Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Case Western Reserve Law Review

Volume

54

Publication Date

2003

Keywords

privacy, piracy, copyright, file-sharing, peer-to-peer, DMCA

Abstract

A few years ago, it was fanciful to imagine a world where intellectual property owners - such as record companies, software owners, and publishers - were capable of invading the most sacred areas of the home in order to track, deter, and control uses of their products. Yet, today, strategies of copyright enforcement have rapidly multiplied, each strategy more invasive than the last. This new surveillance exposes the paradoxical nature of the Internet: It offers both the consumer and creator a seemingly endless capacity for human expression - a virtual marketplace of ideas - alongside an insurmountable array of capacities for panoptic surveillance. As a result, the Internet both enables and silences speech, often simultaneously. This paradox, in turn, leads to the tension between privacy and intellectual property. Both areas of law face significant challenges because of technology's ever-expanding pace of development. Yet courts often exacerbate these challenges by sacrificing one area of law for the other, by eroding principles of informational privacy for the sake of unlimited control over intellectual property. Laws developed to address the problem of online piracy - in particular, the DMCA - have been unwittingly misplaced, inviting intellectual property owners to create private systems of copyright monitoring that I refer to as piracy surveillance. Piracy surveillance comprises extrajudicial methods of copyright enforcement that detect, deter, and control acts of consumer infringement. In the past, legislators and scholars have focused their attention on other, more visible methods of surveillance relating to employment, marketing, and national security. Piracy surveillance, however, represents an overlooked fourth area that is completely distinct from these other types, yet incompletely theorized, technologically unbounded, and, potentially, legally unrestrained. The goals of this Article are threefold: first, to trace the origins of piracy surveillance through recent jurisprudence involving copyright; second, to provide an analysis of the tradeoffs between public and private enforcement of copyright; and third, to suggest some ways that the law can restore a balance between the protection of copyright and civil liberties in cyberspace. This paper was selected as the winning entry for the 2004 Yale Law School Cybercrime and Digital Law Enforcement Conference writing competition, sponsored by the Yale Law School Information Society Project and the Yale Journal of Law and Technology

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