Category Archives: Defamation and Privacy
Houser and Voss, ‘GDPR: The End of Google and Facebook or a New Paradigm in Data Privacy?’
ABSTRACT EU Data Protection Agencies have been vigorously enforcing violations of regional and national data protection law in recent years against US tech companies, but few changes have been made to their business model of exchanging free services for personal data. With the Cambridge Analytica debacle revealing how insufficient American privacy law is, we now […]
Przemysław Pałka, ‘Consumers, online environments, and privacy’
ABSTRACT Consumer privacy law is grounded in the paradigm of individuals’ control over their personal data. Controllers are expected to publish privacy policies, and individuals are expected to ‘self-manage’ their privacy. However, empirical studies demonstrate that consumers do not read privacy policies and that these documents often do not contain the information necessary to engage […]
‘Northern Ireland: “An Interim Law of Defamation?” The Statutory Review of the Defamation Act (Northern Ireland) 2022 in Context’
Midway through the Long Vacation, the Northern Ireland Department of Finance quietly published its statutorily mandated Report on the Review of the Defamation Act (Northern Ireland) 2022 (the Report). The appearance of the Report fulfils the requirement, in Section 11 of the Act, that the Department should ‘keep under review all relevant developments pertaining to […]
Jennifer Rothman, ‘Postmortem Publicity Rights at the Property-Personality Divide’
ABSTRACT In this essay, I consider what private law theory and its various understandings of property reveal about the right of publicity. I begin by identifying the current state of right of publicity laws and the ongoing confusion over the right’s status as property. I then consider what it would mean to take seriously the […]
John Weaver, ‘Artificial Intelligence and Governing the Life Cycle of Personal Data’
ABSTRACT With other countries making efforts to regulate and govern artificial intelligence (‘AI’), it was only a matter of time before American legislators began similar efforts. In December 2017, a bipartisan group of US senators and representatives introduced the Fundamentally Understanding the Usability and Realistic Evolution of Artificial Intelligence Act of 2017 (the ‘FUTURE of […]
Jie (Jeanne) Huang, ‘A System Without Ownership: How China’s New Data Property Rights System Will Impact Digital Trade’
ABSTRACT China announced an unprecedented data property rights system to promote data commercialization in December 2022 and issued implementation rules in 2023. The property rights system attempts to clarify data handlers’ rights over ‘big data’ (ie data derived or constituted from personal or nonpersonal data). It also establishes parameters for China’s regulations concerning data handlers […]
Eric Descheemaeker, ‘Legal Persons and the Right to Privacy’
ABSTRACT This article examines what the state of the law regarding the tortious protection of the privacy of corporations tells us about the concept of a legal person. Given that non-human persons are capable of having an interest in at least their informational privacy, logic would seem to dictate that they should be recognised such […]
Kar and Yu, ‘The Contractual Death and Rebirth of Privacy’
ABSTRACT This article proposes for the first time using ‘shared meaning analysis’ – a general method of contract interpretation first introduced by Professors Kar and Radin in ‘Pseudo-Contract and Shared Meaning Analysis’, 132 Harvard Law Review 1135 (2019) – to determine when the text in an online privacy policy contributes a legally enforceable term to […]
‘With all these defamation lawsuits, what ever happened to free speech?’
It seems like the dust barely settles from the latest high-profile defamation stoush before the next set of litigants straps on the gloves and steps into the ring. Many of these cases raise eyebrows — and questions. Was that story about him? Does anyone remember that tweet? Wasn’t it just harmless banter? Didn’t she respond […]
Preminger and Kugl, ‘The Right of Publicity can save actors from Deepfake Armageddon’
ABSTRACT The entertainment industry is being rocked by the potential of deepfakes. A deepfake of a performer can appear to be the performer in a way that no CGI or makeup-enhanced stunt double possibly could, potentially serving as direct competition for them or deceiving audiences. It is now possible to have dead actors star in […]