The Path of Internet Law: An Annotated Guide to Legal Landmarks

The evolution of the Internet has forever changed the legal landscape. The Internet is the world’s largest marketplace, copy machine, and instrumentality for committing crimes, torts, and infringing intellectual property. Justice Holmes’s classic essay on the path of the law drew upon six centuries of case reports and statutes. In less than twenty-five years, Internet law has created new legal dilemmas and challenges in accommodating new information technologies. Part I is a brief timeline of Internet case law and statutory developments for Internet-related intellectual property (IP) law. Part II describes some of the ways in which the Internet is redirecting the path of IP in a globalized information-based economy. Our broader point is that every branch of substantive and procedural law is adapting to the digital world. Part III is the functional equivalent of a GPS for locating the latest U.S. and foreign law resources to help lawyers, policymakers, academics and law students lost in cyberspace

The Path of Internet Law: An Annotated Guide to Legal Landmarks

The evolution of the Internet has forever changed the legal landscape. The Internet is the world’s largest marketplace, copy machine, and instrumentality for committing crimes, torts, and infringing intellectual property. Justice Holmes’s classic essay on the path of the law drew upon six centuries of case reports and statutes. In less than twenty-five years, Internet law has created new legal dilemmas and challenges in accommodating new information technologies. Part I is a brief timeline of Internet case law and statutory developments for Internet-related intellectual property (IP) law. Part II describes some of the ways in which the Internet is redirecting the path of IP in a globalized information-based economy. Our broader point is that every branch of substantive and procedural law is adapting to the digital world. Part III is the functional equivalent of a GPS for locating the latest U.S. and foreign law resources to help lawyers, policymakers, academics and law students lost in cyberspace

From Human-Centered to Social-Centered Artificial Intelligence: Assessing ChatGPT's Impact through Disruptive Events

Large language models (LLMs) and dialogue agents have existed for years, but the release of recent GPT models has been a watershed moment for artificial intelligence (AI) research and society at large. Immediately recognized for its generative capabilities and versatility, ChatGPT's impressive proficiency across technical and creative domains led to its widespread adoption. While society grapples with the emerging cultural impacts of ChatGPT, critiques of ChatGPT's impact within the machine learning community have coalesced around its performance or other conventional Responsible AI evaluations relating to bias, toxicity, and 'hallucination.' We argue that these latter critiques draw heavily on a particular conceptualization of the 'human-centered' framework, which tends to cast atomized individuals as the key recipients of both the benefits and detriments of technology. In this article, we direct attention to another dimension of LLMs and dialogue agents' impact: their effect on social groups, institutions, and accompanying norms and practices. By illustrating ChatGPT's social impact through three disruptive events, we challenge individualistic approaches in AI development and contribute to ongoing debates around the ethical and responsible implementation of AI systems. We hope this effort will call attention to more comprehensive and longitudinal evaluation tools and compel technologists to go beyond human-centered thinking and ground their efforts through social-centered AI

Fighting the Hydra: Combatting Vulnerabilities in Online Leaderless Resistance Networks

Why do contemporary Racially-Motivated Violent Extremist (RMVE) movements champion “leaderless resistance,” and how can practitioners combat this organizational strategy? To answer this question, we draw on insights from military planning to identify why this online network structure provides the RMVE community its primary source of power, or “center of gravity.” We then use this information to deconstruct the movement’s operational activities including its critical capabilities and critical requirements to perpetrate these actions. Based on these requirements, we identify key vulnerabilities to undercut the movement’s resilience and growth. Leaderless resistance is an organizational strategy “that allows for and encourages individuals or small cells to engage in acts of political violence entirely independent of any hierarchy of leadership or network of support.” Fueled by a growing virtual reach, leaderless movements and groups based in the United States have flourished in the last decade. These entities can largely be divided into two categories: those that deliberately adopted a leaderless structure for its strategic benefits (e.g., Atomwaffen, the Base), and those that are organically leaderless due to the highly fluid nature of their network of followers (e.g., Boogaloo Bois, Groypers). The online RMVE leaderless resistance network relies on three critical requirements to achieve their desired end goals: (1) common doctrine, (2) shared narrative, and (3) dense communication networks. Online communication networks, in particular, are critical to spread information, share key doctrinal concepts through common texts, mobilize followers, and radicalize individuals to take actions. Given these requirements, we identify at least three vulnerabilities in these network structures: 1. Poor organizational cohesion and control, 2. Limited visibility of ideological narratives/influencers, and 3. Barriers to communication and coordination. These challenges can undercut the perceived legitimacy, momentum, and growth of the movement. To exploit these vulnerabilities, we assess the effectiveness of several previously tested policy interventions including: • Law Enforcement-Based Interventions: Proscription, Arrests, and Litigation • Community-Based Interventions: Inoculation Theory, Counter-Messaging, Disengagement, De- Radicalization • Industry-Based Interventions: De-platforming, Content Moderation, Redirect, and Hash-Sharing Directories We assess that community-based and industry-based interventions are more likely to succeed than law enforcement-based interventions because the profound distrust of government in these communities limits the potential effectiveness of government-backed interventions and also creates a high potential for unanticipated, counterproductive effects

Say What You Want: How Unfettered Freedom of Speech on the Internet Creates No Recourse for Those Victimized

In today’s society, virtually everyone relies on online posts in order to make decisions—from what products to purchase to what restaurants to visit. The introduction and increase of online communication has made posting reviews online a simpler, easier, and more efficient process. However, the increase of online communication has threatened the delicate balance between free speech and harmful speech. A tangled web of recent case law and federal law exists which aggressively protects the free speech of online reviewers. The law has carved out immunity for the website operators that host an online reviewer’s comments, which in turn makes an online reviewer and their comments impervious to liability. A business harmed by these comments cannot seek remedy for defamatory, fraudulent, or overly negative posts. A lack of judicial remedy can create dire consequences for a business. Thus, businesses victimized by negative online reviews have little to no recourse. By not allowing business to have a remedy, courts only spawn unfettered freedom of speech on the internet

Reputational Privacy and the Internet: A Matter for Law?

Reputation - we all have one. We do not completely comprehend its workings and are mostly unaware of its import until it is gone. When we lose it, our traditional laws of defamation, privacy, and breach of confidence rarely deliver the vindication and respite we seek due, primarily, to legal systems that cobble new media methods of personal injury onto pre-Internet laws. This dissertation conducts an exploratory study of the relevance of law to loss of individual reputation perpetuated on the Internet. It deals with three interrelated concepts: reputation, privacy, and memory. They are related in that the increasing lack of privacy involved in our online activities has had particularly powerful reputational effects, heightened by the Internet’s duplicative memory. The study is framed within three research questions: 1) how well do existing legal mechanisms address loss of reputation and informational privacy in the new media environment; 2) can new legal or extra-legal solutions fill any gaps; and 3) how is the role of law pertaining to reputation affected by the human-computer interoperability emerging as the Internet of Things? Through a review of international and domestic legislation, case law, and policy initiatives, this dissertation explores the extent of control held by the individual over her reputational privacy. Two emerging regulatory models are studied for improvements they offer over current legal responses: the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, and American Do Not Track policies. Underscoring this inquiry are the challenges posed by the Internet’s unique architecture and the fact that the trove of references to reputation in international treaties is not making its way into domestic jurisprudence or daily life. This dissertation examines whether online communications might be developing a new form of digital speech requiring new legal responses and new gradients of personal harm; it also proposes extra-legal solutions to the paradox that our reputational needs demand an overt sociality while our desire for privacy has us shunning the limelight. As we embark on the Web 3.0 era of human-machine interoperability and the Internet of Things, our expectations of the role of law become increasingly important

Social Media and the Press

The Internet and social media are transforming news as we knew it, yet the precise consequences of these changes are not yet clear. Journalists now rely on Twitter, crowdsourcing is available through social media, facts and stories are googled, traditional print newspapers have websites and reporter blogs, open newsrooms invite community participation in the editorial process itself, video from citizen journalists is commonly used in mainstream media storytelling, bloggers consider themselves journalists, and media consolidation marries entities like AOL and the Huffington Post. In turn, changes in the news-access practices of readers are increasingly influencing the length, breadth, and subjects of reporting, whether online or in print. While recognizing the reality of the many positive changes facilitated by social media-including the potential for an Internet-mediated renaissance of public engagement with news-this Article explores some particular challenges posed for the democratic press by the new reality of social media

Enforcement Through the Network: The Network Enforcement Act and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights

This Comment explores the conflict between state-described freedom of expression and the autonomy of social media companies to regulate content on their platforms through the lens of the Network Enforcement Act, passed by Germany in 2017, and the freedom of expression clause of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Network Enforcement Act, which compels social media companies to monitor and remove content from their sites which violate certain other provisions of German law, has thrust the issues of intermediary autonomy and censorship-byproxy into the spotlight. Proponents of the law support it as a way to ensure that what is illegal offline remains illegal online. Opponents argue that the law essentially amounts to censorship, and therefore violates freedom of expression under the German constitution and a host of international treaties. This Comment finds that while the law likely does not violate freedom of expression as enumerated under Article 5 of the Basic Laws of the Republic of Germany, it may violate freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights, in part because the law incentivizes “overblocking” which could lead to the removal of lawful speech without due process. In order to promulgate such regulations, more than one country needs to band together in order to promote safety and international security without curtailing civil rights