Colonial copyright: an early case of globalisation

The author provides an account of the legal history of copyright law in the former British colonies, seen and understood from the colonized side. He looks at the ways in which colonial copyright can be considered as an early instance of “legal transplant” and local adaptation of emerging international practice and agreement. Article by Michael Birnhack (Professor of Law, Tel Aviv University, Israel and IALS Fellow) - published in Amicus Curiae - Journal of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and its Society for Advanced Legal Studies. The Journal is produced by the Society for Advanced Legal Studies at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London

The Glocal Net: Standing on Joel Reidenberg’s Shoulders

Information technology and digital networks are global, and information can easily cross borders. Laws, however, are territorial, local, and specific. This is the meeting of the global and the local. Imposing local laws on global technology can result in a conflict, but it may give birth to a new condition, the “glocal net”: the fusion of the global and the local. Under the condition of the glocal net, as a matter of practice, people experience the internet differently in different places around the globe. As an ideal, the glocal net would strive to enable both the global and the local dimensions, integrated or side-by-side. This essay is a tribute to Professor Joel Reidenberg and his scholarship. I revisit the first generation of cyberlaw studies with an emphasis on Reidenberg’s work on internet jurisdiction; the discussion revisits the Yahoo! France case and juxtaposes it with a recent decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union, Google v. CNIL, on the scope of a right-to-be-forgotten order examining whether it should be local, European, or global

Does Law Matter Online - Empirical Evidence on Privacy Law Compliance

Does law matter in the information environment? What can we learn from the experience of applying a particular legal regime to the online environment? Informational privacy (or to use the European term, data protection) provides an excellent illustration of the challenges faced by regulators who seek to secure user rights and shape online behavior. A comprehensive study of Israeli website compliance with information privacy regulation in 2003 and 2006 provides insights for understanding these challenges. The study examined the information privacy practices of 1360 active websites, determining the extent to which these sites comply with applicable legal requirements related to information privacy and examining other privacy-related practices. Information practices were explored on three levels: first, we examined the legal requirements applicable to each information practice under current Israeli law (legal analysis); second, we analyzed the declared privacy policies posted on each website; and third, we studied the actual information practices of each website. The findings show that only a small minority of websites comply with legal requirements. Most websites do not provide privacy protection to users at the level required by the law. Websites routinely collect personal data from users, although the practice of collecting data is slightly lower among commercial and organization websites than in other categories. Among public and private sector websites, compliance was relatively low, with 16% and 22% of websites that collect personal data giving users some sort of notice. The popular and sensitive websites, generally owned by large corporations, had substantially higher levels of compliance, and the most popular websites had the lowest number of violations. The overall picture that emerges from the findings is one in which the law seems to have only a relatively minor role in shaping users\u27 privacy experiences online, while other forces and factors are clearly at play. The findings further suggest that information privacy regulation is most effective among commercial enterprises, which are better able to acquire legal advice and respond to potential legal liability. It is less effective among small enterprises and individual users who operate websites, because they typically cannot afford the somewhat sophisticated legal counsel that is required for establishing and maintaining a data protection policy. This is a troublesome conclusion, given growing threats to user privacy in the Web 2.0 environment. As a whole, the findings suggest that data protection regulators may be unable to craft a single legal measure that fits the Internet. Regulating the online behavior of various players may require tailored regulatory measures

Shielding Children: The European Way

The Internet crosses physical borders, and carries with it both its promises and its harms to many different countries and societies. These countries thus share the same technology, but they do not necessarily share the same set of values or legal system. This Article compares the legal response in the United States and in Europe to one important issue: the exposure of children to certain materials, which are deemed harmful to them but not harmful to adults. This US-European comparison, in which the experience in the United Kingdom serves as a leading example, illustrates the traits of various kinds of regulation of the new media: public ordering (direct and indirect), private ordering, and ordering by code, i.e., by technological means. The authors examine the various kinds of regulation and their constitutional meaning. The US opted mostly for a direct legal attack on the material which is harmful to children, an approach which thus far failed the judicial test, due to the limitations it imposes on freedom of speech of adults. While the European framework allows greater balancing between expression rights and competing interests, the European response has not been to follow the direct restrictions attempted in the US. Instead, accepting the practical difficulties of enforcing direct restrictions, the emerging legal response in European countries has been a market-based solution, guided by a legal framework that fosters self-regulation. The Article considers the reasons for adopting the approach of self-regulation and the impact that such methods of control have on freedom of expression. In particular, the Article examines the relationship of such controls with the communitarian approach advocated by Professor Etzioni