Law Commons^™

Cyber Warfare And Precautions Against The Effects Of Attacks, Eric Talbot Jensen

Faculty Scholarship

Ninety-eight percent of all U.S. government communications travel over civilian-owned-and-operated networks. Additionally, the government relies almost completely on civilian providers for computer software and hardware products, services, and maintenance. This near-complete intermixing of civilian and military computer infrastructure makes many of those civilian objects and providers legitimate targets under the law of armed conflict. Other civilian networks, services, and communications may suffer collateral damage from legitimate attacks on government targets. To protect those civilian objects and providers from the effects of attacks, the law of armed conflict requires a state to segregate its military assets from the civilian population and …

Law's Expressive Value In Combating Cyber Gender Harassment, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

The online harassment of women exemplifies twenty-first century behavior that profoundly harms women yet too often remains overlooked and even trivialized. This harassment includes rape threats, doctored photographs portraying women being strangled, postings of women’s home addresses alongside suggestions that they should be sexually assaulted and technological attacks that shut down blogs and websites. It impedes women’s full participation in online life, often driving them offline, and undermines their autonomy, identity, dignity, and well-being. But the public and law enforcement routinely marginalize women’s experience, deeming it harmless teasing that women should expect, and tolerate, given the Internet’s Wild West norms …

The Google Book Search Settlement: Ends, Means, And The Future Of Books, James Grimmelmann

Faculty Scholarship

For the past four years, Google has been systematically making digital copies of books in the collections of many major university libraries. It made the digital copies searchable through its web site--you couldn't read the books, but you could at least find out where the phrase you're looking for appears within them. This outraged copyright owners, who filed a class action lawsuit to make Google stop. Then, last fall, the parties to this large class action announced an even larger settlement: one that would give Google a license not only to scan books, but also to sell them.

The settlement …

How To Fix The Google Book Search Settlement, James Grimmelmann

Faculty Scholarship

The proposed settlement in the Google Book Search case should be approved with strings attached. The project will be immensely good for society, and the proposed deal is a fair one for Google, for authors, and for publishers. The public interest demands, however, that the settlement be modified first. It creates two new entities—the Books Rights Registry Leviathan and the Google Book Search Behemoth—with dangerously concentrated power over the publishing industry. Left unchecked, they could trample on consumers in any number of ways. We the public have a right to demand that those entities be subject to healthy, pro-competitive oversight, …

Cyber Civil Rights, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

Social networking sites and blogs have increasingly become breeding grounds for anonymous online groups that attack women, people of color, and members of other traditionally disadvantaged groups. These destructive groups target individuals with defamation, threats of violence, and technology-based attacks that silence victims and concomitantly destroy their privacy. Victims go offline or assume pseudonyms to prevent future attacks, impoverishing online dialogue and depriving victims of the social and economic opportunities associated with a vibrant online presence. Attackers manipulate search engines to reproduce their lies and threats for employers and clients to see, creating digital "scarlet letters" that ruin reputations. Today's …

Law's Expressive Value In Combating Cyber Gender Harassment, Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

The online harassment of women exemplifies twenty-first century behavior that profoundly harms women yet too often remains overlooked and even trivialized. This harassment includes rape threats, doctored photographs portraying women being strangled, postings of women’s home addresses alongside suggestions that they should be sexually assaulted and technological attacks that shut down blogs and websites. It impedes women’s full participation in online life, often driving them offline, and undermines their autonomy, identity, dignity, and well-being. But the public and law enforcement routinely marginalize women’s experience, deeming it harmless teasing that women should expect, and tolerate, given the Internet’s Wild West norms …

Rethinking Consideration In The Electronic Age, Maureen A. O'Rourke

Faculty Scholarship

Our fast-paced age of electronic agreements that ostensibly govern transactions as diverse as downloading software, ordering goods, and engaging in collaborative development projects raises questions regarding thesuitability of contract law as the appropriate legal framework. While this question arises in many settings, we focus here on the free and open source software (FOSS) movement because of the maturity and success of its model and the ubiquity of its software. We explore in particular whether open source licenses are supported by consideration, and argue that they are, and that open source licenses are contracts. We further argue that a contractual framework …

Electronic Contracting Cases 2008-2009, Juliet M. Moringiello, William L. Reynolds

Faculty Scholarship

In this survey, we review electronic contracting cases decided between June 15, 2008 and June 15, 2009. During that period we found that there was not much action on the formation by click-wrap and browse-wrap front. We have previously observed that the law of electronic contracts has matured, and the fact that there have not been any decisions on whether click-wrap and browse-wrap are effective ways of forming contracts reflects that observation. This year brought us three modification cases, two cases in which a party alleged that it was not bound to the offered terms because an unauthorized party agreed …

Subsidizing Creativity Through Network Design: Zero Pricing And Net Neutrality, Robin S. Lee, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Today, through historical practice, there exists a de facto ban on termination fees – also referred to as a “zero-price” rule (Hemphill, 2008) – which forbids an Internet service provider from charging an additional fee to a content provider who wishes to reach that ISP’s customers. The question is whether this zero-pricing structure should be preserved, or whether carriers should be allowed to charge termination fees and engage in other practices that have the effect of requiring payment to reach users. This paper begins with a defense of the de facto zero-price rule currently in existence. We point out that …