Copyright (c) 2009 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann Recent documents in James Grimmelmann en-us Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:15:32 PDT 3600 http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/25 http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/25 Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:47:53 PDT 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. James Grimmelmann Intellectual Property Search Engines http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/24 http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/24 Fri, 10 Apr 2009 09:25:46 PDT 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. James Grimmelmann Intellectual Property http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/23 http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/23 Sat, 31 Jan 2009 09:31:37 PST 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. James Grimmelmann Search Engines http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/22 http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/22 Fri, 30 Jan 2009 14:58:26 PST What is the sound of one party doing equity? James Grimmelmann Miscellaneous http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/21 http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/21 Thu, 22 Jan 2009 12:19:17 PST 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." James Grimmelmann Virtual Worlds http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/20 http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/20 Tue, 26 Aug 2008 05:40:53 PDT 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. James Grimmelmann Software and Law Privacy http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/19 http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/19 Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:19:27 PDT 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. James Grimmelmann Software and Law Search Engines http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/18 http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/18 Wed, 18 Jun 2008 08:36:41 PDT 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. James Grimmelmann Software and Law Intellectual Property http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/17 http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/17 Tue, 17 Jun 2008 11:49:30 PDT 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. James Grimmelmann Software and Law Privacy http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/16 http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/16 Fri, 31 Aug 2007 13:59:40 PDT 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. (HTML version available at http://james.grimmelmann.net/files/Library.markdown) James Grimmelmann Software and Law