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Abstract:
This Article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the law and policy of privacy on social network sites, using Facebook as its principal example. It explains how Facebook users socialize on the site, why they misunderstand the risks involved, and how their privacy suffers as a result. Facebook offers a socially compelling platform that also facilitates peer-to-peer privacy violations: users harming each others' privacy interests. These two facts are inextricably linked; people use Facebook with the goal of sharing some information about themselves. Policymakers cannot make Facebook completely safe, but they can help people use it safely.

The Article makes this case by presenting a rich, factually grounded description of the social dynamics of privacy on Facebook. It then uses that description to evaluate a dozen possible policy interventions. Unhelpful interventions - such as mandatory data portability and bans on underage use - fail because they also fail to engage with key aspects of how and why people use social network sites. The potentially helpful interventions, on the other hand - such as a strengthened public-disclosure tort and a right to opt out completely - succeed because they do engage with these social dynamics.

privacy, Facebook, MySpace, social network sites

Abstract:
The flourishing trade of virtual items for real-life money suggests that virtual worlds will sometimes welcome the intervention of real-life law. At first glance, this possibility seems to undermine the Law and Borders thesis that online spaces should enjoy independence from real-life law. These ideas are compatible, however, because they start from a common premise: that these new communities are developing their own distinctive values. The lesson of the real-money trade is that preserving those values requires recognizing the interdependence of virtual worlds and the real world.

Virtual Worlds, Computer Software, Internet

Abstract:
Search engines are the new linchpins of the Internet, and a new body of law - search engine law - will increasingly determine the shape of the Internet. Making sensible search policy requires a clear understanding of how search works, what interests are at stake, and what legal questions intersect at search. This article offers the first comprehensive overview of search engine law, which it organizes into a systematic taxonomy. It then demonstrates the dense legal interrelationships created by search by discussing a series of important themes in search engine law, each of which cuts across many doctrinal areas.

Internet, search engines, search engine law, Google

Abstract:
Societies have laws, so why should virtual societies be any different? This article is a thought experiment in comparative law, an attempt to lay the necessary conceptual foundations for talking coherently about the internal legal systems of virtual worlds. I identify four recurring problems in virtual worlds, and discuss what we might gain by thinking about these problems as legal ones.

First, I discuss virtual property, which has been one of the most spectacularly successful features of massively multiplayer games. Studying the mechanics and meaning of ownership within games has the potential to tell us a great deal about the mechanics and meaning of law in virtual worlds more generally.

Second, I discuss the forms of investment and exchange governed by contract law in the real world. Virtual economies seem to be humming along without extensive bodies of contract law. Explaining this absence provides us a useful framework for thinking about wealth and society and how these concepts do or do not change as they go online.

Third, I explore the social dynamics of groups of players, specifically how they prevent undesired conduct by others and how they band together for common purposes. Here, the challenge is to find good analogies to similar problems of real-life law.

Finally, I turn to one of the most-discussed problems in game design: How does one reassure players that designers' overwhelming powers over game spaces will not be used maliciously? If we look at the corresponding problem from real-life law - how to restrain seemingly unrestrainable sovereign powers - we see that law has a good deal to say about the practical techniques by which a lasting and trusting relationship between seeming unequals can be established.

Virtual worlds, cyberlaw

Abstract:
Web search is critical to our ability to use the Internet. Whoever controls search engines has enormous influence on all of us; whoever controls the search engines, perhaps, controls the Internet itself. This short essay (based on talks given in January and April 2008) uses the stories of five famous search queries to illustrate the conflicts over search and the enormous power Google wields in choosing whose voices are heard on the Internet.

search, search engine, Google, Internet

Abstract:
Every decision made by the designers of a virtual world game is a political decision. Every debate over the rules and every change to the software is political. When players talk about the rules, they are practicing politics. Once you know to look for virtual politics, they're everywhere.

Designers are the governments of these virtual worlds. Like real governments, they make the laws under which citizens must live. And like real governments, they are accountable, after a fashion, to their constituents. Players use designers as agents, employing them to make and enforce the collective decisions that need to be made to make a virtual world function well. Designers focus the diffuse (and conflicted) will of the players into something actionable: software. More importantly, almost every design decision - even a seemingly uncontested one - has winners and losers.

Virtual worlds, cyberlaw

Abstract:
The proposed settlement in the Google Book Search case should be approved with strings attached. The project will be immensely good for society, and the proposed deal is a fair one for Google, for authors, and for publishers. The public interest demands, however, that the settlement be modified first. It creates two new entities - the Books Rights Registry Leviathan and the Google Book Search Behemoth - with dangerously concentrated power over the publishing industry. Left unchecked, they could trample on consumers in any number of ways. We the public have a right to demand that those entities be subject to healthy, pro-competitive oversight, and so we should.

google, book search, copyright

Abstract:
In this article we defend our contention that culture is prior to facts in resolving the gun debate. The basis for this position, simply put, is that culture is prior to facts in human cognition. Through an overlapping set of psychological and social mechanisms, individuals adopt the factual beliefs that are dominant among persons who share their cultural orientations. Far from being updated in light of new evidence, beliefs so formed operate as an evidentiary filter, inducing individuals to dismiss any contrary evidence as unreliable, particularly when that evidence is proffered by individuals of an opposing cultural affiliation. So even accepting - which we do - that individuals care about both what guns do and what guns mean, it's idle to hope that consensus based on empirical research can settle the gun debate: individuals simply won't perceive any such consensus to exist so long as cultural conflict over the meaning of guns persists.

We fill out the details of this claim - and the extensive research in social psychology on which it rests - by developing a series of models that simulate the formation and transmission of belief. Section 2 will present the Factual Enlightenment Model, which shows how persuasive empirical proof can indeed generate societal consensus on a disputed issue. Section 3 will present the Cultural Cognition Model, which shows how various social and psychological mechanisms can generate beliefs that are uniform within and polarized across distinct cultural orientations. Section 4 develops a model - Truth vs. Culture - that shows that cultural cognition constrains factual enlightenment when these two dynamics of belief-formation and transmission are pitted against one another. And finally, in section, we develop a Breakthrough Politics Model, which shows how persuasive empirical proof can dispel culturally influenced states of false belief once policy options are invested with social meanings that make them compatible with diverse cultural orientations.

cognition, psychological and social mechanisms, cultural cognition, empirical

Abstract:
For the past four years, Google has been systematically making digital copies of books in the collections of many major university libraries. It made the digital copies searchable through its web site - you couldn't read the books, but you could at least find out where the phrase you're looking for appears within them. This outraged copyright owners, who filed a class action lawsuit to make Google stop. Then, last fall, the parties to this large class action announced an even larger settlement: one that would give Google a license not only to scan books, but also to sell them.

The settlement tackles the orphan works problem, but through the judicial process. Laundering orphan works legislation through a class action lawsuit is both a brilliant response to legislative inaction and a dangerous use of the judicial power. Many of the public interest safeguards that would have been present in the political arena are attenuated in a seemingly private lawsuit; the lack of such safeguards is evident in the terms of the resulting settlement. The solution is to reinsert these missing public interest protections into the settlement.

Google, Google Book Search, copyright

Abstract:
Second Life is a feudal society. No, not metaphorically. Literally.

Two problems have preoccupied scholars of virtual world law: "What is the political relationship between developers and users?" And: "Should we treat in-world objects as property?" We can make progress on both questions by recognizing that virtual politics and property are inextricably linked, in the same way that feudal politics and property were. It is the tenant/user's relationship with his lord/developer that both creates the property interest and enforces it. The similarity between ownership of land in feudal England and in Second Life suggests that offline courts should protect user interests in virtual items, gradually, without treating them as full-blown modern "property."

virtual worlds, virtual property, feudalism, property, second life

Abstract:
The realm of privacy law has more crimes than criminals, more wrongs than wrongdoers. Some invasions of privacy are neither intentional nor negligent; it's easy to recognize the harm, but hard to pin the blame.

Laurie Garrett attended the World Economic Forum as a journalist and wrote a private email to a few close friends, only to see that email end up on a widely-read weblog.

This essay tells the story of that inevitable accident: an "accident" in that it needn't have happened, but "inevitable" in that there's no principled way to prevent similar misunderstandings from recurring, again and again and again. The essay considers social, technical, and legal responses, but concludes that none of them can prevent the informal forwarding behavior that led to the leak of Garrett's email without cutting off many overwhelmingly beneficial uses of email. The consequences for privacy and democracy may be unfortunate.

internet, privacy, accidental privacy spills, Laurie Garrett, MetaFilter

Abstract:
Recently, the state of Oregon has used copyright law to threaten people who were publishing its laws online. Can they really do that?

More to the point, why would they? This essay will put the Oregon fracas in historical context, and explain the public policies at stake. Ultimately, it'll try to convince you that Oregon's demands, while wrong, aren't unprecedented. People have been claiming copyright in the law for a long time, and at times they've been able to make a halfway convincing case for it. While there are good answers to these arguments, they're not always the first ones that come to hand. It's really only the arrival of the Internet that genuinely puts the long-standing goal of free and unencumbered access to the law within our grasp.

This essay, written for nonlawyers and people interested in contemporary debates over access to the law, explains what's at stake in the Oregon dispute, how people have tried such things before, the role of new technologies in improving legal publishing, what the law has to say about it, and where we ought to go from here.

copyright, legal publication, access to the law, Internet, Oregon

Abstract:
The image of Borges's Library of Babel, which contains all possible books, is haunting and suggestive. This essay asks what we would do if we were advising a Federal Library Commission on how to deal with the Library's vast holdings and overwhelming disorganization. This thought exercise provides a set of sensible principles for information policy in an age of extreme informational abundance.

Library of Babel, search engine, Google

Abstract:
This symposium essay explores the imagined ethics of copyright: the ethical stories that people tell to justify, make sense of, and challenge copyright law. Such ethical visions are everywhere in intellectual property discourse, and legal scholarship ought to pay more attention to them. The essay focuses on a deontic vision of reciprocity in the author-audience relationship, a set of linked claims that authors and audiences ought to respect each other and express this respect through voluntary transactions.

Versions of this default ethical vision animate groups as seemingly antagonistic as the music industry, file sharers, free software advocates, and Creative Commons. "Respect copyrights," "Don't sue your customers," "Software should be free," and "I love to share" are all ethical claims about copyright that share some common intuitions, even as they draw very different conclusions. The essay provides a framework for thinking about these ethical visions of intellectual property and then puts these various visions into conversation with each other.

ethics, copyright, intellectual property

Abstract:
What is the sound of one party doing equity?

koans, equity

Abstract:
The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) has adopted several unfortunate policies that impair open access to scholarship. It should enable one-click download, stop requiring papers to bear SSRN watermarks, and allow authors to point readers to other download sites. If it does not reform, those who are serious about open access should not use SSRN.