Zeran v. AOL Paper Posted

2009-03-18T12:47:06-07:00

I normally would post my work here for posterity when I finished it, but my latest assignment was actually due online as a Wikipedia article.

I chose to flesh out the Zeran v. AOL article, and man was it a lot of work. You take for granted the amount of labor that goes into a Wikipedia article until you write one yourself.

The case itself is pretty interesting, if I do say so myself. It’s one of the main cases that granted immunity to websites from the postings of third parties. What happened was that somebody posted some inflammatory T-shirts on an AOL bulletin board in 1995, and put down Kenneth Zeran’s name and phone number. He got hundreds of phone calls threatening and berating him, and decided to sue AOL as a result for distributing defamatory materials.

Unfortunately for Zeran though, between the time that the materials were posted, and the time that he sued, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, which pretty much covers AOL’s back (and google’s, and yahoo’s, and youtube’s, and pretty much everybody else’s).

Sucks to be Zeran, but in the words of one article on the subject, “It…illustrates a hard fact of life: Sometimes there is no legal remedy for those who suffer wrongs.”

Interestingly, after all this, Zeran’s phone number is still on whitepages.com. I wonder if he knows…

The Interactions of Law and Code

2009-01-22T10:35:59-08:00

For my new Cyberlaw course, we were assigned a reading by Lawrence Lessig called The Law of the Horse. In it, he writes about how code can control law, and vise versa. He makes some good points that are intuitive yet bear saying nonetheless. Cyberspace as it currently exists is a largely unregulated domain. People can use it pretty much anonymously, so accountability is pretty limited. Lessig argues that this is because of the architecture of the Internet as it has been created by programmers.

As the Net grows, as its regulatory power increases, as its power as a source of values becomes established, the values of real-space sovereigns will at first lose out. In many cases, no doubt, that is a very good thing. But there is no reason to believe that it will be a good thing generally or indefinitely. There is nothing to guarantee that the regime of values constituted by code will be a liberal regime; and little reason to expect that an invisible hand of code writers will push it in that direction. Indeed, to the extent that code writers respond to the wishes of commerce, a power to control may well be the tilt that this code begins to take. Understanding this tilt will be a
continuing project of the law of cyberspace.

So in other words, cyberspace is a good place these days, ruled by fairly liberal ideals, but there is no guarantee that it will stay that way, and we may eventually need more regulation.

Michael Jay Lissner

Zeran v. AOL Paper Posted

The Interactions of Law and Code