Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Law
A Technological Theory Of The Arms Race, Lee B. Kovarsky
A Technological Theory Of The Arms Race, Lee B. Kovarsky
Faculty Scholarship
Although the 'technological arms race' has recently emerged as a vogue-ish piece of legal terminology, scholarship has quite conspicuously failed to explore the phenomenon systematically. What are 'technological' arms races? Why do they happen? Does the recent spike in scholarly attention actually reflect their novelty? Are they always inefficient? How do they differ from military ones? What role can legal institutions play in slowing them down? In this Article I seek to answer these questions. I argue that copyright enforcement and self-help represent substitutable tactics for regulating access to expressive assets, and that the efficacy of each tactic depends on …
Rankings, Reductionism, And Responsibility, Frank Pasquale
Rankings, Reductionism, And Responsibility, Frank Pasquale
Faculty Scholarship
After discussing how search engines operate, and sketching a normative basis for regulation of the rankings they generate, this piece proposes some minor, non-intrusive legal remedies for those who claim that they are harmed by search engine results. Such harms include unwanted (but high-ranking) results relating to them, or exclusion from high-ranking results they claim they are due to appear on. In the first case (deemed inclusion harm), I propose a right not to suppress the results, but merely to add an asterisk to the hyperlink directing web users to them, which would lead to the complainant's own comment on …
Toward An Ecology Of Intellectual Property: Lessons From Environmental Economics For Valuing Copyright's Commons, Frank Pasquale
Toward An Ecology Of Intellectual Property: Lessons From Environmental Economics For Valuing Copyright's Commons, Frank Pasquale
Faculty Scholarship
The fair use defense in copyright law shields an intellectual commons of protected uses of copyrighted material from infringement actions. In determining whether a given use is fair, courts must assess the new use's potential effect on the market for the copyrighted work. Fair use jurisprudence too often fails to address the complementary, network, and long-range effects of new technologies on the market for copyrighted works. These effects parallel the indirect, direct, and option values of biodiversity recently recognized by environmental economists. Their sophisticated methods for valuing natural resources in tangible commons can inform legal efforts to address the intellectual …