H1 2013 Quick Links, Part 4 (Miscellaneous)
By Eric Goldman and Jake McGowan
CFAA/Trespass
* My colleague Kyle Graham traces the early history of California Penal Code Sec. 502.
* Andrew Sellars on the Aaron Schwartz prosecution and Rep. Lofgren’s proposed Aaron’s Law. Related blog post.
Consumer Protection
* Interesting 2nd Circuit ruling on Priceline and online price discrimination.
* News.com: Szoka and Manne, Microsoft, the EU fine, and a browser ballot no one missed
* Kai Falkenberg: Why Rating Your Doctor Is Bad For Your Health.
* Red Tape: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: success or failure?
* The Recorder: Northern District of California courts are seeing lots of litigation over food labels.
* WSJ: Feathers Fly as New Rules Loom for Kids’ Apps. Related blog post.
Advertising
* Amazon may be cooking up its own ad network.
* Bank of America and other financial services companies are moving into Groupon’s space.
* New ad format: “Men Can Now Earn Money By Placing Ads In Their Beards Via ‘Beardvertising.’” Related blog post.
Miscellaneous
* Suicide bomber blown up prematurely due to untimely spam text.
* Salon: How Netflix is turning viewers into puppets.
* Forbes: Airbnb And The Unstoppable Rise Of The Share Economy.
* Ronen and Zarsky, Queues in Law, Iowa Law Review. Interesting article on a theme that comes up frequently on the blog (see, e.g., Ticketmaster v. RMG). Abstract:
“First in, first out” (FIFO) is an allocation principle, whereby resources are allocated to interested parties in their order of entry. FIFO and its close relatives, “first come, first served” and “first-in-time, first-in-right,” have numerous legal applications. These range from traditional private law disputes concerning ownership, secured transactions, and nuisances, through more extensive allocations, as in the cases of employees’ seniority benefits, mass torts, and military discharge, all the way to social and organizational practices regulated by law, such as organ allocation policies, event ticket sales, and data transfers over the internet. Yet although FIFO is an omnipresent and overarching principle in law, it has never been recognized or analyzed as such in legal literature.
The Article aims to fill this surprising theoretical gap. Its purpose and novelty are threefold. First, it constructs an innovative and comprehensive theoretical framework — integrating fairness and efficiency — for assessing FIFO’s role in resource allocation. Second, the Article highlights the prevalence of FIFO in law, by analyzing and critically evaluating its role in a wide array of legal contexts through this theoretical prism. Third, it substantiates a jurisprudentially provocative thesis: while FIFO can be similarly applied in numerous contexts, it has no consistent set of justifications for all applications. Its rationalization in law must be highly varied and context-specific. The Article’s seminal contributions provide a novel and robust foundation for numerous future projects, theoretical and empirical alike.
* News.com: Adobe releases source code for 1990 version of Photoshop.
* Interesting discussion about Barnes & Noble’s negotiations with Simon & Schuster.
* Reuters: UPS to forfeit $40 million over illegal online pharmacy shipments. Son of SOPA strikes again! Now, we are deputizing common carriers. Related blog post.
* U.S. v. Price, 2013 WL 1277297 (4th Cir. March 29, 2013): Each email recipient counts as a separate distribution of child pornography for sentencing purposes.