Internet Law Commons^™

Disagreeable Privacy Policies: Mismatches Between Meaning And Users’ Understanding, Joel R. Reidenberg, Travis Breaux, Lorrie F. Cranor, Brian M. French, Amanda Grannis, James T. Graves, Fei Liu, Aleecia Mcdonald, Thomas B. Norton, Rohan Ramanath, N. Cameron Russell, Norman Sadeh, Florian Schaub

Faculty Scholarship

Privacy policies are verbose, difficult to understand, take too long to read, and may be the least-read items on most websites even as users express growing concerns about information collection practices. For all their faults, though, privacy policies remain the single most important source of information for users to attempt to learn how companies collect, use, and share data. Likewise, these policies form the basis for the self-regulatory notice and choice framework that is designed and promoted as a replacement for regulation. The underlying value and legitimacy of notice and choice depends, however, on the ability of users to understand …

The Dawn Of Social Intelligence (Socint), Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

More information about citizens’ lives is recorded than ever before. Because the data is digitized, it can be accessed, analyzed, shared, and combined with other information to generate new knowledge. In a post-9/‌11 environment, the legal standards impeding access to such data have fallen. Simultaneously, the advent of global communications and cloud computing, along with network convergence, have expanded the scope of information available. The U.S. government has begun to collect and to analyze the associated data.

The result is the emergence of what can be termed “social intelligence” (SOCINT), which this Article defines as the collection of digital data …

Legitimacy And Expertise In Global Internet Governance, Olivier Sylvain

Faculty Scholarship

Over the course of the past decade or so, attention among Internet policymakers and scholars has shifted gradually from substantive design principles to the structure of Internet governance. The Internet Corporation for Assigning Names and Numbers in particular now faces a new skepticism about its legitimacy to administer the essential Internet Assigned Numbers Authority function. ICANN has responded to these doubts by proposing a series of major governance reforms that would bring nation-states more into the organization's decisionmaking. After all, transnational governance institutions in other substantive areas privilege nation-states as a matter of course. This Symposium Essay shows that these …

Confronting Big Data: Applying The Confrontation Clause To Government Big Data Collection, Chad Squitieri

Scholarly Articles

When government investigators request data from companies such as Google, they obtain data on targeted individuals with a guarantee that the data has been collected, stored, and analyzed properly. These guarantees constitute a testimonial statement under the Confrontation Clause. Similar to lab analysts who submit test results of cocaine samples or blood alcohol levels, this Note argues that analysts involved with the collection, storage, and analysis of big data must be available for confrontation under the Sixth Amendment.

Administering Patent Litigation, Jacob S. Sherkow

Articles & Chapters

Recent patent litigation reform efforts have focused on every branch of government — Congress, the President, and the federal courts — save the fourth: administrative agencies. Agencies, however, possess a variety of functions in patent litigation: they serve as “gatekeepers” to litigation in federal court; they provide scientific and technical expertise to patent disputes; they review patent litigation to fulfill their own mandates; and they serve, in several instances, as entirely alternative fora to federal litigation. Understanding administrative agencies’ functions in managing or directing, i.e., “administrating,” patent litigation sheds both descriptive and normative insight on several aspects of patent reform. …

Increasing The Transaction Costs Of Harassment, Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger

Faculty Scholarship

Wouldn’t it be nice if the rules, agreements, and guidelines designed to prevent online harassment were sufficient to curb improper behavior? As if. Wrongdoers are not always so easily deterred. Sometimes these approaches are about as effective as attacking tanks with toothpicks.

As Danielle Citron contends in her critically important work, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, the design of the Internet facilitates vitriol and abuse, even when it is legally, contractually, and normatively prohibited. Communicating almost effortlessly at distance—sometimes anonymously and typically with minimized body language—can heighten emotional detachment and blunt moral sensitivity. Tragically, when a mediated environment makes it …

Privacy As Trust: Sharing Personal Information In A Networked World, Ari Ezra Waldman

Articles & Chapters

This Article is the first in a series on the legal and sociological aspects of privacy, arguing that private contexts are defined by relationships of trust among individuals. The argument reorients privacy scholarship from an individual right to social relationships of disclosure. This has implications for a wide variety of vexing problems of modern privacy law, from limited disclosures to “revenge porn.”

The common everyday understanding is that privacy is about choice, autonomy, and individual freedom. It encompasses the individual’s right to determine what he will keep hidden and what, how, and when he will disclose to the public. Privacy …

Cyberharassment And Workplace Law, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Digital Shareholder, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

Crowdfunding, a new Internet-based securities market, was recently authorized by federal and state law in order to create a vibrant, diverse, and inclusive system of entrepreneurial finance. But will people really send their money to strangers on the Internet in exchange for unregistered securities in speculative startups? Many are doubtful, but this Article looks to first principles and finds reason for optimism.

Well-established theory teaches that all forms of startup finance must confront and overcome three fundamental challenges: uncertainty, information asymmetry, and agency costs. This Article systematically examines this “trio of problems” and potential solutions in the context of crowdfunding. …

The Nonfinancial Returns Of Crowdfunding, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

Securities crowdfunding — the sale of unregistered securities to the public over the Internet — has come under attack before it has even begun. Legal scholars in particular have expressed concern that investors will lose any money they invest in crowdfunding companies. Even assuming that this may be true from a purely financial perspective, these critics are missing an important point: Crowdfund investors with negative returns will not simply have lost their money, but rather they will have spent it (at least in part) on nonpecuniary benefits, including entertainment, political expression and community building. These nonfinancial returns of crowdfunding are …

Who Regulates The Robots, Margot Kaminski

Publications

No abstract provided.

Does Google Content Degrade Google Search? Experimental Evidence, Michael Luca, Tim Wu, Sebastian Couvidat, Daniel Frank

Faculty Scholarship

While Google is known primarily as a search engine, it has increasingly developed and promoted its own content as an alternative to results from other websites. By prominently displaying Google content in response to search queries, Google is able to use its dominance in search to gain customers for this content. This may reduce consumer welfare if the internal content is inferior to organic search results. In this paper, we provide a legal and empirical analysis of this practice in the domain of online reviews. We first identify the conditions under which universal search would be considered anticompetitive. We then …

Initial Interest Confusion "Internet Troika" Abandoned? A Critical Look At Initial Interest Confusion As Applied Online, Connie D. Nichols

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The Ninth Circuit's opinion in Brookfield Communications, Inc. v. West Coast Entertainment Corp. seemingly created a standard to be applied in trademark infringement cases on the Internet. Despite the cautions contained within the Ninth Circuit's holding, Brookfield ushered in an era in which many courts placed emphasis on three factors of the "likelihood of confusion" test finding initial interest confusion in many online infringement cases based solely on these three factors. For over a decade, inconsistent application within the Ninth Circuit and other jurisdictions created a disjointed body of case law on initial interest confusion online. The Ninth Circuit's opinion …

Invisible Labor, Invisible Play: Online Gold Farming And The Boundary Between Jobs And Games, Julian Dibbell

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

When does work become play and play become work? Court shave considered the question in a variety of economic contexts, from student athletes seeking recognition as employees to professional blackjack players seeking to be treated by casinos just like casual players. Here, this question is applied to a relatively novel context: that of online gold farming, a gray-market industry in which wage-earning workers, largely based in China, are paid to play fantasy massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) that reward them with virtual items that their employers sell for profit to the same games' casual players. Gold farming is clearly a …

The Internet Grows Up?, Neil M. Richards

Scholarship@WashULaw

Danielle Citron’s Hate Crimes in Cyberspace is one of the most important publications to date in the emerging fields of privacy and cyberlaw. In her thoughtful and insightful book, Citron explains the uneven playing field and frequently shocking acts of abuse that women face online, and demonstrates practical steps that we can take to remedy the problem of online hate through law, education, and the development of better, more inclusive norms. Other contributors to this Symposium have examined these contributions in great detail, pointing out important nuances of Citron’s argument, urging her in at least one case to be even …

Cyber Sovereignty: The Way Ahead, Eric Talbot Jensen

Faculty Scholarship

The last few years are full of reports of cyber incidents, some of which have caused significant damage. Each of these cyber events raise important questions about the role and responsibility of States with respect to cyber incidents. The answer to these questions revolves in large part around the international law doctrine of sovereignty. The extent to which nations exercise sovereignty over cyberspace and cyber infrastructure will provide key answers to how much control States must exercise and how much responsibility States must accept for harmful cyber activities when they fail to adequately do so. This article argues that States …

Cookie Monster: Balancing Internet Privacy With Commerce, Technology And Terrorism, Nichoel Forrett

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Surfing For Protection: Why Websites Should Be Categorically Excluded From Trade Dress Protection, Matt Mikels

CommLaw Conspectus: Journal of Communications Law and Technology Policy (1993-2015)

No abstract provided.

Promoting Innovation While Preventing Discrimination: Policy Goals For The Scored Society, Frank Pasquale, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

There are several normative theories of jurisprudence supporting our critique of the scored society, which complement the social theory and political economy presented in our 2014 article on that topic in the Washington Law Review. This response to Professor Tal Zarsky clarifies our antidiscrimination argument while showing that is only one of many bases for the critique of scoring practices. The concerns raised by Big Data may exceed the capacity of extant legal doctrines. Addressing the potential injustice may require the hard work of legal reform.

Recent Journalism Awards Won By "Old," "New," And "Hybrid" Media, Robert H. Lande, Thomas J. Horton, Virginia Callahan

All Faculty Scholarship

This compares the quality of the "old" media to that of the "new" media by determining how often each type of media source wins major journalism awards. It divides media sources into three categories: old, new and hybrid. New media is limited to publications that were started purely as online news publications. Old media is classified in the traditional sense to include such newspapers as the New York Times. Hybrid media combines elements of both new and old media. Our research compares the number of Pulitzer Prizes and other major journalism awards won by these three types of media sources …