Internet Law 2002: Syllabus

St. John's University School of Law

Week 1: Introduction -- What is Internet Law?

Findings of Fact (paragraphs 1-48) from American Civil Liberties Union v. Reno, 929 F.Supp. 824 (E.D. Pa. 1996) (affirmed, Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844, 117 S.Ct. 2329, 1997).

Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace ("Code"), chapters 1-4

John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

The District Court in ACLU v. Reno granted a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the Communications Decency Act, section 223, which imposed criminal penalties for making "indecent" or "patently offensive" material available to minors. (We will discuss the decision's legal conclusions and the challenges of blocking and filtering in a few weeks.) What defines the Internet for the ACLU v. Reno court? How does this court's Internet compare to Lessig's? to Barlow's?

Week 2: Internet Management or Governance

• ICANN Fact Sheet
• Browse ICANNwatch.org to get a feel for challenges to ICANN's role
• Request for Comments (RFC) 1958: Architectural Principles of the Internet
• LMMS pp. 1069-1088, Johnson & Post, And How Shall the Net Be Governed? (excerpt)
• Lessig, Code, chapters 4-5, 7
• optional:
• Sharon Eisner Gillett and Mitchell Kapor, The Self-governing Internet: Coordination by Design

Week 3: Jurisdiction and Overlapping Sovereignties

• LMMS pp. 775-797, excerpting
  • Cybersell, Inc. v. Cybersell, Inc., 130 F.3d 414 (9th Cir. 1997)
  • Zippo Mfg. Co. v. Zippo Dot Com. Inc., 952 F. Supp. 1119 (W.D. Pa.1997)
• Yahoo! v. LICRA et al., 145 F.Supp.2d 1168 (N.D. Cal. 2001) (alternate PDF requires free Adobe Acrobat reader)

Week 4: Speech 1: "We Must Protect the Children"

• Lessig, Code, Chapter 12, "Free Speech"
• LMMS pp. 932-958, excerpting
  • Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844 (1997)
  • United States v. Thomas, 74 F.3d 701 (6th Cir. 1996)
  • ACLU, Fahrenheit 451.2: Is Cyberspace Burning?

• Be aware of the chronology of filtering legislation and ligitation (links not required):

  • CDA: Communications Decency Act (1996), purported to regulate the access of minors to "indecent" and "patently offensive" speech on the Internet. The CDA's child-protection provisions were struck down by the Supreme Court in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844, 117 S.Ct. 2329 (1997)
  • COPA (a.k.a. Son of CDA): Child Online Protection Act (1998), imposed criminal liability on anyone who "makes any communication for commercial purposes that is available to any minor and that includes any material that is harmful to minors"; technical prevention is an affirmative defense. Enforcement enjoined by Philadelphia District Court and Third Circuit, vacated and remanded by Supreme Court as Ashcroft v. ACLU. COPA as amended.
  • Mainstream Loudon v. Board of Trustees, 24 F. Supp. 2d 552 (ED Va. 1998). Public library's "Policy on Internet Sexual Harassment" mandated filters on all public Internet-access computers. Library patrons and websites sued and won an injunction against the law's enforcement.
  • CIPA or CHIPA: Children's Internet Protection Act (2001). Uses federal e-rate funding to mandate filtering of Internet access in public schools and libraries. Subject of two pending lawsuits by the ACLU and ALA; struck down by three-judge panel and now on direct appeal to the Supreme Court.
  • Note also the CPPA, Child Pornography Prevention Act (1996), criminalizing production of "virtual child pornography," struck down in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition.-- U.S. -- (2002).
  • State attempts to regulate Internet speech have not fared much better: see New York's American Library Association v. Pataki, 969 F. Supp. 160 (S.D.N.Y.1997), striking down New York's CDA-like statute.
• Optional Additional Resources:
  
  • Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS)
  • American Library Association Guidelines and Considerations for Developing a Public Library Internet Use Policy
  • Censorware.net
  • Peacefire

Week 5: Speech 2: Anonymity and/or Accountability

• LMMS pp. 923-932, excerpting
  • Zeran v. America Online, 129 F.3d 327 (4th Cir. 1997)
  • Blumenthal v. Drudge, 922 F. Supp. 44 (D.D.C. 1998)
• Communications Decency Act Section 230 (47 U.S.C. 230)
• LMMS pp. 1003-1007, McVeigh v. Cohen, 983 F. Supp. 215 (D.D.C. 1998)
• Discovering the Identity of Anonymous Internet Posters, Richard Raysman and Peter Brown, New York Law Journal

Week 6: Copyright and Peer-to-Peer Networking

• Lessig, Code, Chapters 9-10
• LMMS pp. 859-891, excerpting
  • Playboy Enterprises v. Webbworld, 991 F.Supp. 543 (N.D. Tex. 1997)
  • RTC v. Netcom, 907 F.Supp. 1361 (N.D. Cal. 1995)
• A&M Records v. Napster, 239 F.3d 1004 (9th Cir. 2001)
• LMMS pp. 903-912, Recording Industry Association of America v. Diamond Multimedia Systems, 180 F.3d 1071 (9th Cir. 1999)
• Peer-to-Peer Copying, Berkman Center ILAW module
• 17 U.S.C. 512, DMCA Safe Harbor
• optional: For more on one use of the safe-harbor, see
  • Church, DMCA, and too many missing links
  • Church v. Google
  • Church v. Google, round 2

Week 7: Anticircumvention

• Who Will Own Your Next Good Idea, Charles C. Mann, Atlantic Monthly, September 1998

  Copy Protection Through Trusted Systems

• Trusted Systems, Mark Stefik, Scientific American
• 17 U.S.C. 1201, anticircumvention
• 17 U.S.C. 107, fair use
• LMMS 891-902, Samuelson, Intellectual Property and the Digital Economy: Why the Anti-Circumvention Regulations Need to Be Revised
• Universal v. Corley, 273 F.3d. 429, (2d Cir. 2001).
• browse Trusted Computing Platform Alliance website
• browse Gallery of CSS Descramblers, David S. Touretzky, CMU

  Copyleft moved to week 8

Optional Further Reading:
• A Right to Read Anonymously: A Closer Look at Copyright Management in Cyberspace, Julie Cohen, 28 Conn. L. Rev. 981 (1996)
• Fair Use Vs. Fared Use: The Impact of Automated Rights Management on Copyright's Fair Use Doctrine, Tom W. Bell, 76 N. Carolina L. Rev. 557 (1998)

Week 8: "Just Say Yes to Licensing": Doing Business Online

• Lessig, Code, Chapter 8
Shrinkwrap, Clickwrap, and Contract
• LMMS pp. 480-495, ProCD v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3d 1447 (7th Cir. 1996)
• Click OK to Agree, James Gleick, New York Times Magazine, 10 May 1998
• Specht v. Netscape Communications Corp., -- F.3d -- (2d Cir. October 1, 2002)
• Order in Ticketmaster Corp. v. Tickets.com, Inc. (C.D. Cal., March 27, 2000)
  Find the site's terms of service on the Ticketmaster homepage (linked here). Do they form a contract with the reader?

  Electronic Signatures

• E-SIGN, 106th Congress S.761

  Copyleft

• GNU General Public License
• browse Philosophy of the GNU Project
• optional The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond
• optional Microsoft's Passport Terms of Use

Week 9: Privacy

• Lessig Code, Chapter 11 "Privacy"
• LMMS pp. 991-1002, In re GeoCities, Federal Trade Commission
• Cookies and clickstreams: an introduction
• Browse the TRUSTe website
• Privacy Watchdog Declines to Pursue Microsoft, a Backer, Jeri Clausing, New York Times
• The Platform for Privacy Preferences, Joseph Reagle and Lorrie Faith Cranor
• skim P3P and Privacy on the Web FAQ, World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
• P3P's Arrival Raises Concerns That Tool May Create Liability, Drive Away Site Traffic, BNA Electronic Commerce & Law Report, October 3, 2001

  Optional further reading:

• Benjamin Wright's Disavow P3P page
• Information Privacy in Cyberspace Transactions, Jerry Kang, 50 Stan.L.Rev. 1193 (1998)
• Lex Informatica: The Formulation of Information Policy Rules Through Technology, Joel R. Reidenberg, 76 Tex.L.Rev. 553 (1998) (alternate PDF version)

Week 10: Domain Names and Cybersquatting

• LMMS pp. 799-834, excerpting
  • Panavision International, L.P. v. Toeppen, 141 F.3d 1316 (9th Cir. 1998)
  • Avery-Dennison Corp. v. Sumpton
  • Planned Parenthood Federation of America v. Bucci
• ICANN's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP)
  • Madonna Ciccone, p/k/a Madonna v. Dan Parisi and "Madonna.com", WIPO Case No. D2000-0847
• Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA), 15 U.S.C. 1125(d)

For further reading (optional):

• The DNS Wars: Trademarks and The Internet Domain Name System, Jessica Litman, 4 Small & Emerg. Bus. L. 149 (2000)
• WIPO RFC3: The Recognition of Rights and the Use of Names in the Internet Domain Name System
• Rough Justice: An Analysis of ICANN's Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy, Milton Mueller
• Fair.com?: An Examination of the Allegations of Systemic Unfairness in the ICANN UDRP, Michael Geist

Week 11: Alternatives to Intellectual Property

Trespass and SPAM
• LMMS pp. 959-970, CompuServe Inc. v. Cyber Promotions, Inc., 962 F.Supp. 1015 (S.D. Ohio 1997)
• Intel v. Hamidi: Intel Says Spamming is Trespass, Wired News
• MAPS Wins First-Round in Spam Case, August 9, 2000, InternetNews
• MAPS RBL Rationale (the RBL is the "Realtime Blackhole List"
• eBay, Inc. v. Bidder's Edge, Inc. 100 F. Supp. 2d 1058 (ND Cal. 2000)

  Links, Frames, and Metatags
  

• LMMS 912-918, 835-854

Week 12: Monopolies in Cyberspace

• LLMS pp. 30-37, The Economics of Computer Software and Network Markets
  
• LMMS pp. 624-626, Note on Standards, Interoperability, and Standard-Setting Organizations
• Could Java Change Everything? The competitive propriety of a proprietary standard., Mark A. Lemley and David McGowan, 520 PLI/Pat 453
• United States v. Microsoft, Summary of District Court rulings, November 1, 2002
• Europe's Microsoft Alternative, Washington Post, Nov. 2 (alternate site)

• Patents: LMMS pp. 312-321, Business Methods Patents
• Amazon.com, Inc. v. barnesandnoble.com, Inc.
  • Preliminary injunction
  • and Federal Circuit reversal, 2001 U.S. App. LEXIS 2163 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 14, 2001).

• optional browse the MSDOJ web archive

Week 13: Security, Crime, and Encryption

• Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. 1030
• LMMS pp. 971-990, United States v. Morris, United States v. Riggs
• LMMS pp. 1007-1024, Bernstein v. United States Department of Justice, 176 F.3d 1132 (9th Cir. 1999)

Week 14: Conclusion: Digital Music Case Study

• To be determined!

Last updated: October 2002