Computer Law Commons^™

Licensing As Digital Rights Management, From The Advent Of The Web To The Ipad, Reuven Ashtar

Reuven Ashtar

This Article deals with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provision, Section 1201, and its relationship to licensing. It argues that not all digital locks and contractual notices qualify for legal protection under Section 1201, and attributes the courts’ indiscriminate protection of all Digital Rights Management (DRM) measures to the law’s incoherent formulation. The Article proposes a pair of filters that would enable courts to distinguish between those DRM measures that qualify for protection under Section 1201, and those that do not. The filters are shown to align with legislative intent and copyright precedent, as well as the approaches recently …

An Interpretive Framework For Narrower Immunity Under Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act, Gregory M. Dickinson

Gregory M Dickinson

Almost all courts to interpret Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act have construed its ambiguously worded immunity provision broadly, shielding Internet intermediaries from tort liability so long as they are not the literal authors of offensive content. Although this broad interpretation effects the basic goals of the statute, it ignores several serious textual difficulties and mistakenly extends protection too far by immunizing even direct participants in tortious conduct.

This analysis, which examines the text and history of Section 230 in light of two strains of pre-Internet vicarious liability defamation doctrine, concludes that the immunity provision of Section 230, though …