Law Commons^™

Anarchy, Status Updates, And Utopia, James Grimmelmann

Faculty Scholarship

Social software has a power problem. Actually, it has two. The first is technical. Unlike the rule of law, the rule of software is simple and brutal: whoever controls the software makes the rules. And if power corrupts, then automatic power corrupts automatically. Facebook can drop you down the memory hole; Paypal can garnish your pay. These sovereigns of software have absolute and dictatorial control over their domains.

Is it possible to create online spaces without technical power? It is not, because of social software’s second power problem. Behind technical power there is also social power. Whenever people come together …

The Virtues Of Moderation, James Grimmelmann

Faculty Scholarship

TL;DR—On a Friday in 2005, the Los Angeles Times launched an experiment: a “wikitorial” on the Iraq War that any of the paper’s readers could edit. By Sunday, the experiment had ended in abject failure: vandals overran it with crude profanity and graphic pornography. The wikitorial took its inspiration and its technology from Wikipedia, but missed something essential about how the “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” staves off abuse while maintaining its core commitment to open participation.

The difference is moderation: the governance mechanisms that structure participation in a community to facilitate cooperation and prevent abuse. Town meetings …

Privacy, Autonomy, And Internet Platforms, Frank A. Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Electronically Stored Information And The Ancient Documents Exception To The Hearsay Rule: Fix It Before People Find Out About It, Daniel J. Capra

Faculty Scholarship

The first website on the Internet was posted in 1991. While there is not much factual content on the earliest websites, it did not take long for factual assertions—easily retrievable today—to flood the Internet. Now, over one hundred billion emails are sent, and ten million static web pages are added to the Internet every day. In 2006 alone, the world produced electronic information that was equal to three million times the amount of information stored in every book ever written. The earliest innovations in electronic communication are now over twenty years old—meaning that the factual assertions made by way of …

Legitimacy And Expertise In Global Internet Governance, Olivier Sylvain

Faculty Scholarship

Over the course of the past decade or so, attention among Internet policymakers and scholars has shifted gradually from substantive design principles to the structure of Internet governance. The Internet Corporation for Assigning Names and Numbers in particular now faces a new skepticism about its legitimacy to administer the essential Internet Assigned Numbers Authority function. ICANN has responded to these doubts by proposing a series of major governance reforms that would bring nation-states more into the organization's decisionmaking. After all, transnational governance institutions in other substantive areas privilege nation-states as a matter of course. This Symposium Essay shows that these …

Disagreeable Privacy Policies: Mismatches Between Meaning And Users’ Understanding, Joel R. Reidenberg, Travis Breaux, Lorrie F. Cranor, Brian M. French, Amanda Grannis, James T. Graves, Fei Liu, Aleecia Mcdonald, Thomas B. Norton, Rohan Ramanath, N. Cameron Russell, Norman Sadeh, Florian Schaub

Faculty Scholarship

Privacy policies are verbose, difficult to understand, take too long to read, and may be the least-read items on most websites even as users express growing concerns about information collection practices. For all their faults, though, privacy policies remain the single most important source of information for users to attempt to learn how companies collect, use, and share data. Likewise, these policies form the basis for the self-regulatory notice and choice framework that is designed and promoted as a replacement for regulation. The underlying value and legitimacy of notice and choice depends, however, on the ability of users to understand …

Increasing The Transaction Costs Of Harassment, Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger

Faculty Scholarship

Wouldn’t it be nice if the rules, agreements, and guidelines designed to prevent online harassment were sufficient to curb improper behavior? As if. Wrongdoers are not always so easily deterred. Sometimes these approaches are about as effective as attacking tanks with toothpicks.

As Danielle Citron contends in her critically important work, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, the design of the Internet facilitates vitriol and abuse, even when it is legally, contractually, and normatively prohibited. Communicating almost effortlessly at distance—sometimes anonymously and typically with minimized body language—can heighten emotional detachment and blunt moral sensitivity. Tragically, when a mediated environment makes it …

Addressing Cyber Harassment: An Overview Of Hate Crimes In Cyberspace, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

This short piece will take a step back and give an overhead view of the problem of cyber harassment and the destructive impact it can have on victims’ lives. Then, it will address about what the law can do to combat online harassment and how a legal agenda can be reconciled with the First Amendment. Finally, it will turn to recent changes in social media companies’ treatment of online abuse and what that might mean for our system of free expression.

Does Google Content Degrade Google Search? Experimental Evidence, Michael Luca, Tim Wu, Sebastian Couvidat, Daniel Frank

Faculty Scholarship

While Google is known primarily as a search engine, it has increasingly developed and promoted its own content as an alternative to results from other websites. By prominently displaying Google content in response to search queries, Google is able to use its dominance in search to gain customers for this content. This may reduce consumer welfare if the internal content is inferior to organic search results. In this paper, we provide a legal and empirical analysis of this practice in the domain of online reviews. We first identify the conditions under which universal search would be considered anticompetitive. We then …