Law Commons^™

The Airwaves Meet The Highways, David Redl

Journal of Law and Mobility

I applaud and congratulate the University of Michigan for launching the Journal of Law and Mobility. The timing is perfect. The information superhighway is no longer just a clever metaphor. We are living in an era where internet connectivity is a critical part of making transportation safer and more convenient. Internet connectivity has powered the U.S. and global economies for years now. In the early stages, dial-up connections enabled users to access a vast store of digital information. As the internet and its usage grew, so did the demand for faster broadband speeds. Finally, wireless networks untethered the power of …

Nowhere To Run, Nowhere To Hide.* Applying The Fourth Amendment To Connected Cars In The Internet-Of-Things Era, Gregory C. Brown, Jr.

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

Part I of this Note will briefly discuss the key components of a Connected Car, identify who collects the data from the Car, and examine the various uses for the data. Part I also explores whether Car owners consent to the collection of their Car’s data. Part II-A will trace the historical development of the automobile exception to the Fourth Amendment, which generally permits law-enforcement officers to conduct a warrantless search of a vehicle. Part II-B will discuss how the Supreme Court has applied the Fourth Amendment to pre-Internet technologies. Part II-C will discuss two recent Fourth Amendment Supreme …

Law Library Blog (February 2019): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Blockchain-Based Token Sales, Initial Coin Offerings, And The Democratization Of Public Capital Markets, Jonathan Rohr, Aaron Wright

Articles

Best known for their role in the creation of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, blockchains are revolutionizing the way technology entrepreneurs finance their business enterprises. In 2017 alone, tech entrepreneurs raised over $6 billion through the sale of blockchain-based digital tokens, with some sales lasting mere seconds before selling out. In a token sale, also referred to as an “initial coin offering” or “ICO,” organizers of a project sell digital tokens to members of the public to finance the development of new technological platforms and services. After the initial sale, cryptocurrency exchanges scattered across the globe list tokens for trading and facilitate …

When You Give A Terrorist A Twitter: Holding Social Media Companies Liable For Their Support Of Terrorism, Anna Elisabeth Jayne Goodman

Pepperdine Law Review

In the electronic age, the internet—and—social media specifically, can be a tool for good but, abused and unchecked, can lead to great harm. Terrorist organizations utilize social media as a means of recruiting and training new members, urging them to action, and creating public terror. These platforms serve as the catalyst for equipping the growing number of “lone wolf” attackers taking action across the United States. Under civil liability provisions created under JASTA and the ATA, material supporters of terrorism can be held liable for their actions, and with the key role social media sites now play in supporting terrorism, …

Speech Across Borders, Jennifer Daskal

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

As both governments and tech companies seek to regulate speech online, these efforts raise critical, and contested, questions about how far those regulations can and should extend. Is it enough to take down or delink material in a geographically segmented way? Or can and should tech companies be ordered to takedown or delink unsavory content across their entire platforms—no matter who is posting the material or where the unwanted content is viewed? How do we deal with conflicting speech norms across borders? And how do we protect against the most censor-prone nation effectively setting global speech rules? These questions were …

Internet Of Infringing Things: The Effect Of Computer Interface Copyrights On Technology Standards, Charles Duan

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

You connect to the Internet via your Wi-Fi access point. You surf the Web using a browser and send emails through your email server. You probably use some USB peripherals-say a mouse, keyboard, or printer. Maybe you even watch cable or broadcast television.

Under current case law, each of those computer systems and devices may very well be copyright-infringing contraband. This is through no fault of your own-you need not be pirating music or streaming illegal movies to infringe a copyright. The infringement simply exists, hard-wired within each of those devices and many more that you use, a result of …

#Personaljurisdiction: A New Age Of Internet Contacts, Zoe Niesel

Indiana Law Journal

This Article explores the complicated relationship between minimum contacts and the modern internet. Part I traces the development of modern personal jurisdiction analyses in the areas of both specific and general jurisdiction. Interesting in this historical overview is the increased reliance on predictability, even as courts have recognized that advanced technologies and infrastructure have made the maintenance of lawsuits infinitely easier than in the days before International Shoe.7 Part II then explores the intersection between personal jurisdiction and the internet as well as the rise of the so-called Zippo “interactivity” test for jurisdiction in cases involving websites. Although Zippo has …

The Direct Purchaser Requirement In Clayton Act Private Litigation: The Case Of Apple Inc. V. Pepper , Konstantin G. Vertsman

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

More than fifty years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Hanover Shoe, Inc. v. United Shoe Machinery Corp. established the direct purchaser rule, the Supreme Court was provided with an opportunity in Apple Inc. v. Pepper to reevaluate and update the proximate cause standing requirement for litigation under § 4 of the Clayton Act. In the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision, the majority opinion established a rule that consumers who purchase directly from a monopolist satisfy the direct purchaser standing requirement notwithstanding the internal business structure of the monopolist. This interpretation of the direct purchaser rule, along with the recent reformulation …

Marketplace Of Ideas, Privacy, And The Digital Audience, Alexander Tsesis

Faculty Publications & Other Works

The availability of almost limitless sets of digital information has opened a vast marketplace of ideas. Information service providers like Facebook and Twitter provide users with an array of personal information about products, friends, acquaintances, and strangers. While this data enriches the lives of those who share content on the internet, it comes at the expense of privacy. Social media companies disseminate news, advertisements, and political messages, while also capitalizing on consumers' private shopping, surfing, and traveling habits. Companies like Cambridge Analytica, Amazon, and Apple rely on algorithmic programs to mash up and scrape enormous amounts of online and otherwise …

Forget Me, Forget Me Not: Elements Of Erasure To Determine The Sufficiency Of A Gdpr Article 17 Request, Haya Yaish

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

The data subject’s (or the individual to whom the data relates) right to erasure under the new EU’s data protection law is likely to cause tensions with the right to freedom of expression. Using Article 17(1)(d)-(e) of the General Data Protection Regulation as a nexus to trigger and apply the right to privacy in EU law to the right to erasure, this Note presents a balancing test of four factors that can be used to consistently determine whether individual cases that request a right to erasure for published material are entitled to privacy protections. The proposed balancing test “Elements of …

"Sheer Force Of Tweet:" Testing The Limits Of Executive Power On Twitter, Kristina T. Bodnar

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

President Donald Trump’s affinity for Twitter has raised novel issues of constitutional law, tested the norms for presidential etiquette, and opened up a dialogue about whether tweets are considered the actual directives of the President. This note explores four subject areas that the President has tweeted about: judicial legitimacy, executive orders, removal of appointees, and entering into armed conflicts. Then, these topics will be considered in terms of whether presidential speech on social media should be regulated to protect against the risks of posting on the Internet and to ensure the preservation of the principles of democracy embedded in the …

The Trouble With Tinker: An Examination Of Student Free Speech Rights In The Digital Age, Allison N. Sweeney

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

The boundaries of the schoolyard were once clearly delineated by the physical grounds of the school. In those days, it was relatively easy to determine what sort of student behavior fell within an educator’s purview, and what lay beyond the school’s control. Technological developments have all but erased these confines and extended the boundaries of the school environment somewhat infinitely, as the internet and social media allow students to interact seemingly everywhere and at all times. As these physical boundaries of the schoolyard have disappeared, so too has the certainty with which an educator might supervise a student’s behavior.

Because …

#Personaljurisdiction: A New Age Of Internet Contacts, Zoe Niesel

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Digitizing Brandenburg: Common Law Drift Toward A Causal Theory Of Imminence, J. Remy Green

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s Brandenburg v. Ohio test provides an exception to the First Amendment’s broad guarantee of freedom of speech. Where speech is (1) directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and (2) is likely to incite or produce such action, the First Amendment withdraws its promise of protection. Thus, where the “imminence” of lawless action cannot be shown, free speech cannot be restricted. Since Brandenburg, Courts have applied a test for imminence that turns on proximity in space and in time — that is, the test evaluates how spatiotemporally imminent lawless activity is. In this Article, I argue …

Control Over Contemporary Photography: A Tangle Of Copyright, Right Of Publicity, And The First Amendment, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

Professional photographers who make photographs of people negotiate a tense relationship between their own creative freedoms and the right of their subjects to control their images. This negotiation formally takes place over the terrain of copyright, right of publicity, and the First Amendment. Informally, photographers describe implied understandings and practice norms guiding their relationship with subjects, infrequently memorialized in short, boilerplate contractual releases. This short essay explores these formal and informal practices described by contemporary professional photographers. Although the evidence for this essay comes from professional photographic practice culled from interviews with contemporary photographers, the analysis of the evidence speaks …

Babashook: The Babadook, Gay Iconography And Internet Cultures, Renee Middlemost

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

Upon its 2014 release, Australian film The Babadook (Kent, 2014), gained critical acclaim worldwide. While the film gathered high praise, its domestic release was impeded by a lack of marketing support and ongoing debate about the quality of Australian horror films. By 2015, The Babadook was available to stream on Netflix in the United States, and one would imagine, to gradually fade from view. Yet a seemingly innocent categorization error on Netflix in 2016, which listed The Babadook as an LGBT interest film, resulted in a revival of the film's popularity as a cult film and the emergence of the …

Everything Old Is New Again: Does The '.Sucks' Gtld Change The Regulatory Paradigm In North America?, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

In 2012, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (“ICANN”) took the unprecedented step of opening up the generic Top Level Domain (“gTLD”) space for entities who wanted to run registries for any new alphanumeric string “to the right of the dot” in a domain name. After a number of years of vetting applications, the first round of new gTLDs was released in 2013, and those gTLDs began to come online shortly thereafter. One of the more contentious of these gTLDs was “.sucks” which came online in 2015. The original application for the “.sucks” registry was somewhat contentious with …

World War Web: Rethinking "Aiding And Abetting" In The Social Media Age, Rebecca J. Cambron

Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law

ISIS's use of social media presents a new challenge for counterterror efforts. The organization aims to recruit followers and incite violence through social media. Given that this is a new medium for terrorist organizations, social media companies have come under fire for indirectly providing ISIS with farreaching platforms to spread its content. The companies, as well as national governments and international entities, have attempted to respond to the threat posed by such content. These responses, however, have proven ineffective. This Note argues that to effectively respond to and combat the threat posed by terrorist speech, national governments should adopt a …

Coding For Cultural Competency: Expanding Access To Justice With Technology, Sherley Cruz

Scholarly Works

Innovations in legal technology are revolutionizing access to justice for individuals who previously had little or no ability to obtain legal assistance. This Article explores how the lack of culturally competent designs within legal technology negatively impacts diverse communities, thereby hindering the ability to expand access to justice. An examination of the underlying theories of access to justice and cultural competency illustrates why it is necessary for legal professionals and technology designers to incorporate culturally competent designs when developing legal technology. In light of ongoing changes in United States’ demographics, and the heightened need to provide access to justice given …

Poverty, Privacy, And Living Out Of Reach [Reviews], Wendy A. Bach

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Full Transparency: A Case Against The Collection Of Internet Information In Trump-Era American Immigration, Thomas P. Campbell

FIU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Legal Jurisdiction And Virtual Social Life, Paul Schiff Berman

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Social lives are increasingly unmoored from physical location. 21^st century developments in social media, virtual worlds, augmented reality, electronic financial transactions, drones, robotics, and artificial intelligence allow human beings to interact in more and more robust ways at a physical remove from their location. Meanwhile, the ubiquity of multinational corporations, global supply chains, and cloud-based data all mean that our lives are more likely to be affected by activity that is spatially distant. Virtual effects often replace direct territorial effects.

Three important consequences flow from this ubiquitous technology-enabled, data-driven virtual global societal activity. First, the territorial location of data …

From Innovation To Abuse: Does The Internet Still Need Section 230 Immunity?, Benjamin Volpe

Catholic University Law Review

In 1996, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act to allow the screening of offensive material from the internet, while preserving the continued development of the internet economy without burdensome regulation. However, for years, online intermediaries have successfully used the Act as a shield from liability when third parties use their online services to commit tortious or criminal acts. This Comment argues that a wholly-unregulated internet is no longer necessary to preserve the once-fledgling internet economy. After evaluating various approaches to intermediary liability, this Comment also argues that Congress should take a more comprehensive look at consumer protection online and establish …

Embedding Content Or Interring Copyright: Does The Internet Need The "Server Rule"?, Jane C. Ginsburg, Luke Ali Budiardjo

Faculty Scholarship

The “server rule” holds that online displays or performances of copyrighted content accomplished through “in-line” or “framing” hyperlinks do not trigger the exclusive rights of public display or performance unless the linker also possesses a copy of the underlying work. As a result, the rule shields a vast array of online activities from claims of direct copyright infringement, effectively exempting those activities from the reach of the Copyright Act. While the server rule has enjoyed relatively consistent adherence since its adoption in 2007, some courts have recently suggested a departure from that precedent, noting the doctrinal and statutory inconsistencies underlying …