Internet Law Commons^™

Gmonopoly: Does Search Bias Warrant Antitrust Or Regulatory Intervention?, Andrew Langford

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Hackback: Permitting Retaliatory Hacking By Non-State Actors As Proportionate Countermeasures To Transboundary Cyberharm, Jan E. Messerschmidt

National Security Law Program

Cyberespionage has received even greater attention in the wake of reports of persistent and brazen cyberexploitation of U.S. and Canadian firms by the Chinese military. But the recent disclosures about NSA surveillance programs have made clear that a national program of cyberdefense of private firms' intellectual property is politically infeasible. Following the lead

of companies like Google, private corporations may increasingly resort to the use of self-defense, hacking back against cross-border incursions on the Internet. Most scholarship, however, has surprisingly viewed such actions as outside the ambit of international law. This Note provides a novel account of how international law …

Access Denied: The "Facebook Law" And Illinois' Evolving Workplace Protections, Steven A. Montalto

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Local Rules, Standing Orders, And Model Protocols: Where The Rubber Meets The (E-Discovery) Road, Thomas Y. Allman

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

[District Courts], impatient with the failure of the national system to solve pressing, indeed urgent, procedural problems, utilize local rules in an effort to shape pragmatic solutions . . . . [as] one route to procedural change.

Social Media Evidence In Government Investigations And Criminal Proceedings: A Frontier Of New Legal Issues, Justin P. Murphy, Adrian Fontecilla

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

As the newest pillar of communication in today’s society, social media is revolutionizing how the world does business, discovers and shares news, and instantly engages with friends and family. Not surprisingly, because social media factors into the majority of cases in some respect, this exploding medium significantly affects government investigations and criminal litigation. Social media evidence includes, among other things, photographs, status updates, a person’s location at a certain time, and direct communications to or from a defendant’s social media account. This Article will examine the importance of social media in government investigations and criminal litigation, including access to and …

E-Discovery As Quantum Law: Clash Of Cultures-What The Future Portends, Michael Yager

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

Early in the twentieth century, the phenomenon that is the “quantum” stormed the fortress of classical physics, causing Albert Einstein, one of science's greatest thinkers, to opine, “[i]t was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built.” The theoretical laws associated with looking at reality on the quantum level violently collided with those related to looking at the same reality on the macro level. The application of quantum theory to the mathematically pure and proven classical laws of physics introduced a cultural clash …

Fighting Cybercrime After United States V. Jones, David C. Gray, Danielle Keats Citron, Liz Clark Rinehart

Faculty Scholarship

In a landmark non-decision last term, five Justices of the United States Supreme Court would have held that citizens possess a Fourth Amendment right to expect that certain quantities of information about them will remain private, even if they have no such expectations with respect to any of the information or data constituting that whole. This quantitative approach to evaluating and protecting Fourth Amendment rights is certainly novel and raises serious conceptual, doctrinal, and practical challenges. In other works, we have met these challenges by engaging in a careful analysis of this “mosaic theory” and by proposing that courts focus …

Nato, Cyber Defense, And International Law, David P. Fidler, Richard Pregent, Alex Vandurme

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Cybersecurity threats pose challenges to individuals, corporations, states, and intergovernmental organizations. The emergence of these threats also presents international cooperation on security with difficult tasks. This essay analyzes how cybersecurity threats affect the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which is arguably the most important collective defense alliance in the world.1 NATO has responded to the cyber threat in policy and operational terms (Part I), but approaches and shifts in cybersecurity policies create problems for NATO— problems that NATO principles, practices, and politics exacerbate in ways that will force NATO to address cyber threats more aggressively than it has done so …

What Alex Kozinski And The Investigation Of Earl Bradley Teach About Searching And Seizing Computers And The Dangers Of Inevitable Discovery, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles

This paper tells two stories. One concerns the investigation of a Delaware physician named Earl B. Bradley that resulted in a conviction and sentence of fourteen consecutive life terms for the sexual abuse of children. The other concerns the computer problems, both judicial and extra-judicial, of Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Though in a sense unrelated, they share lessons about the practicalities of computers and their search that are worth telling. As courts continue to struggle with how to cabin the searches of computers in order to minimize privacy intrusion …

"C U In Crt": Legal Aid Straight To Your Phone, Jessica Ratner

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Crowdfunding Securities, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

A new federal statute authorizes the online "crowdfunding" of securities, a new idea based on the concept of "reward" crowdfunding practiced on Kickstarter and other websites. This method of selling securities had previously been banned by federal securities law but the new CROWDFUND Act overturns that prohibition.

This Article introduces the CROWDFUND Act and explains that it can be expected to have two primary effects on securities law and capital markets. First, it will liberate startup companies to use peer networks and the Internet to obtain modest amounts of capital at low cost. Second, it will help democratize the market …

News In Cyberspace: The Creation Of The New Ignorance, Ronald Charles Griffin

Journal Publications

Computers are dummying us down. Book learning has given way to computer speak. Modern technology overwhelms us. Users are enthralled with gadgets to the point where they have lost themselves in them. We have abandoned, perhaps mislaid, our sense for ignorance; what it means to be illiterate in the 21st century; and working definitions for truth. In this environment a dab of education (enough to make somebody lethal), a sprinkle of bigotry, and fear produce people with ideas that are bad for us. This essay cautions against trucking with those folk; it marks what they do in the media that …

The “Friend”Ly Lawyer: Professionalism And Ethical Considerations Of The Use Of Social Networking During Litigation, Nicola A. Boothe-Perry

Journal Publications

Social media use has exploded around the world. The top social networking site (SNS), Facebook, reports that it has more than a billion members with approximately two million friend requests every twenty minutes. Coupled with the other top 15 social networking sites, including Linkedln, Google+, Twitter, and MySpace, the number of social networking users is estimated to exceed 2 billion. With billions of people producing and consuming media content through SNS, there has been a growing trend of law firms' use of SNS as a marketing tool and litigators' inclusion of discovery from SNS as a part of their discovery …

Streaming While Teaching: The Legality Of Using Person Streaming Video Accounts For The Classroom, Jonathan I. Ezor

Scholarly Works

Educators are constantly seeking new sources of relevant material to illustrate doctrinal and practice topics. With the growing understanding of students’ different learning styles, as well as the expansion of high-speed network connections and large displays in the classroom, streaming video has begun gaining popularity as an educational tool. Films, television programs, and real-time and archived legislative and court sessions may provide examples (both positive and negative) to enhance pedagogy. One increasingly common source for streaming content is a commercial video provider such as Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu. Even where such providers do not offer educational or institutional services, educators …

The Digital Accountability And Transparency Act Of 2011 (Data): Using Open Data Principles To Revamp Spending Transparency Legislation, Jillian Raines '12

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Databases Lie! Successfully Managing Structured Data, The Oft-Overlooked Esi, Conrad Jacoby, Jim Vint, Michael Simon

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

Legal professionals regularly advise clients to ensure that the storage, retention, and accessibility of their Electronically-Stored Information (“ESI”) is in full compliance with all legal and regulatory requirements in the event this information becomes relevant in civil, criminal, or regulatory disputes. However, what many practitioners may not realize is that the ESI that clients are required to produce for e- discovery includes both “unstructured” and “structured” data. Searching and producing only one of these types of ESI may well not fully satisfy a client’s full discovery obligations. Even worse, it might not present a full understanding of the factual issues …

Cover Letter, Benjamin R. Fox

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

The Richmond Journal of Law and Technology is proud to present its first issue of the 2013-2014 academic year. First published in 1995, JOLT is the world’s first exclusively online law review. JOLT strives to discuss new and emerging issues that fall squarely at the intersection of technology and the law. Today, with the publication of Issue One of its Twentieth Volume, JOLT aims to continue this tradition by providing relevant, insightful, and well-written articles that will drive discussion on these topics.

Buy My Vote: Online Reviews For Sale, Kendall L. Short

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The Internet has granted consumers access to a wealth of information to use in researching products and services. A substantial portion of this information consists of online consumer reviews, which hold great influence over consumers' purchasing decisions due to their perceived honesty and independence from the company. The problem with relying on these reviews, however, is that real consumers may not be the authors; instead, companies often hire writers to fabricate reviews, known as "opinion spam," which can either be positive for the hiring company or negative toward an innocent competitor. Because these fake reviews are difficult to detect, both …

Sexual Privacy In The Internet Age: How Substantive Due Process Protects Online Obscenity, Jennifer M. Kinsley

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Obscenity is one of the narrow categories of speech that has historically lacked First Amendment free-speech protection, and courts and scholars alike have wrestled with the indefinable and often unworkable nature of the obscenity test. The advent of the Internet has both intensified and yet potentially resolved these problems. Recent Supreme Court cases, such as Lawrence v. Texas, suggest that sexually explicit expression that falls outside the scope of the First Amendment may nevertheless be entitled to privacy protection under Fourteenth Amendment substantive due process. Yet Lawrence's potential applicability to online obscenity has created tension in lower-court decisions and produced …

The Illegal Process: Basic Problems In The Making And Application Of Censorship, James Grimmelmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This essay is a response to Derek Bambauer's article Orwell's Armchair, which proposes "[a] statute enabling censorship of Internet material." Bambauer's theory is process-oriented: it focuses on the institutions that engage in censorship and the procedures that they follow. Accordingly, the essay examines his arguments through the lens of the canonical Legal Process text: Hart and Sacks' The Legal Process. A series of notes and queries inquire whether his proposed statute would limit censorship, regularize it, or legitimate it.