Internet Law Commons^™

Trademarks On The Blockchain: Nft Domains And Collisions, Jelena Laketić

Michigan Technology Law Review

Blockchain technology supporting cryptocurrency transactions is one of the most critical innovations of this decade. Establishing a legal identity on blockchain, however, is fraught with uncertainty. In the 1990s, the internet faced a similar set of issues, which were resolved through the ICANN dispute resolution system. This Article asserts that blockchain technology urgently needs a similar cohesive approach to NFT domains.

This Article will explore trademark issues with non-fungible tokens (NFTs), specifically NFT domains. It begins by exploring the fundamental structure of NFTs by demystifying the technology and showing how NFTs contrast with other currency regimes. Increased usage of NFTs …

How To Get The Property Out Of Privacy Law, Jane R. Bambauer

UF Law Faculty Publications

For the last ten years, American rhetoric and state lawmaking has attempted to provide consumers with greater and stickier property interest in their personal information. But the impracticalities of the sticky property model are becoming evident, and will be impossible to ignore as AI becomes more prevalent and useful. This Article critiques the property framework in privacy law, and explains how a risk-based approach can be modernized and implemented instead. An enduring system of privacy laws will manage risks rather than bestowing rights to control and delete information. To do this, data practices should be categorized into safe harbor practices …

The Twenty-Six Words That Created The Internet… And Then Maybe, Kind Of, Destroyed Society: Understanding And Reforming Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act, Nandor F. R. Kiss

Michigan Technology Law Review

In 1996, Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a twenty-six-word law that immunized early internet companies from civil immunity arising from hosted, third-party content. At the time, the law was necessary to allow fledging companies to innovate without fear of bankruptcy-inducing lawsuits and ultimately helped to create the internet as we know it. To the extent this civil immunity has contributed to the vast technological advances over the past three decades, it should be lauded. However, the internet has dramatically changed in the past thirty years, and the law has been relied upon to protect companies in …

The Jawboning Cases End With A Bang Disguised By A Whimper, Derek E. Bambauer

UF Law Faculty Publications

Jawboning is government enforcement through informal channels, where the underlying authority is in doubt. Government actors at all levels have increasingly deployed this tactic to pressure Internet platforms to suppress disfavored speech. Internet jawboning debuted at the Supreme Court in two cases (National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo and Murthy v. Missouri) in 2023. Although the Court disposed of both cases on procedural and standing grounds, rather than offering a new methodology for evaluating jawboning, the opinions offer examples of what a successful jawboning claim looks like and what an unsuccessful claim lacks. Thus, jawboning as a …

Shareholder Primacy Versus Shareholder Accountability, William W. Bratton

Seattle University Law Review

When corporations inflict injuries in the course of business, shareholders wielding environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) principles can, and now sometimes do, intervene to correct the matter. In the emerging fact pattern, corporate social accountability expands out of its historic collectivized frame to become an internal subject matter—a corporate governance topic. As a result, shareholder accountability surfaces as a policy question for the first time. The Big Three index fund managers, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, responded to the accountability question with ESG activism. In so doing, they defected against corporate legal theory’s central tenet, shareholder primacy. Shareholder primacy builds …

Content Moderation Regulation As Legal Role-Scripting, Sari Mazzurco

Indiana Law Journal

Lawmakers and scholars concerned with content moderation regulation typically appeal to “analogies” to justify or undermine different forms of regulation. The logic goes: law should afford individuals due process rights against speech platforms because speech platforms are “like” speech governors as a matter of objective reality. Other common analogies include common carriers, publishers, distributors, shopping malls, and bookstores.

Commentators attempt to invoke social roles to understand what the content moderation relationship is, what behaviors are “right” and “wrong” within it, and how law should police behavioral deviations. But they do so without relying on foundational sociology theory that explains what …

Verses Turned To Verdicts: Ysl Rico Case Sets A High-Watermark For The Legal Pseudo-Censorship Of Rap Music, Nabil Yousfi

Seattle University Law Review

Whichever way you spin the record, rap music and courtrooms don’t mix. On one side, rap records are well known for their unapologetic lyrical composition, often expressing a blatant disregard for legal institutions and authorities. On the other, court records reflect a Van Gogh’s ear for rap music, frequently allowing rap lyrics—but not similar lyrics from other genres—to be used as criminal evidence against the defendants who authored them. Over the last thirty years, this immiscibility has engendered a legal landscape where prosecutors wield rap lyrics as potent instruments for criminal prosecution. In such cases, color-blind courts neglect that rap …

A Framework For Applying Copyright Law To The Training Of Textual Generative Artificial Intelligence, Art Neill, James Thomas, Erika Lee

Faculty Scholarship

The rise in the popularity of consumer-facing generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has created considerable confusion and consternation among some copyright owners. The ability to automate the generation of original works based on user input is considered by some copyright holders to have been made possible by large-scale direct infringement by OpenAI, Microsoft, and other major GenAI developers. This article explores the application of copyright law to the training of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, specifically focusing on the legal issues surrounding the unauthorized use of copyrighted textual works in the GenAI training process.

The large language models (LLMs) that drive ChatGPT and similar …

Balancing Interests: Ai, Business & Human Rights, And The Legal Landscape In An Era Of Disruption, Jena Martin, Ritu Narula

Faculty Articles

On October 30, 2023, the Biden Administration issued a sweeping executive order espousing a policy to advance the development and use of artificial intelligence ("Al") while also establishing safeguards across the federal government. The Executive Order marked the U.S. government's largest move forward related to the regulation of Al. The Order also represents the government's latest effort to advance equity, privacy, and national security in the use of AI systems. Moreover, the Order comes at a time when governments around the world are wrestling with the impact of AI and its disruptive effect, not just on markets, but on society …

Settlement Of Labor Dispute In Thailand: Establishing A Private Labor Dispute Settlement Organization, Nuthapach Worapichaiyut

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

The settlement of labor dispute process is a process use to address the labor dispute between employers and employees. The interest-based labor dispute arises from the employer and employee on the demand to obtain an agreement relating to working conditions, including but not limited to wages, welfare, and on working days and hours. This type of labor dispute differs from right-based labor dispute, which includes issues such as unpaid wages, severance, or unfair dismissal. Both types of labor disputes require their own proper processes for resolution.The settlement of the interest-based labor dispute in Thailand has been prescribed in the Labor …

Comparing Gdpr Against The United States’ Approach To Data Breach Notification By Examining Texas And California And The Feasibility Of A Universal Standard, Amrit Nagi

Cybaris®

No abstract provided.

Ai-Ip? Copyright In An Age Of Internet Propaganda With Artificial Intelligence, Sonya Saepoff

Cybaris®

No abstract provided.

Social Media, The Modern Public Forum: The State Action Doctrine And Resurrection Of Marsh, Erika L. Andersen

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Virtual Justice: Criminalizing Avatar Sexual Assault In Metaverse Spaces, Olivia Bellini

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Datafication, Power, And Publics In India's National Digital Health Ecosystem, Ramya Chandrasekhar

Socio-Legal Review

While evident for a long time, the COVID-19 pandemic starkly illustrated the need to strengthen India’s public healthcare system. But since 2017, the solution to India’s public health woes takes the shape of the National Digital Health Ecosystem (‘NDHE’) – a digital system for the generation, use, and “frictionless” circulation of health data across healthcare actors through the use of artefacts such as health IDs, electronic health records, data standards, and federated computing architectures. These artefacts are not neutral technological systems. Rather, together with social practices, they constitute a “data infrastructure.” Seeing the NDHE as a data infrastructure allows us …

We Shall Overcome: The Evolution Of Quotas In The Land Of The Free And The Home Of Samba, Stella Emery Santana

Seattle University Law Review

When were voices given to the voiceless? When will education be permitted to all? When will we need to protest no more? It’s the twenty-first century, and the fight for equity in higher education remains a challenge to peoples all over the world. While students in the United States must deal with the increase in loans, in Brazil, only around 20% of youth between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four have a higher education degree.

The primary objective of this Article is to conduct an in-depth comparative analysis of the development, implementation, and legal adjudication of educational quota systems within …

Pacific Islands And The U.S. Military: The Legal Borderlands Of The Environmental Movement, Sonia Lei

Seattle University Law Review

Climate change remains an urgent, ongoing global issue that requires critical examination of institutional polluters. This includes the world’s largest institutional consumer of petroleum: the United States military. The Department of Defense (DoD) is a massive institution with little oversight, a carbon footprint spanning the globe, a budget greater than the next ten largest nations combined, and overly generous exemptions to environmental regulations and carbon reduction targets. This Comment examines how this lack of accountability and oversight plays out in the context of three Pacific islands that have hosted U.S. military bases for decades. By considering the environmental impact of …

Artificial Intelligence Is Like A Perpetual Stew, Nathan Reitinger

American University Law Review

Artificial intelligence is inescapable. It is in our phones, fridges, and most of the businesses we engage with use it to “improve” their services. From deciding on what YouTube video to watch next to driving vehicles or firing weapons, artificial intelligence is a linchpin in our society. But what is artificial intelligence? And, more importantly, why does that matter? It matters because we are currently unprepared to deal with the paradigm-shifting legal issues brought about by artificial intelligence. And without this understanding, we are nearly certainly going to make mistakes. The bright side is that artificial intelligence is not complicated. …

The Battle Between Open Markets And National Security: How Limiting Investments Into Foreign Technology Might Be Hurting National Security Goals, Alexandra Van Cleef

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Breaking Algorithmic Immunity: Why Section 230 Immunity May Not Extend To Recommendation Algorithms, Max Del Real

Washington Law Review Online

In the mid-1990s, internet experiences were underwhelming by today’s standards, despite the breakthrough technologies at their core. When a person logged on to the internet, they were met with a static experience. No matter who you were, where you were, or how you accessed a particular website, it rendered a consistent page. Today, internet experiences are personalized, dynamic, and vast—a far cry from the digital landscape of just a few decades ago. While today’s internet is unrecognizable compared with its early predecessors, many of its governing laws remain materially unaltered. In particular, section 230 of the Communications Act, which passed …