 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
All events are open to the public and will take place in the University of Chicago Law School, 1111 East 60th Street, between University and Ellis on the south side of the Midway.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Panel 1: Regulation
3:00 pm in Room V
Moderator: Jacob Gersen, The University of Chicago Law School
Frank Pasquale, Seton Hall Law School
Internet Nondiscrimination Principles
Google’s advocacy for net neutrality has focused policymakers on the dangers of permitting a few dominant carriers to act as unaccountable bottlenecks controlling the flow of information. However, Google itself may now pose more of a threat of “bottlenecking” than the carriers it is calling to account. In certain cases, leading search engines need to be held accountable for the way they collect, order, and present information. Nondiscrimination principles first proposed for carriers may also inspire fruitful regulation of search engines.
James Speta, Northwestern University School of Law
Status of Spectrum Reform
In 2002, the FCC Spectrum Policy Task Force called for significant changes to US spectrum allocation policy. Spectrum reform, however, wasn’t even on the agenda for Congress’s telecom statute reforms in 2006 (which themselves failed to pass anyway). A few one-off statutes have opened some more spectrum for commercial and noncommercial purposes. This paper reviews the status of spectrum reform, and asks how it impacts the issue of broadband competition. It also looks at the FCC’s imposition of open access (network neutrality) conditions on the 700 MHz auction, and comments on wireless network neutrality generally.
Christopher S. Yoo, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Network Neutrality, Consumers, and Innovation
The recent debate over Internet policy has been dominated by claims that mandating network neutrality is essential to protecting consumers and innovation on the Internet. The terms of the debate have shown little appreciation for the economics of regulated industries or for the history of telecommunications regulation. In this Article, I plan to lay out some basic principles of regulatory economics to show ways in which deviations from network neutrality can benefit consumers and promote innovation. I plan to illustrate my arguments with specific examples from previous regulatory efforts showing how examples often regarded as market failures in need of regulatory redress are actually signs of a proper functioning market and regulations that interfere with those mechanisms can actually hurt, rather than help, consumers.
Keynote Address
4:30 pm in the Courtroom
Cindy Cohn, Legal Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation
It’s the Intermediaries, Stupid
Listen to a podcast of the address.
Reception to follow outside the Courtroom
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Breakfast
9:00 am
Panel 2: Privacy, Security, and Surveillance
9:30 am in Room V
Moderator: Douglas G. Baird, The University of Chicago Law School
Susan Freiwald, University of San Francisco School of Law
What Fourth Amendment Protection for E-mail Means for Electronic Surveillance Law
Our paper discusses the impact of Fourth Amendment protection for e-mail, in the wake of the 6th Circuit’s decision in Warshak v United States (June 2007). Although the Warshak decision will be reheard en banc, its ruling that compelled disclosure of stored e-mail is a search under the Fourth Amendment deserves close scrutiny, particularly because it is the first state or federal court to translate the reasonable expectation of privacy test into the language of e-mail. We argue that the panel got the Fourth Amendment analysis exactly right as a matter of both precedent and logic. We explore the implications of the constitutional protection of stored e-mail for the government’s investigative practices, the terms of the Stored Communications Act, and related questions of Fourth Amendment protection. (Paper co-authored by Patricia Bellia, Professor of Law, Notre Dame Law School)
Paul Ohm, University of Colorado Law School
Good Enough Privacy
A world in which the police have tools of perfect surveillance is not a world in which we would want to live. Nor should we want to live in a world where users have tools of perfect, easy-to-use privacy. This essay explores, as a thought experiment, the problems that arise in both of these extreme, hypothetical scenarios.
Jonathan Zittrain, Oxford University
Peer-to-fear: The next generation of privacy problems
Privacy issues arising from government and corporate sources are genuinely interesting and important. But they are dwarfed by a series of threats to privacy that do not fit the standard analytic privacy template. They come from the sorts of Web 2.0 activity that is usually thought of as individually empowering. The generative internet has drawn upon three ingredients to create a new form of privacy problem: cheap sensors, peer production, and reputation systems. These problems arise at the technical layer in Internet and PC security, and at the content layer in ventures such as Wikipedia, Flickr, and Facebook. Effective solutions for these issues may have more in common with solutions to other generative problems than those associated with the decades-old informational privacy analytic template.
Panel 3: Content and Participation
11:00 am in Room V
Moderator: Shyam Balganesh, The University of Chicago Law School
Danielle Citron, University of Maryland School of Law
Open Code Governance
Administrative law has long sought ways to enhance the accountability, public participation, and expertise of the regulatory state. Opaque information systems exacerbate existing accountability problems and create new problems for the democratic legitimacy of agency decision-making. My essay proposes to remedy these concerns and make affirmative gains in transparency, participation, and expertise through open code governance.
Brett M. Frischmann, Loyola University Chicago School of Law
A Note on the Economics of the First Amendment: Sustaining a Spillover Rich Networked Environment
This essay will explore how the emergence of the digital networked environment, and some of the pressures for government regulation that it gives rise to, may reveal or bring into stark relief how the First Amendment functions from an economic perspective. Specifically, I will discuss whether the First Amendment can be understood as an institution that sustains a spillover-rich environment.
Orin S. Kerr, The George Washington University Law School
Criminal Law in Virtual Worlds
This essay considers how criminal law does and should apply to conduct by players in the popular computer games known as “virtual worlds.” It considers two questions. First, when does conduct by an online player in a virtual world game trigger liability for a real-world crime? Second, will new criminal laws be needed to account for new social harms that occur in virtual world computer games?
Timothy Wu, Columbia Law School
Copyright’s Authorship Policy
Who are the beneficiaries of copyright—authors, or distributors? Is
there an argument for vesting ownership of copyrights in authors, and
leaving the rights there?
The background image on the Symposium poster as well as the Symposium title images on our homepage and the top of this page are used by permission of Chris Harrison: chrisharrison.net, and copyrighted by him.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
