Consumer Protection Law Commons^™

Inclusive And Implementable Legal Rules For E-Commerce: A Comparative Study Of Indonesia And Vietnam, Ngoc Nguyen Thi Bich, Phan Quoc Nguyen

Indonesia Law Review

Both Vietnam and Indonesia have large populations that promise major markets for e-commerce. The two nations record high internet coverage and large numbers of social media users. Recently, the countries have been trying to support e-commerce with new legal rules. In November 2019, Indonesia’s government introduced Government Regulation No. 80 of 2019 on Trading through Electronic Systems (GR 80, 2019). GR 80 requires e-commerce businesses to obtain business licenses, report taxes, and preserve consumer protections and rights. Similarly, Vietnam has issued a number of resolutions and guidelines since its Decree on E-Commerce in 2013 (Decree No. 52/2013/NĐ-CP). While these legal …

Easing The Burdens Of A Patchwork Approach To Data Privacy Regulation In Favor Of A Singular Comprehensive International Solution—The International Data Privacy Agreement, Scott Resnick

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

Data privacy has become one of the premier hot-button issues in today’s increasingly digital human experience. Legislatures around the globe have attempted to act swiftly in an effort to safeguard the highly coveted personal information of their citizens and combat misuse at the hands of international businesses operating with an online presence. Since the European Union’s enactment of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018, countries around the globe have been grappling with how best to replicate the EU’s leading data privacy regulation while providing the same or greater level of transparency into data collection practices. While a mere …

Warranty, Product Liability And Transaction Structure: The Problem Of Amazon, Edward J. Janger, Aaron D. Twerski

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

Amazon, and other internet sales platforms, have revolutionized the manner in which goods are purchased and sold. The obligations undertaken by Amazon in those sales are unclear, both as a matter of transparency, and as a matter of legal doctrine. Is Amazon a store? Is it a shipper? Is it a telephone? In various transactions Amazon can play some or all of these roles. Choosing the right metaphor has consequences. Amazon knows this and has done everything it can to deploy the metaphors selectively to its best legal and practical advantage, even when the chosen characterizations are inapt or even …

Door Shut And Ears Plugged: How Consumer Reporting Casts Identity Theft Victims Out Of Financial Society And How The Law Can Be Harmonized To Bring Them Back In, Ryan Bolger

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

Consumer Reporting Agencies (CRAs) are the gatekeepers to the American economy. As the chief informants for prospective lenders, landlords, and employers, they exert immense power over the day-to-day decisions of who gets what. Despite these high stakes, the CRAs run consumer reporting as an automated electronic process that causes a lot of reporting errors, disqualifying consumers from essential goods, services, and opportunities. This is painfully true in the context of identity theft, where perverse incentives pollute the integrity of consumer reporting, piling undue harm onto identity theft victims. The law provides a remedy for this problem, but circuit courts are …

The Modern Pay For Play Model: Laws That Protect Student-Athletes' Fundamental Right To Commercialze Their Names, Images, And Likeness, Paul A. Schwabe Jr.

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

In O’Bannon v. NCAA, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California entered a permanent injunction against the National Collegiate Athletic Association enjoining the collegiate sports governing body from enforcing limits on student-athlete compensation derived from the use of their name, images, and likenesses rights. The court concluded that NCAA rules unreasonably restrained trade in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, however, neither the court nor the NCAA laid out a framework for lawfully implementing these new economic rights to student-athletes. Since that ruling, only one state’s legislature, California, has attempted to pass legislation to prevent the …

Cyber-Insecurity: The Reasonableness Standard In Internet Of Things Device Regulation And Why Technical Standards Are Better Equipped To Combat Cybercrime, Chynna Rose Foucek

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

While the Internet of Things (IoT) has created an interconnected world via phones, laptops, and even household devices, it is not infallible. As cyber-attacks increase in frequency, affecting companies of all sizes and industries, IoT device manufacturers have become particularly vulnerable, due in large part to the fact that many companies fail to implement adequate cybersecurity protocols. Mass data breaches occur often. However, these companies are not held accountable due to the use of the reasonableness standard in existing cybersecurity legislation, which is flexible and malleable. In 2019, the California Legislature enacted a cybersecurity law specific to IoT device manufacturers. …

Consumers' Declining Power In The Fintech Auto Loan Market, Pamela Foohey

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

Automobiles have become part of America’s infrastructure. For most people, having access to a car is crucial to their livelihoods and they will take on significant amounts of debt to purchase vehicles. Auto debt is unlike any other consumer debt, both in its structure, which allows creditors to easily seize collateral, and in its lack of regulation. The unique and lucrative nature of auto debt has not gone unnoticed by lenders or by companies leveraging fintech to offer people new ways to purchase cars and car loans. This Article assesses the evolving marketplace for auto sales, leasing, and loans to …

Symposium: Consumer Welfare Market Structure And Political Power, Edward J. Janger

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

Two competing visions dominate the fields of antitrust and consumer protection: neo-liberal and progressive. The neo-classical approach is associated with Robert Bork and the Law and Economics Movement. The progressive strand is older, identified with Brandeis and early 20th Century social reform. As a matter of chronology the Brandeisian view dominated into the 1970s, but from 1980, until recently, the Borkian law and economics approach has been in ascendancy in Congress, the academy, and in the courts. Technological change and events in the broader economy have caused the politics and the academic focus to shift. The financial crisis of 2008-09 …

The Hunt For Loot: Proposed Solutions To More Effectively Regulate Addictive Gambling Mechanics In Video Games, Andrew Brewer

Journal of Law and Policy

Over the past decade, more and more video game developers have embraced “loot boxes” as a lucrative source of revenue. But recent concerns over the potential harms of loot boxes, particularly to children, have raised questions about their use and prompted attempts to regulate them throughout the world. This Note explores recent attempts—both foreign and domestic—to regulate loot boxes and proposes new solutions based on those strategies’ shortcomings. By carefully and competently defining terms and exceptions, and providing for more aggressive oversight of agency regulatory efforts, federally-crafted loot box legislation can more effectively protect children from predatory gambling mechanics in …

Consumer Credit In Canada: A Regulatory Patchwork, Micheline Gleixner

Dalhousie Law Journal

With unlimited access and consequent increased use of consumer credit in Canada and the federal government’s gradual abandonment of consumer credit regulation since Confederation, Provinces and Territories have progressively enacted provincial consumer protection legislation aiming to regulate the consumer credit industry and protect vulnerable consumers.

A review of current provincial and territorial legislative frameworks governing consumer credit reveals significant discrepancies and limitations. Given the expansion of the consumer credit industry and the inherent vulnerability of consumers, the article confirms the need and urgency of strengthening financial consumer protection and provides possible avenues of reform.

It is recommended that Parliament reassert …

All-Caps, Yonathan A. Arbel, Andrew Toler

Articles

A hallmark of consumer contracts is their use of long blocks of capitalized text. These "all-caps" clauses are meant to alert consumers to nonstandard, risky, or important aspects of the transaction that would otherwise be hidden in the fine print. Based on a belief in the power of all-caps, courts will often deny enforcement of many key terms-such as war­ranty disclaimers, liability releases, arbitration clauses, and automatic billing-unless they are presented in all-caps. This article is the first to empirically examine the effectiveness of all-caps. Using an experimental methodology, the article finds that all-caps fail to apprecia­bly improve consent. Moreover, …

Hacking Hipaa: "Best Practices" For Avoiding Oversight In The Sale Of Your Identifiable Medical Information, Riyad A. Omar

Journal of Law and Health

In light of the confusion invited by applying the label "de-identified" to information that can be used to identify patients, it is paramount that regulators, compliance professionals, patient advocates and the general public understand the significant differences between the standards applied by HIPAA and those applied by permissive "de-identification guidelines." This Article discusses those differences in detail. The discussion proceeds in four Parts. Part II (HIPAA’s Heartbeat: Why HIPAA Protects Identifiable Patient Information) examines Congress’s motivations for defining individually identifiable health information broadly, which included to stop the harms patients endured prior to 1996 arising from the commercial sale of …

Got Bounded Rationality And Political Gridlock? There's A Loan Disclosure Hack For That, Debra Pogrund Stark, Jessica M. Choplin, Andrew Pizor

Cleveland State Law Review

For decades, Congress has primarily relied upon the use of mandatory disclosure forms to protect consumers from entering into ill-advised loans by disclosing the terms of an offered loan before the borrower enters into it. This policy is not likely to change any time soon due to congressional gridlock. Frustratingly, despite improvements, consumers still have difficulties using these forms to obtain the key information and data they need to make wise decisions. These disclosures contain a great deal of information, and assume that consumers are capable of reading, understanding, and using all of it. Contrary to this assumption, research on …

Can David Really Beat Goliath? A Look Into The Anti-Competitive Restrictions Of Apple Inc. And Google, Llc, Emily Feeley

The University of Cincinnati Intellectual Property and Computer Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Symposium: The California Consumer Privacy Act, Margot Kaminski, Jacob Snow, Felix Wu, Justin Hughes

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review is pleased to publish the third “symposium discussion” series in which leading experts are invited to engage in an evening symposium on a new or emerging area of law. The subject of our second evening symposium was the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), a statute signed into state law by then- Governor Jerry Brown on June 28, 2018 and effective as of January 1, 2020.

As with most new law, there are many unsettled issues, disagreements about the likely impact of the law, and much to be developed as regulations are established and the …

Forging A Path Towards Meaningful Digital Privacy: Data Monetization And The Ccpa, Rebecca Harris

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) was passed in response to a number of newsworthy data breaches with widespread impacts, and which revealed how little digital privacy consumers actually have. Despite the large market for consumer data, individual consumers generally do not earn money when their personal data are sold. Further, consumers have very little control over who collects their data, what information is collected, and with whom it is shared. To place control back in the hands of the consumer, affirmative consent should be required to collect and sell consumer’s data, and consumers should have the ability to sell …

Data Of The Dead: A Proposal For Protecting Posthumous Data Privacy, Kate C. Ashley

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Fan Films And Fanworks In The Age Of Social Media: How Copyright Owners Are Relying On Private Ordering To Avoid Angering Fans, Kagen Despain

BYU Law Review

Fandoms active in creating “fanworks” are increasingly able to leverage social media to coordinate and respond to owners of large media franchises who attempt to limit the creation and distribution of fan films. The resulting friction between these groups can be more efficiently addressed through private ordering rather than through formal legal reform.

Unwaivable: Public Enforcement Claims And Mandatory Arbitration, Myriam E. Gilles, Gary Friedman

Articles

This essay, written for a conference on the “pathways and hurdles” that lie ahead in consumer litigation, is the first to examine the implications of California’s recent jurisprudence holding public enforcement claims unwaivable in standard-form contracts of adhesion, and the inevitable clash with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisional law interpreting the Federal Arbitration Act. With its rich history of rebuffing efforts to deprive citizens of public rights through private contract, California provides an ideal laboratory for exploring this escalating conflict.

The Tax Treatment Of Student Loan Discharge And Cancellation, John R. Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The standard view is that, absent an express exclusion in the tax code, cancellation of student debt is taxable. Under this view, any immediate debt relief through administrative action would generate a tax bill. More troubling, the millions of borrowers in Income-Driven Repayment could face a “tax bomb” because of their promised loan cancellation, potentially hitting borrowers with bills for $100,000 or more in the same year that the government tells them their loan obligations have ended. These perverse outcomes are, however, based on a misreading of the tax law. The standard tax treatment of debt cancellation does not work …