Communications Law Commons^™

The Federal Communications Commission And The Nsa Call Database: The Duty To Investigate, Alan J. Chang

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

In May of 2006, news broke out across the United States that the National Security Agency had compiled a call record database that consisted of numerous American consumers' private phone records. The NSA apparently obtained this data directly from four of the nation's largest phone providers at the time: AT&T, BellSouth, Verizon, and SBC. Although Congress called for an FCC investigation as to whether or not these phone companies broke the law, the Commission ultimately refused to involve itself in the matter despite the potentially immense breach of consumer privacy involved. Based on the minimal precedent to have covered this …

The Taming Of The Internet: A New Approach Third-Party Internet Defamation, Amanda Groover Hyland

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

This article examines the liability of interactive Internet forum operators for defamatory statements written by third parties. It discusses Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and how the courts have applied it to third-party Internet defamation. The article concludes that the courts' various approaches fail to adequately protect the various interests involved, as immunizing distributors fails to adequately protect defamation victims, and notice-based liability fails to adequately protect free expression on the web. Policy challenges and the constitutional foundations of libel law should be jointly considered to create a new test to evaluate liability for third-party libel on the …

Get Ready Cause Here They Come: A Look At Problems On The Horizon For Authorship And Termination Rights In Sound Recordings, Abbott Marie Jones

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

Record companies have long included language in standard recording contracts declaring all sound recordings made by the artist works made for hire. Contractual provisions alone, however, will not be enough to confer work-for-hire status on sound recordings. Thus, record companies also require that artists assign some or all of their copyrights in the recordings to the record company. Beginning in 2013, authors of sound recordings will have the opportunity to exercise their right to terminate and renegotiate those assignments, their bargaining power increased by years of success in the music industry. Whether sound recordings will in fact be considered works …

The Four Eras Of Fcc Public Interest Regulation, Lili Levi

Articles

No abstract provided.

Network Neutrality And The False Promise Of Zero-Price Regulation, C. Scott Hemphill

Center for Contract and Economic Organization

This Article examines zero-price regulation, the major distinguishing feature of many modern "network neutrality" proposals. A zero-price rule prohibits a broadband Internet access provider from charging an application or content provider (collectively, "content provider") to send information to consumers. The Article differentiates two access provider strategies thought to justify a zero-price rule. Exclusion is anticompetitive behavior that harms a content provider to favor its rival. Extraction is a toll imposed upon content providers to raise revenue. Neither strategy raises policy concerns that justify implementation of a broad zero-price rule. First, there is no economic exclusion argument that justifies the zero-price …

Hidden Costs Of The Wireless Broadband Lifestyle: Comparing Consumer Protections In The United States, Canada, And The European Union, Renee Dopplick

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

Spurred by relatively inexpensive and widely available retail equipment and increased residential Internet penetration, consumer demand for more wireless broadband options continues at a rapid rate. Now, with consumers increasingly looking for mobile Internet interconnectivity over greater distances and with greater flexibility, technology companies are pushing the next generation of wireless broadband technologies with the promise of freeing consumers from location-based Internet access. These newer technologies can provide robust video and audio capabilities, such as digital television, on-demand video, and VoIP on a variety of digital devices. Yet, the rise of wireless

broadband networks and the roll-out of new technologies …

Telemarketers Gone Mobile: The Telephone Consumer Protection Act Of 1991 And Unsolicited Commercial Text Messages, J. Wesley Harned

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Bridging The Digital Divide: Improving Broadband Access For Rural Americans, Brian Witkowski

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Property Rights In Spectrum: A Reply To Hazlett, Philip J. Weiser, Dale N. Hatfield

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Google Dilemma, James Grimmelmann

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Federal Regulation Of Fios And Lightspeed: A Tale Of Two Jurisdictional Dilemmas, Michael Botein

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Privacy, Visibility, Transparency, And Exposure, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay considers the relationship between privacy and visibility in the networked information age. Visibility is an important determinant of harm to privacy, but a persistent tendency to conceptualize privacy harms and expectations in terms of visibility has created two problems. First, focusing on visibility diminishes the salience and obscures the operation of nonvisual mechanisms designed to render individual identity, behavior, and preferences transparent to third parties. The metaphoric mapping to visibility suggests that surveillance is simply passive observation, rather than the active production of categories, narratives, and, norms. Second, even a broader conception of privacy harms as a function …

Offensive Political Speech From The 1970s To 2008: A Broadcaster’S Moral Choice, Lavonda N. Reed-Huff

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Law And Values - Version '08 (Not Necessarily And Upgrade), Nadine Strossen

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Taking Denial Seriously: Genocide Denial And Freedom Of Speech In French Law, Sévane Garibian

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

The French National Assembly's adoption of a bill penalizing the denial of the Armenian genocide (October 12, 2006), later followed by the German plan to outlaw genocide denial throughout European Union, stoked the vigorous French debate on the connection between genocide denial and law and, more generally, between history and law. The main criticism expressed by the detractors of laws against negationism - in particular historians - is the following: penalization of denial constitutes a violation of freedom of expression and, as such, represents a threat to democracy.

Rethinking Sharing Licenses For The Entertainment Media, Eric E. Johnson

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Lobbying Is An Honorable Profession: The Right To Petition And The Competition To Be Right, Nick Allard

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Paparazzi/Blogger Face-Off: Opportunity Knocking For A Fair Use Limit?, Eaton O'Neill

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Defining Expeditious: Uncharted Territory Of The Dmca Safe Harbor Provision, Debra Weinstein

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Squeezing The Juice: The Failed Attempt To Acquire O.J. Simpson's Right Of Publicity, And Why It Should Have Succeeded, Tal Ganani

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Harmless Constitutional Error And The Institutional Significance Of The Jury, Roger Fairfax

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Appellate harmless error review, an early twentieth-century innovation prompted by concerns of efficiency and finality, had been confined to nonconstitutional trial errors until forty years ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court extended the harmless error rule to trial errors of constitutional proportion. Even as criminal procedural protections were expanded in the latter half of the twentieth century, the harmless error rule operated to dilute the effect of many of these constitutional guarantees-the Sixth Amendment right to jury trial being no exception. However, while a tradeoff between important process values and the Constitution's protection of individual rights is inherent in the …

Spectrum Policy Reform And The Next Frontier Of Property Rights, Philip J. Weiser, Dale N. Hatfield

Publications

The scarcity of wireless spectrum reflects a costly failure of regulation. In practice, large swaths of spectrum are vastly underused or used for low value activities, but the regulatory system prevents innovative users from gaining access to such spectrum through marketplace transactions. In calling for the propertyzing of swaths of spectrum as a replacement for the current command-and-control system, many scholars have wrongfully assumed the simplicity of how such a regime would work in practice. In short, many scholars suggest that spectrum property rights can easily borrow key principles from trespass law, reasoning that since property rights work well for …

Avalanche Or Undue Alarm? An Empirical Study Of Subpoenas Received By The News Media, Ronnell Andersen Jones

Faculty Scholarship

For more than thirty years, proponents and opponents of a federal reporter’s shield law have debated the necessity of a privilege for members of the news media and have disagreed sharply about the frequency with which subpoenas are issued to the press. Most recently, in the wake of several high-profile contempt cases, proponents have pointed to a perceived “avalanche” of subpoenas, while opponents have contended that the receipt of subpoenas by reporters remains very rare. This article summarizes the results of an empirical study on the question. The study gathered data on subpoenas received by daily newspapers and network-affiliated television …

The Future Of 9-1-1: New Technologies And The Need For Reform, Philip J. Weiser, Dale Hatfield, Brad Bernthal

Publications

Our nation's 9-1-1 system's success to date belies the fact that its core premises will not continue to serve it effectively and it has come to a critical juncture. In particular, the balkanized nature of 9-1-1 operations that differ across jurisdictions and are supported by Byzantine funding mechanisms obscure a simple but profound development: our nation's emergency system is not keeping up with or taking advantage of technological change. Because the system continues to work and policymakers largely do not appreciate the system's technological limitations, decision makers not only fail to focus on this challenge but instead are all too …

Reexamining The Legacy Of Dual Regulation: Reforming Dual Merger Review By The Doj And The Fcc, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

Most debates over the structure of merger review in the telecommunications industry focus on the criticism that the role of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is entirely redundant in light of the review conducted by the antitrust agencies. The FCC's lack of a consistently applied standard only reinforces such criticisms. There are, however, cases where the FCC's review of a merger - and imposition of conditions that complement the existing regulatory regime - enable the antitrust agencies to clear mergers that would otherwise pose potential objections.

The central challenge for competition policy merger review is to structure the analysis of …

The Next Frontier For Network Neutrality, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

The challenge for policymakers evaluating calls to institute some form of network neutrality regulation is to bring reasoned analysis to bear on a topic that continues to generate more heat than light and that many telecommunications companies appear to believe will just fade away. Over the fall of 2007, the hopes of broadband providers that broadband networks could escape any form of regulatory oversight were dealt a blow when it was revealed that Comcast had degraded the experience of some users of Bittorent (a peer-to-peer application) and engaged in an undisclosed form of network management. This incident, as well as …

On Communication, John Greenman

Michigan Law Review

Everybody knows that communication is important, but nobody knows how to define it. The best scholars refer to it. Free-speech law protects it. But no one-no scholar or judge-has successfully captured it. Few have even tried. This is the first article to define communication under the law. In it, I explain why some activities-music, abstract painting, and parading-are considered communicative under the First Amendment, while others-sex, drugs, and subliminal advertising-are not. I argue that the existing theories of communication, which hold that communicative behaviors are expressive or convey ideas, fail to explain what is going on in free-speech cases. Instead, …

First Amendment Decisions From The October 2006 Term, Erwin Chemerinsky, Marci A. Hamilton

Articles

No abstract provided.

Homes With Tails: What If You Could Own Your Internet Connection?, Tim Wu, Derek Slater

Faculty Scholarship

America's communications infrastructure is stuck at a copper wall. For the vast majority of homes, copper wires remain the principal means of getting broadband services. The deployment of fiber optic connections to the home would enable exponentially faster connections, and few dispute that upgrading to more robust infrastructure is essential to America's economic growth. However, the costs of such an upgrade are daunting for private sector firms and even for governments. These facts add up to a public policy challenge.

Our intuition is that an innovative model holds unrealized promise: household investments in fiber. Consumers may one day purchase and …

Zoning The Internet: A New Approach To Protecting Children Online, Cheryl B. Preston

BYU Law Review

This Article considers how Internet architecture can be harnessed to create an online environment where government regulation of material harmful to minors can be effective but not unreasonably burdensome. It proposes a solution that engages technology in refocusing the point of regulation, thereby reducing the burden on speech and increasing the ability to achieve constitutionally recognized governmental objectives. This Article briefly examines failed congressional attempts to restrict children's access to sexually explicit content online, and then introduces the Internet Community Ports Concept, which relies on channeling technology to divide kinds of content among various Internet ports. After briefly outlining the …