Keep an I on the Sky: E-Discovery Risks Forecasted for Apple’s iCloud
Daniel Carmeli Some things have not changed since the fire of March 14, 1873. The competing interests of clients seeking convenient storage on one side against providers seeking protection from liability on the other continue to pervade the legal landscape. Naturally, some things have changed, such as the items being stored, the nature of the storage facilities, the associated risks, and the rules governing preservation obligations. Physical property has been replaced with electronically stored information (“ESI”) and warehouses now take the form of remote data servers. And in addition to longstanding conventional risks, such as accidental fire, companies now face...
Geographical Indications: Which Way Should ASEAN Go?
Malobika Banerji “Geographical Indications‟ (hereafter GIs) under the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (hereafter TRIPS) has been the subject of vigorous scholarly debate across the world in the last decade. The TRIPS is the first multilateral text providing for a comprehensive protection of GIs. It provides for (a) a base-level protection for geographic indications related to all products; (b) an additional protection for wines and spirits; and (c) an extra-additional protection only for wines. The “extra-additional‟ protection accorded to wines has generated significant controversy and discussion. The TRIPS mandates the need to accord protection for each GI for wines...
Avoid the Rainy Day: Survey of U.S. Cloud Computing Caselaw
Fernando M. Pinguelo; Bradford W. Muller Cloud computing, a computer networking model that gives users on-demand access to shared software applications and data storage, is becoming increasingly popular among businesses and individuals. For example, if you use Google’s Gmail for your email and calendaring, or Snapfish for your online photo sharing and storage; or if your business remotely stores data with a third-party server provider like Salesforce, or uses Windows Azure to create and host web applications and services, you are already “floating in a cloud.” To provide guidance to those companies working within a cloud – or those considering...
A Safe Bet? State Control of Internet Gambling
Scott L. Jones Gambling has been a part of American life longer than the Constitution. The first recorded instance of gambling in the English colonies occurred in 1620 with horse races in Virginia. Shortly thereafter came the first instance of government in America addressing the issue of gambling when in 1621 the Plymouth Colony placed restrictions on gambling in that colony. Ever since that time, gambling has been regulated at both the federal and state levels. With the advent of the Internet, gambling regulations that do not anticipate the use of online gambling are quickly becoming outdated. As individual citizens...
File Sharing: A Tool for Innovation, or a Criminal Instrument?
Andrew Eichner The dawn of peer-to-peer networks and the subsequent rise of file sharing over the Internet have proved to be a considerable threat to the revenues of the Recording Industry Association of America (“RIAA”) and the international music community. While early music downloading across peer-to-peer networks on the Internet was largely limited “to college students with access to fast pipes and techno geeks sufficiently driven to search the Net for the latest Phish bootlegs,” the market for illegally downloaded music taken from file sharing websites has expanded to astronomic proportions and continues to do so even at present. The...
A Constitutional Right to Deceive?: The First Amendment Implications of Regulating Pay per Click
Peter T. Tschanz Despite Paid Placement’s utility from a marketing perspective, the practice has been sharply criticized. Some authors argue that a search engine’s failure to clearly segregate Sponsored Results leads many users to believe they are delivered based on relevancy alone. These authors argue that this misconception can only be corrected by incorporating uniform regulations for presenting Sponsored Results. Although these regulations are well-intentioned, requiring a normative framework for arranging Sponsored Results may come at a price. The right to freedom of speech necessarily includes the right not to speak. Imposing a regulatory framework for presenting Sponsored Results would...
The Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act: Innovation Must Come Before Price Competition
Robert N. Sahr In an effort to reduce the costs of medicine for patients, Congress must be especially careful not to impair the ability of the biotechnology industry to thrive by substantially diminishing profitability. Currently, the biotechnology industry is “still relatively nascent” and is largely fueled by venture capital investment. Of the approximately 1400 biotechnology companies operating in the United States today, only twenty are profitable. Many of these companies are small, with revenues of under a million dollars per year, and do not even have a product on the market yet. Leaders in the biotechnology industry have expressed concern...
“Indecent” Deception: The Role of Communications Decency Act § 230 in Balancing Consumer and Marketer Interests Online
Amy J. Tindell Should web hosts like Mindspring and online auction houses like eBay be held to the same standard as CSI, a brick-and-mortar flea market operator? Or does the Internet require special treatment due to its higher value as a vast source of information, communication, and social networking? On one hand, the Internet is a developing resource that the free market could shape without governmental regulation. Additionally, it is likely technologically infeasible for Mindspring or eBay to screen every vendor and product that passes through its virtual universe. On the other hand, consumers deserve protection from false and deceptive...
The Edge of Ethics in iParadigms
Michael G. Bennett In an attempt to stem a perceived rise in student plagiarism, educational institutions are increasingly turning to anti-plagiarism technologies. The use of these technological means to police student writings has been controversial, socially, politically, and legally. This article discusses the outcome of A.V. et al. v. iParadigms, to date the most important opinion on the legality of such technology’s use. The author examines the case in detail and presents arguments against the technology’s use, on the grounds that such use undermines educational policy by allowing the ethics of teachers to become a by-product of available technological means and...
Warrantless Search and Seizure of E-Mail and Methods of Panoptical Prophylaxis
Paul Ham U.S. citizens are in a constant battle for their rights to privacy, fighting the government’s increasingly pervasive surveillance and justicial needs. One area where court opinions conflict with the public’s expectation of privacy is over the realm of personal electronic communications. The general public believes electronic communications must be afforded a certain level of privacy that is not currently recognized by case law or statutes. Under current case law, warrantless searches and seizures of your personal e-mail are not prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment should be your source for protecting your e-mails when you are...