Internet Law Commons^™

Open Connectivity, Open Data: Two Dimensions Of The Freedom To Seek, Receive And Impart Information In The New Zealand Bill Of Rights, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Recently, ideas about "rights" to Internet access or connectivity have received growing recognition from governments, legal institutions, and other political actors in several countries, including New Zealand Despite this emerging political and legal recognition, there are few, if any, systematic studies exploring such ideas. This paper aims to change this. First, it offers a theoretical exploration of the idea of a "right" to Internet access, including the diferent versions of such rights talk. Secondly, it examines whether there is any legal basis for such rights claims in New Zealand and ultimately argues that section 14 of the New Zealand Bill …

Virtual Inequality: Challenges For The Net's Lost Founding Value, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Freedom, liberty, and autonomy are the ideals mainly associated with Internet's first generation of thinkers, writers and "netizens," those who helped forge the Internet and the early technological and intellectual foundations of the idea of “cyberspace.” These ideas were, says Lawrence Lessig, the “founding values of the Net” and inspired an entire generation of scholarship focused on preserving the free and open nature of the Internet’s culture and architecture. But what has anyone to say about equality? Few, if any, Internet scholars today focus on equality as a similar value to be promoted or achieved. Returning to some of the …

Civil Liability Theories For Insufficient Security Authentication In Online Banking, Paul Rice

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Prosecuting The Mean Girls: The Viability Of Using Existing State Criminal Laws To Combat Cyberbullying, Anna Tse

Student Works

No abstract provided.

User Generated Revolution And Censorship: Is There A Right To Revolution?, Chris Desimone

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Virtual Child Pornography: The Children Aren't Real, But The Dangers Are; Why The Ashcroft Court Got It Wrong, Brian Goldblatt

Student Works

No abstract provided.

All Those Like You: Identity Aggression And Student Speech, Ari Ezra Waldman

Articles & Chapters

Online and face-to-face harassment in schools requires a coordinated response from the school, parents, students, and government. In this Article, I address a particular subset of online and face-to-face harassment, or identity-based harassment. Identity-based aggressors highlight a quality intrinsic to someone’s personhood and demean it, deprive it of value, and use it as a weapon. They attack women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and other traditionally victimized groups. And, as such, they attack not only their particular victims but also their victims’ communities. Identity-based aggressors com- mit a constitutional evil not only because their behavior interferes with victims’ access to education, …

Tormented: Antigay Bullying In Schools, Ari Ezra Waldman

Articles & Chapters

This Article begins a theoretical and empirical discussion on bullying and cyberharassment of all students, but particularly gay and lesbian youth. Despite the recent spate of bullying-related suicides, I argue that antibullying proposals that include harsh criminal punishments for egregious cases of bullying and cyberbullying in schools lack validity as a matter of legal theory and practice. In fact, it is what makes criminalization so initially attractive — that is, the public’s emotional and retributive need for punishments equal to bullying tragedies — that ultimately leaves the proposal devoid of reason. Criminalization proposals only satisfy retributive aims and are unlikely …

Internet Gambling: A Road To Strengthening Tribal Self-Government And Increasing Tribal Self-Sufficiency While Protecting American Consumers, Chris J. Thompson

American Indian Law Review

No abstract provided.

Respectful And Responsible Relationships: There’S No App For That (The Report Of The Nova Scotia Task Force On Bullying And Cyberbullying), A. Wayne Mackay

Reports & Public Policy Documents

Chairing this Task Force and producing this report has been both the most engaging and exhausting project that I have ever undertaken. Since my appointment in late May 2011, I have lived and breathed in the world of bullying and cyberbullying. I am sure my fellow Task Force members and members of the Working Group did the same. Born in the wake of tragic teen suicides it was easy for the members of the Task Force to be motivated. Indeed, few ventures have stirred my passions as much as this exercise has.

Bullying is a major social issue throughout the …

The Romantic Collective Author, Margaret Chon

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Although the romantic collective author is a much more elusive creature than its romantic individual counterpart, it can be discerned amidst the proliferation of expression on the Internet. This Article first outlines the ways in which the romantic author effect operates through both its genius and its arbiter prongs within collaborative authorship practices in digital networks. It next turns to scientific collaboration, where this author effect is attenuated, to assess whether scientific authorship practices might contribute to a more realistic and less romantic understanding of expressive authorship practices. A subsequent case study of collaborative digital authorship by Wikipedia contributors uncovers …

Curbing Copyblight, John Tehranian

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

This Article identifies and analyzes the growing problem of "copyblight" the use of overreaching claims by putative copyright holders to ownership of public domain works, and, more broadly, to exclusive rights which they do not hold in copyrighted works. Despite the fact that copyblight circumscribes political and social discourse, stifles creativity, and constricts the dissemination of information, present law provides few, if any, disincentives against the practice. Building on the groundbreaking work of Paul Heald and Jason Mazzone, this Article advances three proposals to temper the problems of overreach in order to restore a needed balance in our copyright system: …

Antibiotic Resistance, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

Ten years ago, when I wrote War Stories,' copyright lawyers were fighting over the question whether unlicensed personal, noncommercial copying, performance or display would be deemed copyright infringement. I described three strategies that lawyers for book publishers, record labels, and movie studios had deployed to try to assure that the question was answered the way they wanted it to be. First, copyright owners were labeling all unlicensed uses as "piracy" on the ground that any unlicensed use might undermine copyright owners' control. That epithet helped to obscure the difference between unlicensed uses that invaded defined statutory exclusive rights and other …

Net Neutrality Besieged By Comcast Corp. V. Fcc: The Past, Present And Future Plight Of An Open Internet, Adam Holofcener

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Patent Litigation And The Internet, John R. Allison, Emerson H. Tiller, Samantha Zyontz, Tristan Bligh

Faculty Scholarship

Patent infringement litigation has not only increased dramatically in frequency over the past few decades,¹ but also has also seen striking growth in both stakes and cost.² Although a relatively rich literature has added much to our understanding of the nature, causes, and consequences of patent litigation during the past two decades,³ many interesting questions remain inadequately addressed. The nuances of and trends in patent litigation in different technology fields and industries, for example, are still understudied.⁴ Litigation of patents on new technologies has likewise received a dearth of attention. Here we seek to help begin …

Cartoons Aren't Real People, Too: Does The Regulation Of Virtual Child Pornography Violate The First Amendment And Criminalize Subversive Thought?, Keisha April

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note argues that the government's regulation of virtual child pornography, particularly under the Obscene Visual Representations of the Sexual Abuse of Children (OVR) provision of the PROTECT Act, raises significant First Amendment concerns. While the provision aims to protect children, it criminalizes depictions that do not involve real children, undermining free expression. The analysis critiques the OVR provision's overbreadth and vagueness, asserting that it chills artistic expression and fails to serve a compelling government interest. The note advocates for narrowing the provision to focus on actual harm rather than fictional depictions.

Incitement To Riot In The Age Of Flash Mobs, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

As people increasingly use social media to organize both protests and robberies, government will try to regulate these calls to action. With an eye to this intensifying dynamic, this Article reviews First Amendment jurisprudence on incitement and applies it to existing statutes on incitement to riot at a common law, state, and federal level. The article suggests that First Amendment jurisprudence has a particularly tortuous relationship with regulating speech directed to crowds. It examines current crowd psychology to suggest which crowd behavior, if any, should as a matter of policy be subject to regulation. It concludes that many existing incitement-to-riot …

Privacy & The Personal Prospectus: Should We Introduce Privacy Agents Or Regulate Privacy Intermediaries, Scott R. Peppet

Publications

No abstract provided.

Internet Governance: The Role Of Multistakeholder Organizations, Joe Waz, Phil Weiser

Publications

With the increasing international focus on the future of the ITU and its role (or lack thereof) in Internet governance, there is greater attention being paid to the fact that much of the 'governance' of the Internet is in fact carried out by so-called 'multistakeholder ('MSH') organizations.' Over the last two decades, these entities have largely established the norms and standards for the global Internet, but they are little known to the general public and even to most regulators and legislators. Indeed, most governments do not understand the essential role of MSH organizations. Consequently, to develop an effective Internet governance …

In Defence Of A Defence - A Demonstrable Legitimate And Non-Infringing Purpose As A Full Defence To Anti-Circumvention Legislation, Andrew Yolles

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

In this essay, I will argue that making a demonstrable lawful and non-infringing purpose a full defence to copyright infringement by circumvention of a TPM addresses many of the concerns raised by the currently proposed legislation, while avoiding the pitfalls of directly linking anti-circumvention laws with actual copyright infringement. As the ratification of the WIPO Internet treaties is the foremost concern for this legislation, I will begin with a discussion as to how this model can successfully implement the treaties’ anti-circumvention provisions where the Bill C-60 model may have failed. I will then explain why this model strikes a better …