Information Technology and the Law

The Supreme Court ruled today, by a 9-0 margin, that Grokster’s actions were illegal. I’ll post a link to the Court’s opinion here once it’s available.

The Supreme Court has said that it will announce decisions in all remaining cases, including Grokster, on Monday June 27.

Class members, feel free to post here about the decision if you get the urge.

For news about the case, and pointers to online discussions, check out my blog.

Don Snyder’s post predicting the outcome of the Grokster case was quoted in the New York Times today.

(1) The Verio court ruled that website Terms of Use (TOU) binding on a visitor, if the visitor knew that the TOU existed and that the TOU claimed to bind everyone who visited the site. Was this the correct conclusion?

(2) Does the Verio court’s trespass to chattels ruling go beyond the Bidder’s Edge ruling? If so, is the extension of trespass to chattels justified?

(3) Was the Verio court correct to find a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?

(4) Do you agree with the ruling in Eisenberg?

(5) Suppose that in Eisenberg, rather than sending the disabling code update through the mail on a floppy disk, the update had been delivered by downloading, after asking the system’s user to “click here to download updated software”. Should this change in the facts change the result of the case?

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(1) In thinking about whether to apply trespass principles to web pages, how much does it matter that people talk about pages using words like “site”, “visit” and “home” that are normally associated with real property?

(2) Do you agree with Hardy that traditional theories of property support the application of trespass principles to web sites?

(3) Burk argues that in the trespass to chattels cases, the courts, while pretending to apply trespass to chattels, are really creating a new kind of trespass tort for cyberspace. Is this the right interpretation of the cases we have read?

(4) Looking back on the trespass cases, and on Hardy and Burk, what is the best view of the scope and limits of cyber-trespass?

(1) In the Thrifty-Tel case, most people found the ruling against the Bezeneks unsurprising; but the judge’s rationale, based on trespass to chattels, surprised everyone . Do you think trespass to chattels is a good match for a case like this?

(2) Do you think it makes sense to extend trespass to chattels liability to a spammer like CyberPromotions?

(3) Some people argue that spam should be protected by free speech. Do you agree with this argument, in whole or even in part? Can you think of possible situations where anti-spam laws or court rulings might violate free speech principles? If so, where would you draw the line? (We haven’t studied free speech law much, so think normatively about this question.)

(4) Do you think it makes sense to extend trespass to chattels to web-crawling activities like those of Bidder’s Edge?

(5) In the Bidder’s Edge case, would it make any difference if you knew as a fact that eBay could easily have configured their web server to block requests from Bidder’s Edge?