonialism over Subsharan Africa until the 1960s has had persistant psychological and material consequences. Amongst them is the lingering presence of a significant amount of African objects in French museum collections. In the last five years, Subsaharan African countries have reiterated their desire to receive parts of these collections. Through their “restitution requests,” they identify themselves as the objects’ legitimate owners and claim to have been robbed of their cultural property during colonialism.

The exact conditions under which each Subsaharan artifact arrived on French grounds—whether through theft, donations, sales, or looting—remain unsettled. Even where thefts can be proven, they …