Intellectual Property Law

Cybersieves

By Tim Armstrong, Derek Bambauer, and William McGeveran.

My article Cybersieves is now available in the Duke Law Journal. The team at Duke did a superb job editing and improving the piece, and I’m grateful. The abstract is:

This Article offers a process-based method to assess Internet censorship that is compatible with different value sets about what content should be blocked. Whereas China?s Internet censorship receives considerable attention, censorship in the United States and other democratic countries is largely ignored. The Internet is
increasingly fragmented by nations? different value judgments about what content is unacceptable. Countries differ not in their intent to censor material?from political dissent in Iran to copyrighted songs in America?but in the content they target, how precisely they block it, and how involved their citizens are in these choices. Previous scholars have analyzed Internet censorship from values-based perspectives, sporadically addressing key principles such as openness, transparency, narrowness, and accountability. This Article is the first to unite these principles into a coherent methodology. Drawing upon scholarship in deliberative democracy, health policy, labor standards, and cyberlaw, this Article applies this new framework to contentious debates about sales of censorship technology by Western companies, public law regulation of these transactions, and third-party analysis of Internet censorship.

Full post as published by Info/Law on December 05, 2009 (boomark / email).