Computer Law Commons^™

Form And Substance In Cyberspace, A. Michael Froomkin

Articles

In this Response to the preceding article by Joe Sims and Cynthia Bauerly, A. Michael Froomkin defends his earlier critique of ICANN. This Response first summarizes the arguments in Wrong Turn In Cyberspace, which explained why ICANN lacks procedural and substantive legitimacy. This Response focuses on how the U.S. government continues to assert control over the domain name system, and how this control violates the APA, the nondelegation doctrine as articulated by the Supreme Court in Carter Coal, and public policy. Professor Froomkin then proposes that ICANN's role be more narrowly focused away from policy making towards true …

Default Rules In Sales And The Myth Of Contracting Out, James J. White

Articles

In this article, I trace the dispute in the courts and before the ALI and NCCUSL over the proper contract formation and interpretation default rules. In Part II, I consider the Gateway litigation. In Part III, I deal with UCITA and the revision to Article 2. In Part IV, I consider the merits of the competing default rules.

De-Bugging Open Source Software Licensing, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

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Home computer users and businesses often rely on software developed by unconventional programmers known as "hackers." Hackers claim that the code they develop is superior in quality to the code developed by commercial software firms because hackers freely share the code they develop. This code sharing enables a multitude of programmers from around the world to rapidly find and fix bugs. The legal mechanism that enables hackers to deploy this worldwide team of de-buggers is a license agreement or, to be more precise,an assortment of license agreements known as "open source" licenses.

Although open source software developers may regularly fix …

Legal Protection For Software: Still A Work In Progress, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

Articles

Software began as geekware-something written by programmers for programmers. Now, software is a business and consumer staple. Cryptic character-based user interfaces have given way to friendly graphical ones; multi-media is everywhere; people own multiple computers of varying sizes; computers are connected to one another across the globe; email and instant electronic messages have replaced letters and telephone calls for many people.

The issue of whether the law should protect software seems quaint to us now. Over the past twenty-five years, legislatures and courts have concluded that copyright, patent, trade secret, trademark, and contract law all can be used to protect …

Tax Competition And E-Commerce, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

In the last four years, there has been increasing concern by developed countries about the potential erosion of the corporate income tax base by "harmful tax competition" (in the European Union since 1997, in the OECD since 1998). However, the data on tax competition available to date present a mixed and somewhat puzzling picture. On the one hand, there is considerable evidence that effective corporate income tax rates in many countries have been declining, and that the worldwide effective tax rates on multinational enterprises (MNEs) have been going down as well. On the other hand, macroeconomic data from developed countries …

Should It Be A Free For All? The Challenge Of Extending Trade Dress Protection To The Look And Feel Of Web Sites, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

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In the e-commerce world, a company's web site becomes the primary communication center with the customer. The web site is where the company displays products, presents marketing materials, and provides sales and post-sales support. Increasingly, companies are spending valuable resources to build and maintain their web sites. With the rapid change in web technology, many web sites now feature more than just ordinary text. Color, clipart, graphics, designs, animations, and sounds are now part of the overall appearance of web sites. Yet copying an image from a web site is just one click away. What protection is available to the …

Blame It On The Cybersquatters: How Congress Partially Ends The Circus Among The Circuits With The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act?, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

Congress blamed the cybersquatters for the need to pass another trademark cyberlaw. Congress enacted the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (“ACPA”) on November 29, 1999. The ACPA aimed to protect consumers and businesses, to promote the growth of electronic commerce, and to provide clarity in the law for trademark owners by prohibiting cybersquatting activities on the Internet. Prior to the enactment of the ACPA, the Federal Trademark Dilution Act (“FTDA”), which was passed by Congress in 1995 and became effective on January 16, 1996, was hailed as a powerful tool to combat cybersquatters on the Internet. That presumed powerful tool turned …

The Constitution And Encryption Regulation: Do We Need A "New Privacy"?, A. Michael Froomkin

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No abstract provided.

How Copyleft Uses License Rights To Succeed In The Open Source Software Revolution And The Implications For Article 2b, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

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The computer industry moves from one “next great thing” to the next “next great thing” with amazing speed. Graphical user interface, object-oriented programming, client-server computing, multimedia software, Java applets, the network computer, and the Internet have all been hailed as technological breakthroughs at one time or another. Some of these promising developments fizzle, some evolve and succeed slowly, and some revolutionize the industry overnight.

Led by a group of software developers known as “hackers,” the latest “next great thing” is “open source” software. The word “source” refers to software in source code form. Source code is the collection of instructions …

Article 2b As Legal Software For Electronic Contracting-Operating System Or Trojan Horse?, A. Michael Froomkin

Articles

The proposed draft of Article 2B of the Uniform Commercial Code can be thought of as akin to a complex computer software suite which seeks to dominate a market by offering all things to all people. The author suggests, however, that Article 2B's electronic contracting rules interoperate poorly with existing digital signature laws, and with some forms of electronic commerce. The author also questions whether Article 2B is the proper means to enact controversial rules that ordinarily would make consumers liable for fraudulent uses of their digital signatures by third parties. After considering Article 2B's potential interaction with existing digital …

Some Examples Of Using Legal Relations Language In The Legal Domain: Applied Deontic Logic, Layman E. Allen

Articles

The fundamental concept of the LEGAL RELATIONS Language (LRL) is the recursively-defined notion of LEGAL RELATION (LR). As LR is defined here, there is an infinite number of different LEGAL RELATIONS, and LRL is a language for precisely and completely describing each of those infinite number of dfferent LEGAL RELATIONS. With its robust collection of dfferent names, one for each of the different LEGAL RELATIONS, LRL provides adequate vocabulary for (1) describing every possible legal state of affairs, (2) accounting for every possible change from one legal state of affairs to another, (3) representing every possible legal rule, and (4) …

The Implied Warranty Of Merchantability In Software Contracts: A Warranty No One Dares To Give And How To Change That, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

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A disclaimer of ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITING THE IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY, greets virtually everyone who prepares to use a computer software product. Software publishers disclaim the implied warranty of merchantability because they do not know what they might be promising if they give it. Though the disclaimer is routine, software publishers have little interest in needlessly eroding confidence in the quality of their products by conspicuously disclaiming a warranty with which their products may well comply. Disclaimers feed suspicion, voiced by industry critics, that software publishers care little about software quality or standing behind their products. Nonetheless, …

Flood Control On The Information Ocean: Living With Anonymity, Digital Cash, And Distributed Databases, A. Michael Froomkin

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No abstract provided.

The Essential Role Of Trusted Third Parties In Electronic Commerce, A. Michael Froomkin

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No abstract provided.

It Came From Planet Clipper: The Battle Over Cryptographic Key "Escrow", A. Michael Froomkin

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No abstract provided.

A Brief Defense Of Mass Market Software License Agreements, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

Articles

In the rapidly changing world of personal computer software, the end user license agreement ("EULA") has endured. The EULA is a familiar component of most personal computer software transactions. Many commentators, however, have maligned the practice of standard form software licensing. A survey of the literature on the subject might lead one to conclude that there are only critics--and no proponents--of EULAs.

Despite the din of criticism, EULAs continue to be widely usedby almost every mass-market software publisher, even though the cost of doing so is significant. This Article explains the value of EULAs for both software publishers and users, …

Performer's Rights And Digital Sampling Under U.S. And Japanese Law, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

A year or two ago, one of my copyright students called to my attention a problem that seemed to him to pose unique difficulties for the copyright statute. The problem arises because of a technology called digital sampling.' Digital sampling is a new threat to performers' rights that has grown out of the combination of digital recording technology with music synthesizer technology. This threat is a very recent one. Indeed, the digital sampling problem is so new that copyright lawyers haven't yet figured out how to think about it.

One Use Of Computerized Instructional Gaming In Legal Education: To Better Understand The Rich Logical Structure Of Legal Rules And Improve Legal Writing, Layman E. Allen, Charles S. Saxon

Articles

This article describes an innovation in legal education and speculates about its importance and effectiveness as an educational tool. The speculations about its potential use, however, are ones that each legal educator will be able to test individually to determine the effectiveness of this use of microcomputers to improve legal education. The computer software that permits the innovation to be used will be available to interested persons by the time that this article is published.

The Need For Clear Structure In 'Plain Language' Legal Drafting, Layman E. Allen, C. Rudy Engholm

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Language is not simple. To pretend otherwise is to mislead. In practice the aspect that is handled most ineptly in written legal materials is the structure. The focus of this article is upon structure and how to improve it. At the outset, let one thing be absolutely clear. In seeking to achieve clarity of expression, those who have no more to recommend than short sentences, simple words, and readability formulas are offering a cracker in circumstances where a full gourmet feast is gleaming in the chef's eye for those with the wit but to ask for the menu. To practice …

Normalized Legal Drafting And The Query Method, Layman E. Allen, C. Rudy Engholm

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Normalized legal drafting is a mode of expressing ideas in statutes, regulations, contracts, and other legal documents in such a way that the syntax that relates the constituent propositions is simplified and standardized. This "normalization" results in documents that are easier to understand in the dual sense that they can be read faster and more accurately than corresponding documents that are not normalized. The query method is a technique for familiarizing learners with normalized drafting and providing practice in some of the easier aspects of doing it.

Formalizing Hohfeldian Analysis To Clarify The Multiple Senses Of 'Legal Right': A Powerful Lens For The Electronic Age, Layman E. Allen

Articles

Careful communication is frequently of central importance in law. The language used to communicate even with oneself in private thought profoundly influences the quality of that effort; but when one attempts to transmit an idea to another, language assumes even greater significance because of the possibilities for enormously distorting the idea. Word skill is to be prized.

A Language-Normalization Approach To Information Retrieval In Law, Layman E. Allen

Articles

An information retrieval system (as distinguished from a document retrieval system) is described for handling statute-oriented legal literature. The Normalized Sentence-Index Matrix (N-SIM) system suggested differs from more traditional retrieval systems for legal literature in three respects: (1) the categories used for classification are normalized versions of sentences from statutes, regulations, treaties, constitutions, case opinions, legal treatises, law review articles, and other documents in legal literature, (2) the classification system is hierarchial and open-ended to evolve with the literature through time, and (3) the organization of the file facilitates some analysis of the literature by computer. A sentence is expressed …