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Full-Text Articles in Law
Privacy As A Public Good, Joshua A. T. Fairfield, Christoph Engel
Privacy As A Public Good, Joshua A. T. Fairfield, Christoph Engel
Joshua A.T. Fairfield
Privacy is commonly studied as a private good: my personal data is mine to protect and control, and yours is yours. This conception of privacy misses an important component of the policy problem. An individual who is careless with data exposes not only extensive information about herself, but about others as well. The negative externalities imposed on nonconsenting outsiders by such carelessness can be productively studied in terms of welfare economics. If all relevant individuals maximize private benefit, and expect all other relevant individuals to do the same, neoclassical economic theory predicts that society will achieve a suboptimal level of …
Virtual Property, Joshua A.T. Fairfield
Virtual Property, Joshua A.T. Fairfield
Joshua A.T. Fairfield
This article explores three new concepts in property law. First, the article defines an emerging property form - virtual property - which is not intellectual property, but that more efficiently governs rivalrous, persistent, and interconnected online resources. Second, the article demonstrates that the threat to high-value uses of internet resources is not the traditional tragedy of the commons that results in overuse. Rather, the naturally layered nature of the internet leads to overlapping rights of exclusion that cause underuse of internet resources: a tragedy of the anticommons. And finally, the article shows that the common law of property can act …
The God Paradox, Joshua A.T. Fairfield