Law Commons^™

Recent Journalism Awards Won By "Old," "New," And "Hybrid" Media, Robert H. Lande, Thomas J. Horton, Virginia Callahan

All Faculty Scholarship

This compares the quality of the "old" media to that of the "new" media by determining how often each type of media source wins major journalism awards. It divides media sources into three categories: old, new and hybrid. New media is limited to publications that were started purely as online news publications. Old media is classified in the traditional sense to include such newspapers as the New York Times. Hybrid media combines elements of both new and old media. Our research compares the number of Pulitzer Prizes and other major journalism awards won by these three types of media sources …

Interview On The Black Box Society, Lawrence Joseph, Frank A. Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

Hidden algorithms drive decisions at major Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms. Thanks to automation, those firms can approve credit, rank websites, and make myriad other decisions instantaneously. But what are the costs of their methods? And what exactly are they doing with their digital profiles of us?

Leaks, whistleblowers, and legal disputes have shed new light on corporate surveillance and the automated judgments it enables. Self-serving and reckless behavior is surprisingly common, and easy to hide in code protected by legal and real secrecy. Even after billions of dollars of fines have been levied, underfunded regulators may have only …

Who Owns "Hillary.Com"? Political Speech And The First Amendment In Cyberspace, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Akron Law Faculty Publications

In the lead-up to the next presidential election, it will be important for candidates both to maintain an online presence and to exercise control over bad faith uses of domain names and web content related to their campaigns. What are the legal implications for the domain name system? Although, for example, Senator Hillary Clinton now owns ‘hillaryclinton.com’, the more generic ‘hillary.com’ is registered to a software firm, Hillary Software, Inc. What about ‘hillary2008.com’? It is registered to someone outside the Clinton campaign and is not currently in active use. This article examines the large gaps and inconsistencies in current domain …

“We, The Paparazzi”: Developing A Privacy Paradigm For Digital Video, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Akron Law Faculty Publications

In January 2009, the Camera Phone Predator Alert bill was introduced into Congress. It raised serious concerns about privacy rights in the face of digital video technology. In so doing, it brought to light a worrying gap in current privacy regulation – the lack of rules relating to digital video privacy. To date, digital privacy regulation has focused on text records that contain personal data. Little attention has been paid to privacy in video files that may portray individuals in inappropriate contexts, or in an unflattering or embarrassing light. As digital video technology, including inexpensive cellphone cameras, is now becoming …

Law Of The Intermediated Information Exchange, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Akron Law Faculty Publications

When Wikipedia, Google and other online service providers staged a ‘blackout protest’ against the Stop Online Piracy Act in January 2012, their actions inadvertently emphasized a fundamental truth that is often missed about the nature of cyberlaw. In attempts to address what is unique about the field, commentators have failed to appreciate that the field could – and should – be reconceputalized as a law of the global intermediated information exchange. Such a conception would provide a set of organizing principles that are lacking in existing scholarship. Nothing happens online that does not involve one or more intermediaries – the …

Copyrighting "Twilight": Digital Copyright Lessons From The Vampire Blogosphere, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Akron Law Faculty Publications

In January of 2010 a United States District Court granted an injunction against a Twilight fan magazine for unauthorized use of copyrighted publicity stills . No surprise there. Intellectual property laws deal effectively – some would argue too effectively – with such cases. Nevertheless, recent Web 2.0 technologies, characterized by user-generated content, raise new challenges for copyright law. Online interactions involving reproductions of copyrighted works in blogs, online fan fiction, and online social networks do not comfortably fit existing copyright paradigms. It is unclear whether participants in Web 2.0 forums are creating derivative works, making legitimate fair uses of copyright …

Combating Cyber-Victimization, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Akron Law Faculty Publications

In today’s interconnected society, high profile examples of online victimization abound. Cyber-bullies, stalkers and harassers launch attacks on the less powerful, causing a variety of harms. Recent scholarship has identified some of the more salient damage, including reputational harms, severe emotional distress, loss of employment, and physical assault. Extreme cases of online abuse have resulted in death through suicide or as a result of targeted attacks. This article makes two major contributions to the cyber-victimization literature. It proposes specific reforms to criminal and tort laws to address this conduct more effectively. Further, it situates those reforms within a new multi-modal …

Trial By Google: Judicial Notice In The Information Age, Jeffrey Bellin, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Faculty Publications

This Article presents a theory of judicial notice for the information age. It argues that the ease of accessing factual data on the Internet allows judges and litigants to expand the use of judicial notice in ways that raise significant concerns about admissibility, reliability, and fair process. State and federal courts are already applying the surprisingly pliant judicial notice rules to bring websites ranging from Google Maps to Wikipedia into the courtroom, and these decisions will only increase in frequency in coming years. This rapidly emerging judicial phenomenon is notable for its ad hoc and conclusory nature—attributes that have the …

U.S. Vs. European Broadband Deployment: What Do The Data Say?, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

As the Internet becomes more important to the everyday lives of people around the world, commentators have tried to identify the best policies increasing the deployment and adoption of high-speed broadband technologies. Some claim that the European model of service-based competition, induced by telephone-style regulation, has outperformed the facilities-based competition underlying the US approach to promoting broadband deployment. The mapping studies conducted by the US and the EU for 2011 and 2012 reveal that the US led the EU in many broadband metrics.

• High-Speed Access: A far greater percentage of US households had access to Next Generation Access (NGA) …

Tesla And The Car Dealers' Lobby, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Tesla Motors, the offspring of entrepreneur Elon Musk (who brought us Pay-Pal and SpaceX), is the most exciting automotive development in many decades and a marquee story of American technological dynamism and innovation. The company’s luxury electric cars have caused a sensation in the auto industry, including a review by Consumer Reports calling Tesla’s Model S the best car it ever tested. Despite the acclaim, Tesla faces enormous challenges Despite the acclaim, Tesla faces enormous challenges in penetrating an automotive market that has been dominated for a century by internal combustion engines. Not only must it build cars that customers …

Technology And Client Communications: Preparing Law Students And New Lawyers To Make Choices That Comply With The Ethical Duties Of Confidentiality, Competence, And Communication, Kristin J. Hazelwood

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

That the use of technology has radically changed the legal profession is beyond dispute. Through technology, lawyers can now represent clients in faraway states and countries, and they can represent even local clients through a “virtual law office.” Gone are the times in which the lawyer’s choices for communicating with clients primarily involve preparing formal business letters to convey advice, holding in-person client meetings in the office, or conducting telephone calls with clients on landlines from the confines of the lawyer’s office. Not only do lawyers have choices about how to communicate with their clients, but they also frequently choose …

Trial By Google: Judicial Notice In The Information Age, Andrew Ferguson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Article presents a theory of judicial notice for the information age. It argues that the ease of accessing factual data on the Internet allows judges and litigants to expand the use of judicial notice in ways that raise significant concerns about admissibility, reliability, and fair process. State and federal courts are already applying the surprisingly pliant judicial notice rules to bring websites ranging from Google Maps to Wikipedia into the courtroom, and these decisions will only increase in frequency in coming years. This rapidly emerging judicial phenomenon is notable for its ad hoc and conclusory nature – attributes that …

The New Territorialism In The Not-So-New Frontier Of Cyberspace, William L. Reynolds, Juliet M. Moringiello

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay addresses the following questions: What jurisdictions should govern cyberspace problems? Are cyberspace problems different from those in the tangible world? If so, what are the implications for governance? We conclude that the judicial response to cyberspace governance has been mostly correct. After some adaptation problems (an early learning curve), courts have generally followed common law analogs to cyberspace problems. In other words, those problems are not treated as unique unless there is something special about the internet that suggests different resolutions are needed. There certainly is nothing to suggest that American courts or legislatures are trying to occupy …

Pinterest And Copyright's Safe Harbors For Internet Providers, Michael W. Carroll

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Has the time come to substantially revise the Copyright Act to better adapt the law to the ever-evolving digital environment? A number of influential sources appear to think so. If their initiatives gain momentum, it will be important to consider lessons learned from the first such effort fifteen years ago when Congress made far-reaching changes to copyright law by extending the term of copyright for twenty years and by enacting a package of reform proposals known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”). This Article intertwines the story of one important provision of the DMCA - safe harbors for Internet …

Do Objects Dream Of An Internet Of Things?, Teodor Mitew

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

This paper develops the notion of heteroclite sociable objects in the context of the emerging internet of things, and examines their transformative effect for understandings of sociability and agency. The notion of sociable objects attempts to capture the heterogeneous identity-shift occurring when heretofore obscure and mute objects ranging from toasters to thermostats acquire the agencies to leave semantically distinct traces online, and detour their human interlocutors into an object-mediated entanglement. Using a toolkit drawn from actor network theory and object oriented ontology, the paper discusses several examples illustrating the case for new parameters of sociability, better suited to a materiality …

After Search Neutrality: Drawing A Line Between Promotion And Demotion, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

The Federal Trade Commission's (“FTC” or “the commission”) January 3, 2013 decision to close its longstanding investigation of Google1 brings to a close a flurry of discussion over the possibility that Google could become subject to a “search neutrality” principle in the United States. Although the Commission found against Google on several grounds, it rejected petitions from Google's critics to create a search neutrality principle as a matter of antitrust law. This essay briefly analyzes what remains of U.S. antitrust scrutiny of Internet search bias after the Google settlement. In particular, it suggests that a sensible line can be drawn …

Teenage Crowdfunding, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

Teenage startups are in the public interest and should be encouraged, yet the federal CARD Act of 2009 eliminated credit card financing for many such companies, cutting off an important source of early-stage business capital for teenage entrepreneurs. Since then, however, Congress passed the CROWDFUND Act of 2012 which will allow teenagers to raise early-stage financing through Internet crowdfunding. Teens, being masters of the Internet, are well positioned to exploit this new opportunity, with the upshot being that securities crowdfunding may become an important way for youthful entrepreneurs to fund their business dreams.

Reviving Implied Confidentiality, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

The law of online relationships has a significant flaw-it regularly fails to account for the possibility of an implied confidence. The established doctrine of implied confidentiality is, without explanation, almost entirely absent from online jurisprudence in environments where it has traditionally been applied offline, such as with sensitive data sets and intimate social interactions.

Courts' abandonment of implied confidentiality in online environments should have been foreseen. The concept has not been developed enough to be consistently applied in environments such as the Internet that lack obvious physical or contextual cues of confidence. This absence is significant because implied confidentiality could …

Rethinking Online Privacy In Canada: Commentary On Voltage Pictures V. John And Jane Doe, Ngozi Okidegbe

Faculty Scholarship

This article problematizes the use of the bona fide case standard as the legal standard for a court to order a third party Internet Service Provider ("ISP") to disclose subscriber information to a copyright owner in online piracy cases. It argues that ISP account holders have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their subscriber information. It contends that the current bona fide case standard affords a relatively low threshold of protection for Internet users’ subscriber information. The reason for which the article takes this position is that the bona fide case standard can be met solely by IP address evidence, …

Meatspace, The Internet, And The Cloud: How Changes In Document Storage And Transfer Can Affect Ip Rights, Sharon Sandeen

Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses the intellectual property issues from "meatspace" to online services and the Internet. It further explores intellectual property issues from the Internet to the Cloud. Finally, it discusses the implications of cloud computing for trade secret protection.

Regulating The Internet Of Things: First Steps Toward Managing Discrimination, Privacy, Security, And Consent, Scott R. Peppet

Publications

The consumer "Internet of Things" is suddenly reality, not science fiction. Electronic sensors are now ubiquitous in our smartphones, cars, homes, electric systems, health-care devices, fitness monitors, and workplaces. These connected, sensor-based devices create new types and unprecedented quantities of detailed, high-quality information about our everyday actions, habits, personalities, and preferences. Much of this undoubtedly increases social welfare. For example, insurers can price automobile coverage more accurately by using sensors to measure exactly how you drive (e.g., Progressive 's Snapshot system), which should theoretically lower the overall cost of insurance. But the Internet of Things raises new and difficult questions …

Le Cyberspace, C'Est Moi?: Authoritarian Leaders, The Internet, And International Politics, David P. Fidler

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Failing Expectations: Fourth Amendment Doctrine In The Era Of Total Surveillance, Olivier Sylvain

Faculty Scholarship

Today’s reasonable expectation test and the third-party doctrine have little to nothing to offer by way of privacy protection if users today are at least conflicted about whether transactional noncontent data should be shared with third parties, including law enforcement officials. This uncertainty about how to define public expectation as a descriptive matter has compelled courts to defer to legislatures to find out what public expectation ought to be more as a matter of prudence than doctrine. Courts and others presume that legislatures are far better than courts at defining public expectations about emergent technologies.This Essay argues that the reasonable …

Copyright’S Private Ordering And The 'Next Great Copyright Act', Jennifer E. Rothman

All Faculty Scholarship

Private ordering plays a significant role in the application of intellectual property laws, especially in the context of copyright law. In this Article, I highlight some of the dominant modes of private ordering and consider what formal copyright law should do, if anything, to engage with private ordering in the copyright space. I conclude that there is not one single approach that copyright law should take with regard to private ordering, but instead several different approaches. In some instances, the best option is for the law to get out of the way and simply continue to provide room for various …