Internet Law Commons^™

Robotic Speakers And Human Listeners, Helen Norton

Publications

In their new book, Robotica, Ron Collins and David Skover assert that we protect speech not so much because of its value to speakers but instead because of its affirmative value to listeners. If we assume that the First Amendment is largely, if not entirely, about serving listeners’ interests—in other words, that it’s listeners all the way down—what would a listener-centered approach to robotic speech require? This short symposium essay briefly discusses the complicated and sometimes even dark side of robotic speech from a listener-centered perspective.

Four Principles For Digital Expression (You Won't Believe #3!), Danielle K. Citron, Neil Richards

Faculty Scholarship

At the dawn of the Internet’s emergence, the Supreme Court rhapsodized about its potential as a tool for free expression and political liberation. In ACLU v. Reno (1997), the Supreme Court adopted a bold vision of Internet expression to strike down a federal law - the Communications Decency Act - that restricted digital expression to forms that were merely “decent.” Far more than the printing press, the Court explained, the mid-90s Internet enabled anyone to become a town crier. Communication no longer required the permission of powerful entities. With a network connection, the powerless had as much luck reaching a …

Can Cyber Harassment Laws Encourage Online Speech?, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Do laws criminalizing online harassment and cyberbullying "chill" online speech? Critics often argue that they do. However, this article discusses findings from a new empirical legal study that suggests, counter-intuitively, that while such legal interventions likely have some dampening effect, they may also facilitate and encourage more speech, expression, and sharing by those who are most often the targets of online harassment: women. Relevant findings on this point from this first-of-its-kind study are set out and discussed along with their implications.

The “Sovereigns Of Cyberspace” And State Action: The First Amendment’S Application (Or Lack Thereof) To Third-Party Platforms, Jonathan Peters

Scholarly Works

Many scholars have commented that the state action doctrine forecloses use of the First Amendment to constrain the policies and practices of online service providers. But few have comprehensively studied this issue, and the seminal article exploring “[c]yberspace and the [s]tate [a]ction [d]ebate” is fifteen years old, published before the U.S. Supreme Court reformulated the federal approach to state action. It is important to give the state action doctrine regular scholarly attention, not least because it is increasingly clear that “the private sector has a shared responsibility to help safeguard free expression.” It is critical to understand whether the First …

To Show, Or Not To Show—That Was The Question: A Discussion Regarding The First Amendment Issues Implicated By The Sony Pictures Entertainment Cyberhack & The Interview Debacle, Chelsey Huso

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

No abstract provided.

Keeping Pace: The U.S. Supreme Court And Evolving Technology, Brian Thomas

Politics Summer Fellows

Contemporary mainstream discussions of the Supreme Court are often qualified with the warning that the nine justices are out of touch with everyday American life, especially when it comes to the newest and most popular technologies. For instance, during oral argument for City of Ontario v. Quon, a 2010 case that dealt with sexting on government-issued devices, Chief Justice John Roberts famously asked what the difference was “between email and a pager,” and Justice Antonin Scalia wondered if the “spicy little conversations” held via text message could be printed and distributed. While these comments have garnered a great deal of …

Cyberharassment And Workplace Law, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

From Google To Tolstoy Bot: Should The First Amendment Protect Speech Generated By Algorithms?, Margot Kaminski

Publications

No abstract provided.

Net Neutrality: Preparing For The Future, Jennifer Wong

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

No abstract provided.

An Intersystemic View Of Intellectual Property And Free Speech, Mark Bartholomew, John Tehranian

Journal Articles

Intellectual property regimes operate in the shadow of the First Amendment. By deeming a particular activity as infringing, the law of copyright, trademark, and the right of publicity all limit communication. As a result, judges and lawmakers must delicately balance intellectual property rights with expressive freedoms. Interestingly, each intellectual property regime strikes the balance between ownership rights and free speech in a dramatically different way. Despite a large volume of scholarship on intellectual property rights and free speech considerations, this Article represents the first systematic effort to detail, analyze, and explain the divergent evolution of expression-based defenses in copyright, trademark, …

Public Forum 2.1: Public Higher Education Institutions And Social Media, Robert H. Jerry Ii, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky

UF Law Faculty Publications

Like most of us, public colleges and universities increasingly are communicating via Facebook, Second Life, YouTube, Twitter and other social media. Unlike most of us, public colleges and universities are government actors, and their social media communications present complex administrative and First Amendment challenges. The authors of this article — one the dean of a major public university law school responsible for directing its social media strategies, the other a scholar of social media and the First Amendment — have combined their expertise to help public university officials address these challenges. To that end, this article first examines current and …

Liable For Your Lies: Misrepresentation Law As A Mechanism For Regulating Behavior On Social Networking Sites, Geelan Fahimy

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

All Those Like You: Identity Aggression And Student Speech, Ari Ezra Waldman

Articles & Chapters

Online and face-to-face harassment in schools requires a coordinated response from the school, parents, students, and government. In this Article, I address a particular subset of online and face-to-face harassment, or identity-based harassment. Identity-based aggressors highlight a quality intrinsic to someone’s personhood and demean it, deprive it of value, and use it as a weapon. They attack women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and other traditionally victimized groups. And, as such, they attack not only their particular victims but also their victims’ communities. Identity-based aggressors com- mit a constitutional evil not only because their behavior interferes with victims’ access to education, …

Incitement To Riot In The Age Of Flash Mobs, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

As people increasingly use social media to organize both protests and robberies, government will try to regulate these calls to action. With an eye to this intensifying dynamic, this Article reviews First Amendment jurisprudence on incitement and applies it to existing statutes on incitement to riot at a common law, state, and federal level. The article suggests that First Amendment jurisprudence has a particularly tortuous relationship with regulating speech directed to crowds. It examines current crowd psychology to suggest which crowd behavior, if any, should as a matter of policy be subject to regulation. It concludes that many existing incitement-to-riot …

The Future Of Cybertravel: Legal Implications Of The Evasion Of Geolocation, Marketa Trimble

Scholarly Works

Although the Internet is valued by many of its supporters particularly because it both defies and defeats physical borders, these important attributes are now being exposed to attempts by both governments and private entities to impose territorial limits through blocking or permitting access to content by Internet users based on their geographical location—a territorial partitioning of the Internet. One of these attempts, for example, is the recent Stop Online Piracy Act (“SOPA”) proposal in the United States. This article, as opposed to earlier literature on the topic discussing the possible virtues and methods of erecting borders in cyberspace, focuses on …

Anti-Cyber Bullying Statutes: Threat To Student Free Speech, John O. Hayward

Cleveland State Law Review

On October 17, 2006, Megan Meier, a thirteen-year-old girl in Dardenne Prairie, Missouri, who had been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and depression, committed suicide because of postings on MySpace, an Internet social networking site, saying she was a bad person whom everyone hated and the world would be better off without. As a result, the state revised its harassment and stalking statutes to prohibit using electronic means to knowingly "frighten, intimidate, or cause emotional distress to another person."' At the time of this writing, twenty-one states have passed similar legislation with others sure to follow. Many of these statutes …

Cohen V. Google, Inc., Eirik Cheverud

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Pornography As Pollution, John Copeland Nagle

Journal Articles

Pornography is often compared to pollution. But little effort has been made to consider what it means to describe pornography as a pollution problem, even as many legal scholars have concluded that the law has failed to control internet pornography. Opponents of pornography maintain passionate convictions about how sexually-explicit materials harm both those who are exposed to them and the broader cultural environment. Viewers of pornography may generally hold less fervent beliefs, but champions of free speech and of a free internet object to anti-pornography regulations with strong convictions of their own. The challenge is how to address the widespread …

Cyberspace Property Rights: Private Property Interests In The Context Of Internet Webpages, Taylor E. White

Proxy

No abstract provided.

The Networked Electorate: The Internet And The Quiet Democratic Revolution In Malaysia And Singapore, Hang Wu Tang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This paper is intended to be a contribution to the literature on claims of the democratising effect of the Internet. The paper begins by setting out the arguments and also critiques of claims of the democratising power of the Internet. In order to test the validity of these arguments, the author will undertake a comparative study of the impact of the Internet on recent general elections in Malaysia and Singapore. The study will demonstrate that in the case of Singapore, the Internet has merely exerted some pressure on the pre-existing laws and state-imposed norms governing free speech; in contrast, in …

Cybercrimes Vs. Cyberliberties, Nadine Strossen

Articles & Chapters

Cybercrimes vs. Cyberliberties, Chapter 8 in Internet Policy and Economics: Challenges and Perspectives 2nd ed. at 110-127 ( W.H. Lehr & L.M. Pupillo, eds. Springer, 2009).

China's Network Justice, Benjamin L. Liebman, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

China's Internet revolution has set off a furious debate in the West. Optimists from Thomas Friedman to Bill Clinton have predicted the crumbling of the Chinese Party-state ("Party-state"), while pessimists suggest even greater state control. But a far less discussed and researched subject is the effect of China's Internet revolution on its domestic institutions. This Article, the product of extensive interviews across China, asks a new and different question. What has China's Internet revolution meant for its legal system? What does cheaper, if not free, speech mean for Chinese judges?

The broader goal of this Article is to better understand …

Warring Ideologies For Regulating Military Blogs: A Cyberlaw Approach For Balancing Free Speech And Security In Cyberspace, Julia E. Mitchell

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Part I of this note provides an overview of the use of media during war. It also reviews case law relating to the military's limited right to freedom of speech under the First Amendment. Part II analyzes the problems of regulating milblogs in terms of societal costs and the technological challenges of regulating behavior on the Internet. This note argues that the military's "unexceptionalist" approach toward regulation, wherein it applies the traditional principles embodied in the UCMJ to milblog regulation, undermines its goal of maintaining operational security and impedes the free flow of ideas. Finally, Part II introduces an "exceptionalist" …

Can The Internet Be A Human Right?, Michael L. Best

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Human Rights and the Internet edited by Steven Hick, Edward F. Halpin, and Eric Hoskins. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. 276pp.

Proactive Legislation And The First Amendment, Stuart Minor Benjamin

Michigan Law Review

It is a commonplace that the world is changing rapidly, with whole sectors of the economy being transformed. New forms of communication, like the World Wide Web, e-mail, and satellite television, have risen from obscurity to ubiquity in less than a decade. The speed of these changes has led some to express concern about the ability of governments to respond. The fear is that governments cannot keep up with developments as they occur and thus get hopelessly behind. The solution, according to some, is for the government to act proactively - before a harm has arisen, so that the government …

Zoning Speech On The Internet: A Legal And Technical Model, Lawrence Lessig, Paul Resnick

Michigan Law Review

Speech, it is said, divides into three sorts - (1) speech that everyone has a right to (political speech, speech about public affairs); (2) speech that no one has a right to (obscene speech, child porn); and (3) speech that some have a right to but others do not (in the United States, Ginsberg speech, or speech that is "harmful to minors," to which adults have a right but kids do not). Speech-protective regimes, on this view, are those where category (1) speech predominates; speech-repressive regimes are those where categories (2) and (3) prevail. This divide has meaning for speech …

Sovereign Indignity? Values, Borders And The Internet: A Case Study, Eric Easton

All Faculty Scholarship

This article focuses on the publication ban issued by a Canadian court in a notorious murder trial, and the popular reaction to the publication ban, as a case study of the new global communications environment. Part I reconstructs the factual circumstances that provoked the ban, as well as the responses of the media, the legal establishment, and the public. Part II examines the ban itself, the constitutional challenge mounted by the media, and the landmark Dagenais decision. Part III reflects on the meaning of the entire episode for law, journalism, and national sovereignty.

The Dagenais decision demonstrates the continued independence …