Federal Search Commission - Access, Fairness, and Accountability in the Law of Search

Should search engines be subject to the types of regulation now applied to personal data collectors, cable networks, or phone books? In this article, we make the case for some regulation of the ability of search engines to manipulate and structure their results. We demonstrate that the First Amendment, properly understood, does not prohibit such regulation. Nor will such interventions inevitably lead to the disclosure of important trade secrets. After setting forth normative foundations for evaluating search engine manipulation, we explain how neither market discipline nor technological advance is likely to stop it. Though savvy users and personalized search may constrain abusive companies to some extent, they have little chance of checking untoward behavior by the oligopolists who now dominate the search market. Against the trend of courts that would declare search results unregulable speech, this article makes a case for an ongoing conversation on search engine regulation

Incomplete Commodification: Book Review of Who Owns the News? A History of Copyright

This review essay offers an interpretation of the history of proprietary rights in news as a process of incomplete commodification. Like other species of information, news increasingly came to be treated as a commodity whose exchange value is extracted in markets through the support of property rights. This process of commodification, however, was incomplete because it was hampered and resisted due to three distinctive features of news: its information-intensive character, its close entanglement with public-sphere speech, and its precarious relationship with the modern construct of authorship. The essay identifies three eras in which these distinctive features played out differently with respect to proprietary rights in news: the period of proto-copyright privileges; early, thin copyright; and modern, increasingly commodified copyright. It concludes by suggesting a few lessons from this history relevant for contemporary renewed pressures to further commodify news through proprietary rights

Owning Inventions (Chapter from \u3cem\u3eOwning Ideas: The Intellectual Origins of American Intellectual Property 1790-1909\u3c/em\u3e)

https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/clark_speakers/1085/thumbnail.jp

Owning Inventions (Chapter from \u3cem\u3eOwning Ideas: The Intellectual Origins of American Intellectual Property 1790-1909\u3c/em\u3e)

https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/clark_speakers/1085/thumbnail.jp