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overview
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Law
and the World Wide Web Overview How the law is affecting cyberspace and how cyberspace is affecting the law are the central themes of this course. In other words, law and the Web are each bringing change to the other. One, of course, is new and one is old. One seems to change quickly and the other slowly. But both are powerful and both are affecting the standards and rules that regulate our behavior, the capabilities we have for using information,and the manner in which we settle disputes. Many of the legal doctrines and concepts that we will consider during the semester, such as privacy, copyright, contract, and the First Amendment, are obviously not brand new doctrines. We have, for a few centuries at least, had laws regulating the ownership, control and use of some kinds of information. Yet, how adaptable are these traditional doctrines? Are there qualities of the new media that call for new approaches and the abandonment of old ones? Is the law itself changed by new means for working with information? As we look at these and other issues, we shall consistently see both that law frames our use of technology and also that technology frames and influences the law. This course has a sufficiently limited enrollment that we should be able to share what we discover with each other. Some of the issues we will deal with are frequently in the news, such as copyright and software piracy, hackers and cybercrime, pornography and freedom of expression, and privacy. While other topics may not be as newsworthy, they are more numerous and are extremely important. These would include domain names and Internet governance issues, jurisdiction, digital signatures, ecommerce issues such as shrinkwrap licenses, encryption, online dispute resolution, lawyers and technology, patents, internet taxation, online gambling, protection of databases, trespassing in cyberspace, spam, online voting, application of the American with Disabilities Act, the “digital divide,” First Amendment issues affecting schools and libraries, patents and other intellectual property issues – database protections, linking, framing, metatags, robots, electronic books and author’s rights, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In considering these issues and and in designing this course, I have been partly guided by a frequently quoted statement by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that “the life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience.” What Holmes meant is that outside forces shape the law at the same time that the law is shaping those forces. The emergence of powerful information technologies certainly qualifies as an “experience,” for all of us as well as for the law. It is, in all likelihood, one of the most powerful experiences the law has encountered in a long time and this presents us with a broad range of interesting and significant issue to explore.
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