An online provider’s termination of a user’s online account can be a major-and potentially even life-changing-event for the user. Account termination exiles the user from a virtual place the user wanted to be; termination disrupts any social network relationship ties in that venue, and...

Why do some individuals pay for digital music while others pirate it? Using data on a sample of undergraduate students, we study the determinants of music piracy by looking at whether a respondent’s last song was obtained illegally. We first elicit our respondents’ willingness to pay (WTP)...

The proposed settlement of a copyright infringement suit brought against Google’s plan to digitize and make available of millions of books includes a structure under which Google sets access and sales prices and distributes revenues collects to rightsholders. The Department of Justice (DOJ)...

An important reason for the Internet's remarkable growth over the last quarter century is the "end-to-end" principle that networks should confine themselves to transmitting generic packets without worrying about their contents. Not only has this made deployment of internet infrastructure cheap...

Certain distributors of popular file-sharing programs have repeatedly failed to prevent, and may have knowingly caused and perpetuated, inadvertent file-sharing, Inadvertent sharing cannot be remediated by self-regulation by distributors of file-sharing programs because certain distributors have...

The recent growth of Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft has given rise to many economic as well as legal questions. The assignment of (intellectual) property rights to the licensee as well as to players is an important issue, legal discussion has to...

This essay asks: How did we get into the current crisis of copyright law, and how to move beyond it? This crisis developed as proliferating and expanding rights entered into tensions with each other and with exceptions and limitations. It has become acute as media progress has brought cultural...

The Northeast Regional Planning Body (NE-RPB) process should be beyond reproach with respect to ethical standards, and the public should never have reason to call into question its trust of the NE-RPB process, or the integrity of the NE-RPB to be guided by principles upon which our democratic...

The commercial speech doctrine in First Amendment jurisprudence has frequently been criticized and is recognized as a highly contested, problematic and shifting landscape. Despite the compelling critique within constitutional law scholarship more broadly, Intellectual Property (“IP”) law has...

In a generation’s time, collaborative methods of innovation have become a centerpiece of modern economic organization. Rather than creating technology primarily in-house, companies often enter into complex contractual arrangements whereby innovation processes cross firm boundaries. This...