The Life of Pi in the Electronic Silk Road

The Life of Pi presents an epic journey that a boy survives by maximizing spiritual strength in the most adverse circumstances. Called Pi, the boy harnesses curiosity, spirituality, and love to go through his adventurous “international” journeys through religions, cultures, and most notably nature with a stormy ocean. In his new book The Electronic Silk Road: How the Web Binds the World in Commerce, Anupam Chander also narrates an epic journey that we must embark on in the digital age. Skillfully written with elegant prose, the book explores complex challenges posed by culture, politics, and technology associated with trade in information services.postprin

The Invention of Traditional Knowledge

Sunder argues that the failure of intellectual property to recognize the contributions of traditional and natural sources cannot be rectified by mere payment and she posits a non-monetizable, non-utilitarian benefit in terms of worth or dignity in having one\u27s contribution as the subject labelled of an intellectual property right. Foregrounding the important role of raw materials in the process of innovation, cultural environmentalism helped provide a theoretical and political basis for recognition and recompense for the purveyors of those raw materials-often indigenous peoples who have cultivated the earth\u27s biodiversity and who hold traditional knowledge about that biodiversity. Moreover, focus on the effects on the poor of the cultural environmentalism metaphor through its reification of the division between raw and cooked knowledge, a conceptual separation long fundamental to intellecual property law

Law and Society Approaches to Cyberspace

This is the introductory essay to an edited collection titled Law and Society Approaches to Cyberspace and published by Ashgate Publishing. Accordingly, the essay first considers what qualifies as a law and society approach to any particular subject. Then, I address questions about what it means to study cyberspace, surveying some of the academic literature on the subject and identifying three distinct waves of scholarship about the Internet since the mid 1990s. I also discuss some of the major theoretical fault lines that have emerged during this period. Finally, the essay summarizes each of the contributions to the volume, which includes work by Sherry Turkle, Richard Ross, Dan Hunter, Gunther Teubner, Paul Schiff Berman, James Boyle, Margaret Jane Radin, Lawrence Lessig, Jack L. Balkin, Jane C. Ginsburg, Jessica Litman, Julie E. Cohen, Anupam Chander, Jerry Kang, Jennifer L. Mnookin, and James Grimmelmann

Achieving Privacy

Is privacy a luxury for the rich? Remarkably, there is a dearth of literature evaluating whether data privacy is too costly for companies to implement or too expensive for governments to enforce. This paper is the first to offer a review of the costs of compliance and to summarize national budgets for enforcement. Our study suggests that, while privacy may indeed prove costly for companies to implement and may present a special burden for small and medium-sized businesses, it is not too costly for governments to enforce. Indeed, the European Union, seen as a global champion of privacy, expends less than a dollar a year per citizen on data protection enforcement. Effective data protection agencies are not prohibitively costly, even for small administrations, especially if they collaborate through regional bodies. This study will help inform governments as they fashion and implement privacy laws to address the “privacy enforcement gap”—the disparity between privacy on the books and privacy on the ground