Over the past three decades, most people have become accustomed to dealing with music, film, photography, and other expressive media stored in digital format. However, while great strides have been made in digitalizing what we see and hear, there has been far less progress in digitalizing the other senses. This lack of progress is especially evident for the chemical senses of...
There has been increasing interest in the transformative power of not only crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, but also the technology underlying them-namely blockchain. To the uninitiated, a blockchain is a sophisticated, distributed online ledger that has the potential, according to Goldman Sachs, to "change 'everything."
This article examines some of the inherent inequities that exist for music vocalists under the United States Copyright Act and related music industry practices, due to the limited scope of protection given to sound recordings and the absence of an express inclusion of nondramatic music performance as a protected work under Section 102(a). It argues for expansion of the rights...
Under existing law, social media information communicated through behind password -protected pages receives no reasonable expectation of privacy. The Note argues that the Fourth Amendment requires a greater degree of privacy protection for social media data. Judicial and legislative activity provides indicia of a willingness to reconsider citizens
The transfer of data across borders support s trade in most service industries around the world as well as the growth of traditional manufacturing sectors. However, several countries have begun to adopt laws impeding the cross-border transfer of data, ostensibly in pursuit of policy objectives such as national security, public morals or public order, and privacy. Such domestic...
Algorithmic agents permeate every instant of our online existence. Based on our digital profiles built from the massive surveillance of our digital existence, algorithmic agents rank search results, filter our emails, hide and show news items on social networks feeds, try to guess what products we might buy next for ourselves and for others, what movies we want to watch, and when...
Native advertising, which matches the look and feel of unpaid news and editorials, has exploded online. The Federal Trade Commission has long required advertising to be clearly and conspicuously labeled, and it recently reiterated that these requirements apply to native advertising. We explore whether respondents can distinguish native advertising and "regular" ads from unpaid...
Electronic timekeeping is a ubiquitous feature of the modern workplace. Time and attendance software enables employers to record employees
The proliferation of computerized databases of personal information has brought renewed attention to federal privacy law. While privacy rights under the Constitution have traditionally been limited to intimate details of personal lives, recent disputes have raised the question as to whether notions of substantive due process also extend to personal data. The focus of recent...
With respect to intellectual property, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that it is probably the most active and growing area of law that exists today. People are keenly aware of the importance of intellectual property: to use a phrase from a high-level Japanese commission, this is the “knowledge era.” An article in the Harvard Business Review pointed out that for...
Being the general counsel at Netscape was fascinating because Netscape has been involved in many of the most pressing issues concerning the Internet-contracts, copyright, encryption, and privacy, to name a few. The experiences of Netscape show how technology is once again forcing our leaders to deal with many complex issues that make us turn yet again to examine the first...
I’m going to talk today about the Internet in relation to political theory and, in particular, to libertarianism. Anyone who has spent time on the Net or who has read the writings of Internet gurus knows that the default set of political assumptions on the Internet is a libertarian set of arguments. In fact, if you had to come up with a technology-or more expansively, a space...
Richard M. Smith, Chief Technology Officer of the Privacy Foundation, discusses the ways emerging technology infringes consumer privacy on the Internet. He believes the widespread use of cookies and the growing use of online profiling by companies like DoubleClick create serious privacy problems for people who use the Internet. The solution lies in combining the efforts of...
RIDER TO STUDENT NOTE: PRIVACY WARS IN CYBERSPACE: AN EXAMINATION OF THE LEGAL AND BUSINESS TENSIONS IN INFORMATION PRIVACY
This Note examines how architecture, and particularly the design and coding of software on the Internet, helps shape social norms. The Note makes two points about architecture and norms. First, architectural decisions affect what norms evolve and how they evolve. By allowing or facilitating certain types of behavior and preventing others, architecture can promote the growth of...
This article examines the impact of e-mail on the physician-patient relationship, and how contract law can resolve the uncertainties incumbent in this nascent form of communication. Indeed, courts have yet to indicate when the physician-patient relationship begins by e-mail, or to what extent e-mail affects the duties of the relationship. Instead of waiting for judicial guidance...
This analysis describes the radical transformations in pharmaceutical intellectual property protection in Argentina during the 1990s. Most importantly, it highlights the consequences of the use by the United States of unilateral trade weapons to pressure Argentina to adopt certain standards in this field. The enforcement or threatened enforcement of Section 301 of the US Trade...
The Article highlights the language of the digital and the principle of modularization as the basic concepts which the further development of the information environment will have to pivot around, regardless of how conflicts between freedom and control are temporarily solved. Perceiving both the computer and the Internet as complex systems, the authors look at how modular design...
This Article presents the case against genetic enhancement. It begins with a critique of Fukuyama's highly publicized work on enhancement. It then reconstructs the case for regulation, arguing that enhancement will undermine the most basic and universal sources of meaning and well-being in human life. The Article pays special attention to the law and economics scholarship...
Theoretical debates about how best to address cybererime have their place, but, in the real world, companies and individuals face new harmful criminal activity that poses unique technical and investigatory challenges. One of the greatest challenges posed by this new technology is how to combat wrongdoing effectively without netting innocent actors. This Article will present three...
Well-established legal principles govern evidentiary issues arising from technology developments. In the United States, the Supreme Court and Courts of Appeals in every circuit draw from non-computer and non-wireless Fourth Amendment doctrine to address nascent electronic evidence issues. I agree that legal analyses drawing from historical treatment can be effective, but will...
Since the creation of the first pre-Web Internet search engines in the early 1990s, search engines have become almost as important as email as a primary online activity. Arguably, search engines are among the most important gatekeepers in today's digitally networked environment. Thus, it does not come as a surprise that the evolution of search technology and the diffusion of...
The 'fair use" defense in copyright law shields an intellectual commons of protected uses of copyrighted material from infringement actions. In determining whether a given use is fair, courts must assess the new use's potential "effect on the market" for the copyrighted work. Fair use jurisprudence too often fails to address the complementary, network, and long-range effects of...
The problem of global information flows via computer networks raises issues of competition, interoperability, and standard-setting parallel to those in the analysis of technical standards. Uniform standards, whether technical or legal, give rise to a constellation of positive and negative network effects. As a global network based upon the "end to end
Forum shopping by patent litigants is nothing new. However, in recent years, there has been an increase in forum shopping by patentee plaintiffs. Because of this forum shopping phenomenon, the Eastern District of Texas, a technological backwater, is on pace to become the leading patent docket in the United States. This Article empirically analyzes the reasons for the popularity...