The Information Society

Professor Jack M. Balkin

Yale Law School

Syllabus

Note: All of the readings for the course are available on the Internet except for the three assigned books, Jack M. Balkin and Beth Simone Noveck, eds., The State of Play (2006); C. Edwin Baker, Media, Markets, and Democracy (2002); C. Edwin Baker, Media Concentration and Democracy (2006), and Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (2006), copies of which you should purchase for the course.

After the assigned readings for each week I will sometimes also list a set of additional readings on related subjects if you are particularly interested in the subject. They are optional.

Part I: Introduction

1. Code (1/29/2007)

• Universal Studios v. Corley
  

• Julian Dibbell, A Rape in Cyberspace

Additional Readings

• Lawrence Lessig, The Law of the Horse: What Cyberlaw Might Teach
  

• James Grimmelman, Regulation by Software

2. Democratic Culture (1/30/2007)

• Jack M. Balkin, Digital Speech and Democratic Culture

Additional Reading

• Yochai Benkler, Property, Commons, and the First Amendment: Towards a Core Common Infrastructure (Brennan Center White Paper, March 2001)

Part II: Virtual Worlds and Social Software

3. Regulating Virtual Worlds (2/5/2007)

• The State of Play, pp. 13-186

4. Social Software (2/6/2007)

• The State of Play, pp. 189-216
  

• Clay Shirky, A Group is its Own Worst Enemy
  
• T.L. Taylor, Beyond Management: Considering Participatory Design and Governance in Player Culture
  
• danah boyd, Friendster Lost Steam. Is MySpace Just a Fad?
  
• danah boyd, Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites
  
• danah boyd, Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace
  
• Beth Simone Noveck, A Democracy of Groups
  
• Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, Chapter 10, pp. 356-377

Additional Readings

• Mikael Jakobsson & T.L. Taylor, The Sopranos Meets Everquest: Social Networking in Massively Multiplayer Online Games
  

• Marvel Enters. v. NCSoft Corp., No CV 04-9253, 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 8448 (C.D. Cal. 2005) (trademark and copyright implications of game-provided character design tools)
  
• danah boyd, Facebook's "Privacy Trainwreck": Exposure, Invasion, and Drama
  
• Clay Shirky, RELATIONSHIP: A vocabulary for describing relationships between people
  
• Adam Mathes, Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata

Part III-- Media and Information Policy

5. Audiences and Markets (2/12/2007 and 2/13/2007)

• C. Edwin Baker, Media, Markets, and Democracy

6. Media Concentration and the Role of the Internet (2/19/2007 and 2/20/2007)

• C. Edwin Baker, Media Concentration and Democracy

Part IV -- Content Control over the Internet

7. Collateral Censorship and Control over Conduits (2/26/2007 and 2/27/2007)

A. Section 230

• Jack M. Balkin, Free Speech and Hostile Environments
  

• Internet Service Provider Liability Exception 47 USC §230
  
• Barrett v. Rosenthal (California Supreme Court 2006) [Additional version]
  
• Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights under the Law, Inc. v. Craigslist, Inc., 1:06-CV-00657 (N.D. Ill. Nov. 14, 2006)
  
• Wikipedia, The Sigenthaler Controvery
  
• Doe v. MySpace, (W,D. Tex., February 13, 2007)

B. The DMCA

• Summary of Digital Millennium Copyright Act Liability Provisions
  

• Online Policy Group v. Diebold
  
• RIAA v. Verizon

C. Policy Justifications for Regulating Conduits

• Jonathan Zittrain, A History of Online Gatekeeping
  

• Doug Lichtman, On holding Internet Service Providers Accountable

Additional Readings

• Zeran v. America Online (4th Cir. 1997) [Alternate version]
  

• Blumenthal v. Drudge, 992 F.Supp. 44 (D.D.C. 1998) [Alternate version]
  
• Ken S. Myers, Wikimmunity: Fitting the Communications Decency Act to Wikipedia
  
• Douglas Lichtman and Eric Posner, Holding Internet Service Providers Accountable, SSRN

8. Filtering and Rating Systems (3/5/2007 and 3/6/2007)

• Reno v. ACLU (Reno I), 521 U.S. 844 (1997) (The CDA Case) [Additional version]
  

• ACLU v. Ashcroft (COPA case)(3d Circuit)
  
• Ashcroft v. ACLU (COPA case)(S. Ct.)
  
• CDT v. Pappert
  
• Jack M. Balkin et al., Filtering the Internet, a Best Practices Model
  
• United States v. ALA

Additional Readings

• ACLU, Fahrenheit 451.2, Is Cyberspace Burning
  

• COPA Commission Final Report
  
• Tim Wu, The World Trade Law of Internet Filtering, SSRN
  
• Jonathan Ezor, Busting Blocks: Appropriate Legal Remedies for Wrongful Inclusion in Spam Filters Under U.S. Law, SSRN

Part V -- Copyright and Free Expression

9. Copyright and Free Speech (3/12/2007)

A. Free Culture

• Eldred v. Ashcroft
  

• Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture [here], [here], and [here]
  
• Lawrence Lessig, Copyrighting the President

B. Doctrinal Problems

• Suntrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co.
  

• Castle Rock Entertainment, Inc. v. Carol Publishing Group, Inc.
  
• Worldwide Church of God v. Philadelphia Church of God, Inc.
  
• Neil Netanel, Locating Copyright Within The First Amendment Skein

10. Theories of Free Speech and Copyright (3/13/2007)

• C. Edwin Baker, First Amendment Limits On Copyright
  

• David McGowan, Why The First Amendment Cannot Dictate Copyright Policy
  
• Jed Rubenfeld, The Freedom of Imagination: Copyright's Constitutionality
  
• Rebecca Tushnet, Copy this Essay

Additional Readings on Copyright and Freedom of Speech

• Benkler, Free As The Air To Common Use: First Amendment Constraints On Enclosure of The Public Domain
  

• Tushnet, Copyright As A Model For Free Speech Law [From B.C. L. Rev. Website]
  
• Constitutional Law Professor's Brief in Eldred v. Reno
  
• Landes and Posner, The Political Economy of Intellectual Property Law
  
• Hal Varian, Copying and Copyright
  
• Liebowitz and Margolis, Seventeen Famous Economists Weigh in on Copyright

11. Open Science (3/26/2007)

• Lecture by Harold Varmus on Open Science issues, Room 127, 4:30pm

Part VI -- Digital Control of Information (3/27/2007)

12. Digital Rights Management and Open Access

(Guest Lecturer-- Eddan Katz, Executive Director, Information Society Project)

A. Basic Considerations

• Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas (selections)
  

• Niva Elkin-Koren, It's All About Control
  
• Yochai Benkler, From Consumers to Users: Shfiting the Deeper Structures of Regulation Towards Sustainable Commons and User Access

B. The DMCA

• Universal Studios v. Corley
  

• Chamberlain Group v. Skylink Technologies
  
• Recent Exemptions to DMCA (U.S. Copyright Office)

C. Open Access and Network Neutrality

• Tim Wu and Christopher Yoo exchange on Network Neutrality, Keeping the Internet Neutral, in Legal Affairs
  

• Jack Balkin, The Democratic Case for Network Neutrality

Additional Readings

• National Cable and Telecommunications Association v. Brand X
  

• FCC Report and Order (September 23, 2005) (order eliminating mandated sharing requirements for DSL companies)

Part VII -- Innovation Policy

13. Copyright, the Entertainment Industry, and Innovation Policy (4/2/2007)

• MGM v. Grokster (Supreme Court opinion)
  

• Sony Corp v. Universal City Studios
  
• Viacom v. YouTube complaint
  
• Doug Lichtman, The Case Against YouTube
  
• Terry Fisher, Promises To Keep (Chapter 6)
  
• Neil Weinstock Netanel, Impose a Noncommercial Use Levy to Allow Free Peer-to-Peer File

Additional Readings

• Wu, Copyright's Communications Policy
  

• The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis
  
• Liebowitz, Will MP3 downloads Annihilate the Record Industry? The Evidence so Far
  
• A&M v. Napster
  
• In Re Aimster
  
• Clay Shirky, File Sharing Goes Social
  
• Clay Shirky, Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content

14. Search Engines and Archives (4/3/2007)

A. Search Engines (Guest Lecturer: James Grimmelmann, ISP Fellow/New York Law School)

• Field v. Google
  

• Perfect 10 v. Google
  
• Jonathan Band, The Google Print Library Project: A Copyright Analysis
  
• Search King v. Google
  
• Rescuecom v. Google
  
• James Grimmelmann, The Structure of Search Engine Law [alternative version]

Additional Readings

• Langdon v. Google
  

• Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation [alternative version]
  
• Frank Pasquale, Ratings, Rankings and Reductionism
  
• Eric Goldman, Search Engine Bias and Demise of Search Engine Utopianism [alternative version]

15. Standards Setting and Control over Digital Broadcasting (4/9/2007)

A. Standards Setting and Innovation Policy (Guest Lecturer: Laura DeNardis, ISP Fellow)

• Christopher S. Gibson, Technology Standards - New Technical Barriers to Trade?
  

• Mark A. Lemley, Ten Things to do About Patent Holdup of Standards (and One Not
  
• To)
  
• Pam Samuelson, Questioning Copyright in Standards
  
• Carl Cargill, Eating Our Seed Corn: A Standards Parable for Our Time
  
• Alan Davidson, John Morris, and Robert Courtney, Strangers in a Strange Land:
  
• Public Interest Advocacy and Internet Standards
  
• Rishab Ghosh, An Economic Basis for Open Standards

B. The Broadcast Flag and the Broadast Treaty (Guest Lecturer: Shyamkrishna Balganesh, ISP Student Fellow)

1. The Broadcast Flag

• ALA v. FCC [alternative version]
  

• H.R. 4569: The Digital Transition Content Security Act of 2005
  
• Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Communications' Copyright Policy

2. The WIPO Broadcast Treaty

• Draft Treaty Version SCCR/15/2
  

• Shyamkrishna Balganesh, The Social Costs of Property Rights in Broadcast (and Cable) Signals
  
• Patricia Akester, The Draft WIPO Broadcasting Treaty and its Impact on Freedom of Expression

Additional Readings

• CDT Primer on the Broadcast Flag
  

• EFF Primer on the Broadcast Flag
  
• Public Knowledge on the Broadcast Flag
  
• Susan Crawford, The Biology of the Broadcast Flag

Part VIII -- Privacy

16. Privacy and the First Amendment (4/10/2007)

• Note on Data Privacy (including selections from Volokh, Freedom of Speech and Information Privacy, and Schwartz, Free Speech versus Information Privacy)
  

• C. Edwin Baker, Autonomy and Informational Privacy
  
• Neil M. Richards, Reconciling Data Privacy and the First Amendment
  
• Bartnicki v. Vopper
  
• Gonzales v. Google [N.D. Calif. 2006 Discussing privacy interests of users against subpoenas.]

Part IX-- The Political Economy of Information Production

17. The Political Economy of Information Production (4/16/2007 and 4/17/2007)

A. Open Source and Peer Production Models

• Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, Ch. 2-5, pp 35-175
  

• Steven Weber, The Political Economy of Open Source
  
• Beth Noveck, The Peer to Patent Project (Read the Project Summary and the FAQ)
  
• Cameron Marlow, Mor Naaman, danah boyd, and Marc Davis, HT06, Tagging Paper, Taxonomy, Flickr, Academic Article, ToRead

B. Wikipedia as a case study in peer production systems

• Aaron Swartz, Wikipedia at the Crossroads
  

• Roy Rosenzweig, Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the History of the Past, 93 Journal of American History 117
  
• Larry Sanger: Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge
  
• Clay Shirky, Larry Sanger, Citizendium, and the Problem of Expertise
  
• Clay Shirky, Social Facts, Expertise, Citizendium, and Carr
  
• Jim Giles, Internet Encylopaedias Go Head to Head

Additional Readings

• Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral And The Bazaar
  

• The Open Source Definition
  
• GNU General Public License
  
• BSD Open Source License
  
• Hahn, ed., Government Policy Toward Open Source Sotware
  
• Benkler, Freedom in the Commons: Toward a Political Economy of Information
  
• Benkler, Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm
  
• Benkler, Sharing Nicely: On shareable goods and the emergence of sharing as a modality of economic production

18. Access to Knowledge (4/23/2007)

• Yochai Benkler, Freedom in the Commons, Ch. 9, pp 301-355
  

• Amy Kapczynski, The Social Movement for Access to Knowledge
  
• Jack Balkin, What Is Access to Knowledge?
  
• Yochai Benkler, the The Idea of Access to Knowledge (Also look at the accompanying Powerpoint presentation)

Optional Readings

• Apunam Chander and Madhavi Sunder, The Romance of the Public Domain
  

• Margaret Chon, Intellectual Property and the Development Divide

Part X -- Journalism, Democracy and Politics

19. Participatory Journalism and the Blogosphere (4/24/2007)

• Dan Gilmore We the Media
  

• Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell The Power and Politics of Blogs
  
• Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell, Web of Influence

20. The Networked Public Sphere and Democracy (4/30/2007, 5/1/2007, 5/7/2007 and 5/8/2007)

• Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, Chapters 6-7, pp. 176-272
  

• Clay Shirky, Powerlaws and the Web
  
• Clay Shirky, The FCC, Power Laws and Inequality
  
• Clay Shirky, Is Social Software Bad for the Dean Campaign?
  
• Henry Farrell, Bloggers and Parties
  
• Cass Sunstein, "The Daily We," from Republic.com
  
• Responses to Sunstein
  
• Jack M. Balkin, What I Learned About Blogging in a Year
  
• Jack M. Balkin, The Internet and Democratic Organization
  
• Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance, The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 Election: Divided They Blog
  
• Ezter Hargatay, Cross-ideological conversations among bloggers
  
• Eszter Hargittai, Jason Gallo and Matthew Kane, Cross-Ideological Discussions among Top Conservative and Liberal Bloggers (on Blackboard)

Optional Readings

• A. Michael Froomkin, Habermas@discourse.net: Toward a Critical Theory of Cyberspace