Wed. May 7, 2008: James Grimmelmann on Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: Old Problems and New
The Center for Research on Computation and Society continues its
weekly lunch seminar:
CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar
Date: Wednesday, 7 May 2008
Time: 12:00pm-1:30 pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119
Topic: Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: Old Problems and New
Solutions
Speaker: James Grimmelmann
Abstract:
“All persons are presumed to know the law,” goes the maxim, but that
presumption only makes sense if in fact the law is readily available
for all persons to learn. Today, one the largest threats to
accessible law comes from a surprising source: copyright. Publishers
claim copyright in their selection, arrangement, and annotations of
laws; private authors of model codes go them one better and claim
copyright in the text of the laws themselves. In so doing, they frame
the issue in terms of intellectual property’s classic tradeoff:
incentives for creation versus public access to the results. And
they’re not wrong, either: historically, exclusive rights have been an
important component in creating legal publishing institutions. Today,
however, we can and should go further. Just as the Internet has
helped solve other problems of information production by providing
near-costless distribution and catalyzing large-scale collaboration,
it’s also opening up new possibilities for making the law accessible.
This talk will:
* Discuss some recent cases of copyright claims to “the law.”
* Put them in the historical context of legal publishing technology.
* Explain why computers and the Internet shift the proper balance
towards more open access.
* Suggest some tentative heuristics for thinking about legal
copyrights.
James Grimmelmann is Associate Professor at New York Law School and a member of its Institute for Information Law and Policy. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was Editor-in-Chief of LawMeme and a member of the Yale Law Journal. Prior to law school, he received an A.B. in computer science from Harvard College and worked as a programmer for Microsoft. He has served as a Resident Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale, as a legal intern for Creative Commons and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and as a law clerk to the Honorable Maryanne Trump Barry of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
He studies how the law governing the creation and use of computer software affects the distribution of wealth, power, and freedom in society. As a lawyer and technologist, he aims to help these two groups speak intelligibly to each other. He writes on such topics as intellectual property, virtual worlds, search engines, electronic commerce, online privacy, and the use of software as a regulator. Recent publications include The Structure of Search Engine Law, 93 Iowa L. Rev. 1 (2007), Virtual Borders, First Monday (Feb. 2006), and Regulation by Software, 114 Yale L.J. 1719 (2005). In 2007, he was named one of Interview Magazine’s “New Pop A-List: 50 To Watch (Age 30 or Under).”
He has been blogging since 2000 at the Laboratorium (http://laboratorium.net/). His home page is at http://james.grimmelmann.net/.