Communications Law Commons^™

Categorizing Wayne's World: The Public Forum Doctrine And Public Access Channels, Michael Molstad

Boston College Law Review

On February 9, 2018, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held, in Halleck v. Manhattan Community Access Corp., that a public access channel administered by the Manhattan Community Access Corporation and three of its employees was a public forum. In doing so, the court determined that a complaint against Manhattan Community Access Corporation and those three employees sufficiently alleged state action. The legal status of public access channels has been unsettled since 1996, when the Supreme Court explicitly chose not to decide whether public access channels were public forums in Denver Area Educational Telecommunications Consortium v ...

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 ...

Lowering Legal Barriers To Rpki Adoption, Christopher S. Yoo, David A. Wishnick

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

Across the Internet, mistaken and malicious routing announcements impose significant costs on users and network operators. To make routing announcements more reliable and secure, Internet coordination bodies have encouraged network operators to adopt the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (“RPKI”) framework. Despite this encouragement, RPKI’s adoption rates are low, especially in North America.

This report presents the results of a year-long investigation into the hypothesis—widespread within the network operator community—that legal issues pose barriers to RPKI adoption and are one cause of the disparities between North America and other regions of the world. On the basis of interviews ...

Narrowing The Digital Divide: A Better Broadband Universal Service Program, Daniel Lyons

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

Universal service has long been an integral component of American telecommunications policy. As more activities move online, it becomes increasingly important to narrow the digital divide by helping low-income Americans get online and by extending broadband networks into unserved areas.

Unfortunately, the Federal Communications Commission’s reforms are unlikely to help solve this problem. The Commission is repurposing an $8 billion telephone subsidy program to focus instead on broadband networks. But when pressed, the agency admits that it has no proof that the program meaningfully affected telephone adoption rates, and it offers little evidence that it will fare any better ...

Masthead

Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Lost In A Novelty Mug: U.S. Telecom, The Fcc, And Policy Resolution For Net Neutrality, Christopher Terry, Scott Memmel, Ashley Turacek

Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal

This paper traces the history of net neutrality and the judicial reviews of the Federal Communication Commission’s multiple attempts at regulation, including the agency’s 2006 guidelines overturned in Comcast v. FCC, the 2010 rules overturned in Verizon v. FCC, and the FCC’s reclassification of broadband in its 2015 net neutrality rules, as well as the contemporary battles over the agency’s decision in November of 2017 to repeal the 2015 rules. As the FCC continues to wrestle with net neutrality and open internet regulations, the agency engaged in a series of continuing delays to impede a potential ...

Harvey Of Hollywood: The Face That Launched A Thousand Stories, Sara Khorasani

Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal

In the fall of 2017, the world was shaken by allegations of sexual misconduct against one of Hollywood’s high-powered movie moguls. The Harvey Weinstein scandal exposed countless accounts of sexual harassment and abuse, along with the settlement agreements that had kept them covered for decades. Since then, social movements have helped knock Harvey off his Hollywood throne and shed light upon a major concern plaguing the entertainment industry. This paper seeks to address how to effectively change an industry that has long bred a systemic culture of sexual harassment and discrimination. Under the accepted norms of Hollywood, victims of ...

Mixed Messages: How The Free Press Has A Responsibility To We The People At The Marketplace Of Ideas, Addison O’Donnell

Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal

The Free Press makes possible a fair democracy. It exerts influence on our communities and our consciences, principally in the form of reporting facts through its account of events, endorsing certain viewpoints through editorials, and ultimately producing the “first rough draft of history.” How the public responds to the Free Press speaks to the historic and continued expectation that many different voices should present divergent messages and allow the people to decide which message is the truth. Risks taken by the Free Press in the name of truth enable the theory of our Constitution to endure by facilitating the unbridled ...

Youtube, K-Pop, And The Emergence Of Content Copycats, Sam Quach

Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal

YouTube is the internet’s largest and most recognized video streaming platform; the website has millions of daily active users from all over the world and hosts billions of videos. With so much content being hosted on the website, YouTube has developed basic protocol when it comes to copyright issues, including a standardized system for dealing with copyright infringement. But with such a large audience and technology constantly growing and changing, YouTube is constantly faced with new problems. Among content on YouTube, Korean entertainment and pop music (commonly referred to as K-Pop) has quickly become one of the largest markets ...

The Future Of Freedom Of Expression Online, Evelen Mary Aswad

Duke Law & Technology Review

Should social media companies ban Holocaust denial from their platforms? What about conspiracy theorists that spew hate? Does good corporate citizenship mean platforms should remove offensive speech or tolerate it? The content moderation rules that companies develop to govern speech on their platforms will have significant implications for the future of freedom of expression. Given that the prospects for compelling platforms to respect users’ free speech rights are bleak within the U.S. system, what can be done to protect this important right? In June 2018, the United Nations’ top expert for freedom of expression called on companies to align ...

Dialing It Back: Why Courts Should Rethink Students’ Privacy And Speech Rights As Cell Phone Communications Erode The ‘Schoolhouse Gate’, Nicholas J. Mcguire

Duke Law & Technology Review

The ubiquity of cell phones in today’s society has forced courts to change or dismiss established, but inapplicable analytical frameworks. Two such frameworks in the school setting are regulations of student speech and of student searches. This Article traces the constitutional jurisprudence of both First Amendment off-campus speech protection and Fourth Amendment search standards as applied to the school setting. It then analyzes how the Supreme Court’s ruling in Riley v. California complicates both areas. Finally, it proposes a pragmatic solution: by recognizing a categorical First Amendment exception for “substantial threats” against the school community, courts could accommodate ...

Collective Shout's Victory Against Sexpo: A Win For Children's Rights, Caitlin Roper

Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence

This report is an account of the legal battle between Australian grassroots campaigning movement Collective Shout and Sexpo, the annual sex industry exhibition. Sexpo brought a lawsuit against Collective Shout after their campaign against Sexpo’s promotion of live-streamed porn shows on public buses servicing school routes. In April 2018, Sexpo’s application was dismissed, with Sexpo ordered to pay Collective Shout’s legal costs.

You Can’T Say That!: Public Forum Doctrine And Viewpoint Discrimination In The Social Media Era, Micah Telegen

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The growing prevalence of privately-owned social media platforms is changing the way Americans and their governments communicate. This shift offers new opportunities, but also requires a reinterpretation of the First Amendment’s proscription of government limitations of speech. The public forum doctrine and its proscription of viewpoint discrimination seem particularly stretched by the digital revolution and the development of social media. In ongoing cases, litigants and courts have invoked the doctrine to limit the government’s ability to ‘block’ those who comment critically on government pages—much to the chagrin of those who note the private status of the companies ...

Forum Selling Abroad, Stefan Bechtold, Jens Frankenreiter, Daniel M. Klerman

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series

Judges decide cases. Do they also try to influence which cases they decide? Clearly plaintiffs “shop” for the most attractive forum, but do judges try to attract cases by “selling” their courts? Some American judges actively try to enlarge their influence by making their courts attractive to plaintiffs, a phenomenon known as “forum sell-ing.” This article shows that forum selling occurs outside the U.S. as well, focusing on Germany, a country that is often held up as the paragon of the civil law approach to adjudication. As in the U.S., German courts attract cases primarily through the pro-plaintiff ...

The Legacy Of Slavery, Cognitive Shortcuts, And Biased News: The Mass Media’S Vilification Of Black Males And The Resulting “Reasonableness” Of Excessive Force By Law Enforcement, Janyl Relling Smith

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

No abstract provided.

Fool Me Once: Regulating "Fake News" And Other Online Advertising, Abby Wood, Ann M. Ravel

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series

A lack of transparency for online political advertising has long been a problem in American political campaigns. Disinformation attacks that American voters have experienced since the 2016 campaign have made the need for regulatory action more pressing.

Platforms desire self-regulation and have only recently come around to supporting transparency regulations. While government must not regulate the content of political speech, it can, and should, force transparency into the process. We propose several interventions aimed at transparency. Most importantly, campaign finance regulators should require platforms to store and make available ads run on their platforms, as well as the audience at ...

"Distinctive Sounds": A Critique Of The Transformative Fair Use Test In Practice And The Need For A New Music Fair Use Exception, Kristin Bateman

Seattle University Law Review

The Constitution gives Congress the power “[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” resulting in our modern regime of patent, trademark, and copyright law. Over time, however, this artistic tradition of copying has collided with more modern concepts of intellectual property rights, especially copyright protections. The advent of the internet as well as state-of-the-art recording and mixing software has vastly increased opportunities to copy, remix, sample, parody, and otherwise alter the work of other artists, particularly musicians. More than twenty years after Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, transformative fair use has become the predominant test courts have used ...

Call Me, Beep Me, If Ya Wanna Reach Me -- Unless I Might Be Driving: An Analysis Of Sender Liability And Why Pennsylvania Should Not Hold Citizens Responsible For Car Accidents Caused By The Drivers They Text, Michaela Cronin

Villanova Law Review

No abstract provided.

Common Carriage’S Domain, Christopher S. Yoo

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

The judicial decision invalidating the Federal Communications Commission’s first Open Internet Order has led advocates to embrace common carriage as the legal basis for network neutrality. In so doing, network neutrality proponents have overlooked the lessons from the history and the academic literature on common carriage. This Essay distills these learnings into five factors that play a key role in promoting common carriage’s success: (1) commodity products, (2) simple interfaces, (3) stability and uniformity in the transmission technology, (4) deployment of the transmission network, and (5) stable demand and market shares. Applying this framework to the Internet suggests ...

Curtailing Online Service Provider Immunity From Liability: An Advocacy For The Entension Of Roommates.Com, Corey Patton

Seattle University Law Review

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) was enacted following the controversial decision in Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Servs. Co., where an interactive computer service provider was held liable for a libelous message posted by a user on one of its financial message boards. The court determined that the service provider was a “publisher” of the libelous message for the purposes of state law because it had engaged in screening and moderating of other objectionable posts on its message boards but failed to remove the libelous message in question. Because the service provider voluntarily self-policed some of the ...