Law Commons^™

Who's In Charge Here? Information Privacy In A Social Networking World, Lisa Di Valentino

FIMS Presentations

No abstract provided.

Enhancing Public Access To Online Rulemaking Information, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

One of the most significant powers exercised by federal agencies is their power to make rules. Given the importance of agency rulemaking, the process by which agencies develop rules has long been subject to procedural requirements aiming to advance democratic values of openness and public participation. With the advent of the digital age, government agencies have engaged in increasing efforts to make rulemaking information available online as well as to elicit public participation via electronic means of communication. How successful are these efforts? How might they be improved? In this article, I investigate agencies’ efforts to make rulemaking information available …

Free Expression And Censorship: The Evolving Role Of American Companies In The Age Of The Internet, Daniel Witt

In the Balance

No abstract provided.

Batter Up: Who’S Prepared To Take The Hit From The Stuxnet Aftermath?, Kortney Mosley

In the Balance

No abstract provided.

How Not To Criminalize Cyberbullying, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky, Andrea Garcia

UF Law Faculty Publications

This essay provides a sustained constitutional critique of the growing body of laws criminalizing cyberbullying. These laws typically proceed by either modernizing existing harassment and stalking laws or crafting new criminal offenses. Both paths are beset with First Amendment perils, which this essay illustrates through 'case studies' of selected legislative efforts. Though sympathetic to the aims of these new laws, this essay contends that reflexive criminalization in response to tragic cyberbullying incidents has led law-makers to conflate cyberbullying as a social problem with cyberbullying as a criminal problem, creating pernicious consequences. The legislative zeal to eradicate cyberbullying potentially produces disproportionate …

When Antitrust Met Facebook, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Social networks are among the hottest phenomena on the Internet. Facebook eclipsed Google as the most visited website in both 2010 and 2011. Moreover, according to Nielsen estimates, as of the end of 2011 the average American spent nearly seven hours per month on Facebook, which is more time than they spent on Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Microsoft, and Wikipedia combined. LinkedIn’s May 19, 2011 initial public offering (“IPO”) surpassed expectations, placing the value of the company at nearly $9 billion, and approximately a year later, its stock price had risen another 20 percent. Facebook followed suit a year later with …

New Technologies And Constitutional Law, Thomas Fetzer, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Internet Policy Going Forward: Does One Size Still Fit All?, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Much of the current debate over Internet policy is framed by the belief that there has always been a single Internet that was open to everyone. Closer inspection reveals a number of important ways in which the architecture has deviated from this commitment. Providers frequently deploy Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) over hybrid networks that reserve bandwidth or employ technologies such as MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS) that are not fully accessible to the public Internet. At the same time, the increasing value in variety and decreasing returns to scale is mitigating the value of being …

Network Neutrality And The Need For A Technological Turn In Internet Scholarship, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

To most social scientists, the technical details of how the Internet actually works remain arcane and inaccessible. At the same time, convergence is forcing scholars to grapple with how to apply regulatory regimes developed for traditional media to a world in which all services are provided via an Internet-based platform. This chapter explores the problems caused by the lack of familiarity with the underlying technology, using as its focus the network neutrality debate that has dominated Internet policy for the past several years. The analysis underscores a surprising lack of sophistication in the current debate. Unfamiliarity with the Internet’s architecture …

Copy Game For High Score: The First Video Game Lawsuit, 20 J. Intell. Prop. L. 1 (2012), William K. Ford

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

Commentators and industry historians generally agree that the multi-billion dollar video game industry began forty years ago in November 1972 with Atari's release of Pong. Pong is among the simplest of video games: a version of ping pong or tennis requiring little more to play than a ball, two paddles, a scoring indicator, and a couple of memorable sounds. While it was not the first video game, Pong was the first video game hit. With unauthorized copying of a successful product occurring, it is not surprising that a lawsuit resulted in the fall of 1973, one that predates the more …

Electronic Discovery And The Constitution: Inaccessible Justice, Jennifer M. Smith

Journal Publications

Computers are the cynosure of American society. As a result, most information is stored electronically and only a small amount of information ever becomes a paper document. This explosion of electronically stored information has affected every aspect of society, including the court system. Litigation is drastically different than a few years ago due to this onset of electronically stored information. The discovery of electronically stored information in litigation has become known as electronic discovery. For many, electronic discovery is expensive and complicated, and thus, litigants are settling frivolous cases to avoid the costs and complexities of engaging in discovery to …

Behavioral Advertising: From One-Sided Chicken To Informational Norms, Richard Warner, Robert Sloan

All Faculty Scholarship

When you download the free audio recording software from Audacity, you agree that Audacity may collect your information and use it to send you advertising. Billions of such pay-with-data exchanges feed information daily to a massive advertising ecosystem that tailors web site advertising as closely as possible to individual interests. The vast majority want considerably more control over our information. We nonetheless routinely enter pay-with-data exchanges when we visit CNN.com, use Gmail, or visit any of a vast number of other websites. Why? And, what, if anything, should we do about it? We answer both questions by describing pay-with-data exchanges …

Respectful And Responsible Relationships: There’S No App For That (The Report Of The Nova Scotia Task Force On Bullying And Cyberbullying), A. Wayne Mackay

Reports & Public Policy Documents

Chairing this Task Force and producing this report has been both the most engaging and exhausting project that I have ever undertaken. Since my appointment in late May 2011, I have lived and breathed in the world of bullying and cyberbullying. I am sure my fellow Task Force members and members of the Working Group did the same. Born in the wake of tragic teen suicides it was easy for the members of the Task Force to be motivated. Indeed, few ventures have stirred my passions as much as this exercise has.

Bullying is a major social issue throughout the …

Sealand, Havenco, And The Rule Of Law, James Grimmelmann

Faculty Scholarship

In 2000, a group of American entrepreneurs moved to a former World War II anti-aircraft platform in the North Sea, seven miles off the British coast, and launched HavenCo, one of the strangest start-ups in Internet history. A former pirate radio broadcaster, Roy Bates, had occupied the platform in the 1960s, moved his family aboard, and declared it to be the sovereign Principality of Sealand. HavenCo's founders were opposed to governmental censorship and control of the Internet; by putting computer servers on Sealand, they planned to create a "data haven" for unpopular speech, safely beyond the reach of any other …

Games Are Not Coffee Mugs: Games And The Right Of Publicity, 29 Santa Clara Computer & High Tech. L.J. 1 (2012), William K. Ford, Raizel Liebler

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

Are games more like coffee mugs, posters, and T-shirts, or are they more like books, magazines, and films? For purposes of the right of publicity, the answer matters. The critical question is whether games should be treated as merchandise or as expression. Three classic judicial decisions, decided in 1967, 1970, and 1973, held that the defendants needed permission to use the plaintiffs' names in their board games. These decisions judicially confirmed that games are merchandise, not something equivalent to more traditional media of expression. As merchandise, games are not like books; instead, they are akin to celebrity-embossed coffee mugs. To …

Big Brother Or Little Brother? Surrendering Seizure Privacy For The Benefits Of Communication Technology, José F. Anderson

All Faculty Scholarship

Over two centuries have passed since Benjamin Franklin quipped that we should defend privacy over security if people wanted either privacy or security. Although his axiom did not become a rule of law in its original form, its principles found voice in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution's Bill of Rights. To a lesser extent, provisions against the quartering of troops in private homes found in the Third Amendment also support the idea that what a government can require you to do, or who you must have behind the doors of your home, is an area of grave …

Communications Disruption And Censorship Under International Law: History Lessons, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

With Internet censorship on the rise around the world, a variety of tools have proliferated to assist Internet users to circumvent such censorship. However, there are few studies examining the implications of censorship circumvention under international law, and its related politics. This paper aims to help fill some of that void, with an examination of case studies wherein global communications technologies have been disrupted or censored — telegram cable cutting and censorship, high frequency radio jamming, and direct broadcast satellite blocking — and how the world community responded to that disruption or censorship through international law and law making. In …

Cross-Border Extended Collective Licensing: A Solution To Online Dissemination Of Europe’S Cultural Heritage, Johan Axhamn, Lucie Guibault

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The ever increasing use of the Internet and of digitisation technologies have opened up new possibilities for distributing and accessing creative content online, including for cultural heritage institutions. However, the digitisation and dissemination of a substantial proportion of the collections held by European cultural institutions may be considerably hindered due to high transaction costs related to clearance of copyright and related rights. This holds equally true for the cultural institutions taking part in the Europeana project. This study examines whether the Nordic “extended collective licensing” (ECL) model could provide a viable solution to the problems of digitisation and dissemination of …

The Challenge Of "Big Data" For Data Protection, Fred H. Cate, Christopher Kuner, Christopher Millard, Dan Jerker B. Svantesson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Computer-Supported Peer Review In A Law School Context, Kevin D. Ashley, Ilya Goldin

Articles

Legal instructors have been urged to incorporate peer reviewing into law school courses as a way to provide students much needed feedback. Peer review can benefit legal education, but only if law school instructors adopt peer review on a large scale, and for that, computer-supported peer review systems are crucial. These web-based systems orchestrate the mechanics of students submitting written assignments on-line and distributing them to other students for anonymous review, making it considerably easier for instructors to manage.

Beyond the problem of orchestrating mechanics, however, a deeper obstacle to widespread acceptance of peer review in legal education is the …

Computable Contracts, Harry Surden

Publications

This Article explains how and why firms are representing certain contractual obligations as computer data. The reason is so that computers can read and process the substantive aspects of contractual obligations. The representation of contractual obligations in data instead of (or in addition to) the traditional written language form - what this Article calls "data-oriented contracting" - allows for the application of advanced computer processing abilities to substantive contractual obligations. Certain financial contracts exemplify this model. Equity option contracts are routinely represented not as contract documents written in ordinary language - but as data records intended to be processed by …

Patent Litigation And The Internet, Samantha Zyontz, John R. Allison, Emerson H. Tiller, Tristan Bligh

Faculty Scholarship

Patent infringement litigation has not only increased dramatically in frequency over the past few decades,¹ but also has also seen striking growth in both stakes and cost.² Although a relatively rich literature has added much to our understanding of the nature, causes, and consequences of patent litigation during the past two decades,³ many interesting questions remain inadequately addressed. The nuances of and trends in patent litigation in different technology fields and industries, for example, are still understudied.⁴ Litigation of patents on new technologies has likewise received a dearth of attention. Here we seek to help begin …

Cybercrime, Ronald C. Griffin

Journal Publications

This essay recounts campaigns against privacy; the fortifications erected against them; and hi-jinx attributable to hackers, crackers, and miscreants under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Search Neutrality As An Antitrust Principle, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Given the Internet's designation as "the great equalizer,"' it is unsurprising that nondiscrimination has emerged as a central aspiration of web governance.2 But, of course, bias, discrimination, and neutrality are among the slipperiest of regulatory principles. One person's bias is another person's prioritization. Fresh on the heels of its initial success in advocating a net neutrality principle,' Google is in the uncomfortable position of trying to stave off a corollary principle of search neutrality.' Search neutrality has not yet coalesced into a generally understood principle, but at its heart is some idea that Internet search engines ought not to prefer …