Internet Law Commons^™

Warning! Tiered Internet Ahead: Expect Delays, Courtney Loyack

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

As the topic of net neutrality becomes increasingly polarized, the question becomes: Who should decide how consumers use the internet? Are usage determinations best left unregulated and to the discretion of massive corporations, or should usage be determined by regulations that aim to ensure an open and freely accessible internet? The answer to this question has far-reaching and deeply meaningful implications for the lives of every American.

The ways in which consumers communicate, access information, and participate in social media are all subject to change as the future of net neutrality regulation becomes uncertain. Part I of this Essay will …

Digital Colonialism: The 21st Century Scramble For Africa Through The Extraction And Control Of User Data And The Limitations Of Data Protection Laws, Danielle Coleman

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

As Western technology companies increasingly rely on user data globally, extensive data protection laws and regulations emerged to ensure ethical use of that data. These same protections, however, do not exist uniformly in the resource-rich, infrastructure-poor African countries, where Western tech seeks to establish its presence. These conditions provide an ideal landscape for digital colonialism.

Digital colonialism refers to a modern-day “Scramble for Africa” where largescale tech companies extract, analyze, and own user data for profit and market influence with nominal benefit to the data source. Under the guise of altruism, large scale tech companies can use their power and …

Gender Equality And The First Amendment: Foreword, Jeanmarie Fenrich, Benjamin C. Zipursky, Danielle Keats Citron

Fordham Law Review

Gender equality demands equal opportunity to speak and be heard. Yet, in recent years, the clash between equality and free speech in the context of gender has intensified—in the media, the workplace, college campuses, and the political arena, both online and offline. The internet has given rise to novel First Amendment issues that particularly affect women, such as nonconsensual pornography, online harassment, and online privacy. On November 1–2, 2018, the Fordham Law Review brought together scholars and practicing lawyers from around the nation to address many of the pressing challenges facing feminists and free speech advocates today. The Symposium was …

When Law Frees Us To Speak, Danielle Keats Citron, Jonathon W. Penney

Fordham Law Review

A central aim of online abuse is to silence victims. That effort is as regrettable as it is successful. In the face of cyberharassment and sexualprivacy invasions, women and marginalized groups retreat from online engagement. These documented chilling effects, however, are not inevitable. Beyond its deterrent function, the law has an equally important expressive role. In this Article, we highlight law’s capacity to shape social norms and behavior through education. We focus on a neglected dimension of law’s expressive role: its capacity to empower victims to express their truths and engage with others. Our argument is theoretical and empirical. We …

Sexual Privacy, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

Those who wish to control, expose, and damage the identities of individuals routinely do so by invading their privacy. People are secretly recorded in bedrooms and public bathrooms and “up their skirts.” Such images are used to coerce people into sharing nude photographs and filming sex acts under the threat of public disclosure. People’s nude images are posted online without permission. Machine-learning technology is used to create digitally manipulated “deep fake” sex videos that swap people’s faces into pornography.

Each of these abuses is an invasion of sexual privacy—the behaviors, expectations, and choices that manage access to and information about …

Search Engines And Internet Defamation: Of Publication And Legal Responsibility, Gary Kok Yew Chan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

When the Internet user keys a search term and clicks “enter”, a series of snippets, images and html links will appear typically running into several web pages. In the case of Autocomplete suggestions, the result appearing on the bar changes with each keystroke even before the user clicks “enter”. As a result, in the course of finding search results from the original search term, the user is constantly provided with suggestions of other search terms. The search results and Autocomplete suggestions may be defamatory of individuals and businesses by associating them with dishonest and improper activities or conduct. Should search …

Brief Of The R Street Institute As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Petitioner, Charles Duan

Amicus Briefs & Court Filings

It is a common but misleading premise of cases such as this one that the disappointed patent applicant has two options for judicial review: a 35 U.S.C. § 145 district court action and an appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 141. The applicant also has a non-judicial option: administrative remedies within the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

These administrative remedies add an important dimension to this case. The Court of Appeals adopted what it conceded was an atextual construction of § 145 expense recovery provision in order to ensure that § 145 actions were not cost-prohibitive to “small businesses and individual …

Of Facts And Falsehoods, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In a commentary, SMU Associate Professor of Law Eugene Tan shared his views on the proposed Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Bill (POFMB). He surmised that POFMB is “a necessary but insufficient tool” against the scourge of “fake news” and that it must be applied sensitively in order not to undermine but enhance Singaporeans’ resilience and bottom-up drive to fight deliberate harmful falsehoods.

Better Left Forgotten: An Argument Against Treating Some Social Media And Digital Assets As Inheritance In An Era Of Platform Power, Shelly Kreiczer-Levy, Ronit Donyets-Kedar

Brooklyn Law Review

Restraining technological platforms’ power has become one of the main concerns of our era. The control over cyberspace and data ownership are among the key issues addressed in the literature. Yet, the ongoing vigorous debate surrounding the inheritance of digital assets remains surprisingly oblivious of the platform’s involvement in shaping memory and continuity. Current legal scholarship and legislation ask whether social network profiles are inheritable property; they balance the user’s privacy and wishes against family members’ interests, without addressing or even considering the corporate power at play. This article argues that we are constantly asking the wrong questions. Instead of …

On The Clock, Best Bet To Draft Cyberdefensive Linemen: Federal Regulation Of Sports Betting From A Cybersecurity Perspective, William H. Williams

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

On May 14, 2018, Justice Alito delivered the majority opinion for the United States Supreme Court in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The Professional and Amateur Protection Act (PASPA), a twenty-six-year-old federal statute, was deemed unconstitutional; thus, this decision allows state legislatures to legalize sports betting within their borders. With many states independently legalizing sports gambling, the regulatory landscape throughout the country is becoming a patchwork of state statutes. Additionally, top tier sporting organizations heavily depend on data analytics to formulate game plan strategy, train efficiently, rehab player injuries, gauge team and player performance, etc. The popularity of …

Playing Fair: Youtube, Nintendo, And The Lost Balance Of Online Fair Use, Natalie Marfo

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

Over the past decade, YouTube saw an upsurge in the popularity of “Let’s Play” videos. While positive for YouTube, this uptick was not without controversy. Let’s Play videos use unlicensed copyrighted materials, frustrating copyright holders. YouTube attempted to curb such usages by demonetizing and removing thousands of Let’s Play videos. Let’s Play creators struck back, arguing that the fair use doctrine protects their works. An increasing number of powerful companies, like Nintendo, began exploiting the ambiguity of the fair use doctrine against the genre; forcing potentially legal works to request permission and payment for Let’s Play videos, without a determination …

The Nationalization Of The Dutch Owned Plantations In North Sumatra: To Whom The Communal Land Belong?, Edy Ikhsan

Indonesia Law Review

This article has been developed through an analysis of primary and secondary sources concerning the nationalization’s policy of the Dutch enterprises in Indonesia as had been conducted by Soekarno’s regime back in 1958. The impact of this said policy has been so much felt very strongly to these days, most especially on the ex-concessionary lands of the Dutch enterprises in North Sumatera. The flaws made by the Indonesian government in interpreting the terminology of Concession to the Cultivation Rights on Lands, in the said nationalization policy, have created various endless conflicts among central and regional governments, state-owned enterprises, the Sultanates …

General Data Protection Regulation (Gdpr): Prioritizing Resources, Jennifer Dumas

Seattle University Law Review

This Article will discuss and analyze the years of preparation for the GDPR and provide recommendations for dealing with the GDPR forevermore. It will assess whether the preparation and panic were worth it. In other words, was the time, expense, and distraction my peers and I expended and experienced over the past years proportionate to the requirements and impact of the GDPR? Further, was the high level of preparation and panic many legal departments in countless companies undertook and experienced appropriate now that we have had a chance to see the initial impact of the GDPR?

Privacy, Freedom, And Technology—Or “How Did We Get Into This Mess?”, Alex Alben

Seattle University Law Review

Can we live in a free society without personal privacy? The question is worth pondering, not only in light of the ongoing debate about government surveillance of private communications, but also because new technologies continue to erode the boundaries of our personal space. This Article examines our loss of freedom in a variety of disparate contexts, all connected by the thread of erosion of personal privacy. In the scenarios explored here, privacy reducing activities vary from government surveillance, personal stalking conducted by individuals, and profiling by data-driven corporations, to political actors manipulating social media platforms. In each case, new technologies …

Footprints: Privacy For Enterprises, Processors, And Custodians…Oh My!, Blair Witzel, Carrie Mount

Seattle University Law Review

Americans’ interest in privacy—as evidenced by increasing news coverage, online searches, and new legislation—has grown over the past decade. After the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), technologists and legal professionals have focused on primary collectors of data—known under various legal regimes as the “controller” or “custodian.” Thanks to advances in computing, many of these data collectors offload the processing of data to third parties providing data-related cloud services like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. In addition to the data they have already collected about the data subjects themselves, these companies now “hold” that data on behalf of …

The Gdpr: It Came, We Saw, But Did It Conquer?, Leila Javanshir

Seattle University Law Review

On February 1, 2019, the Seattle University Law Review held its annual symposium at the Seattle University School of Law. Each year, the Law Review hosts its symposium on a topic that is timely and meaningful. This year, privacy and data security professionals from around the globe gathered to discuss the current and future effects of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that was implemented on May 25, 2018. The articles and essays that follow this Foreword are the product of this year’s symposium.

Gdpr Compliance—It Takes A Village, Susy Mendoza

Seattle University Law Review

When the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect in May of 2018, many legal departments were confronted with the gravity of just how they were going to comply with such a wide-reaching law. If you have international customers (both direct to consumer or business to business), it is not hard to convince your general counsel that compliance with the GDPR is a must. You may even be able to get the chief technical officer (CTO) or chief operating officer (COO) onboard just by mentioning the steep fines—two to four percent of worldwide gross revenue. But how does the …

Requiem For Cyberspace: The Effect Of The European General Privacy Regulation On The Global Internet, Steven Tapia

Seattle University Law Review

The dream of a perpetual, limitless, non-dimensional space is an idea that has transfixed clergy, philosophers, and poets for ages. Whether it is called “heaven,” “the afterlife,” “nirvana,” or another linguistic stand-in, the dream of a dimension beyond the bounds of time, space, and the laws of nature seems as universal as any concept ever. From its initial development in the 1970s (as a military, academic, and governmental experiment in creating a wholly alternative means of communication capable of surviving catastrophic failures of any parts of the communications conduits) until essentially now, the Internet seemed to be the closest incarnate …

Confiding In Con Men: U.S. Privacy Law, The Gdpr, And Information Fiduciaries, Lindsey Barrett

Seattle University Law Review

In scope, ambition, and animating philosophy, U.S. privacy law and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation are almost diametric opposites. The GDPR’s ambitious individual rights, significant prohibitions, substantive enforcement regime, and broad applicability contrast vividly with a scattershot U.S. regime that generally prioritizes facilitating commerce over protecting individuals, and which has created perverse incentives for industry through anemic enforcement of the few meaningful limitations that do exist. A privacy law that characterizes data collectors as information fiduciaries could coalesce with the commercial focus of U.S. law, while emulating the GDPR’s laudable normative objectives and fortifying U.S. consumer privacy law with a …

Regulating The Gdpr: Perspectives From The United Kingdom, Hannah Mccausland

Seattle University Law Review

Hannah McCausland leads the international group at the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The ICO’s International Engagement functions as the gateway to other data protection and privacy authorities on international matters. She’s involved in the work of the EU European Data Protection Board advising the commissioner and the deputy commissioner on international positioning of the ICO, and she has played a key role over the past six years in the ICO’s strategy on navigating the EU’s data protection framework. Hannah has also played a major role at the global level and advancing the practical tools that data protection and privacy …