Want to Know What I Did This Summer? A Roundup of My Projects During the Pandemic Summer

I had Spring semester off from teaching, so I was on “summer” break all of 2020. That break is over now; I’m already a week-and-a-half through the semester. I’ve completed numerous projects since the pandemic shutdown (which I’m dating as March 10, when I took my last airplane flight), some of which I have not previously announced here, so this post will round up what I’ve been doing and what you might have missed.

Books

• Published the 2020 edition of my Internet Law casebook.
• Published the 5th edition of the Advertising and Marketing Law casebook with Rebecca Tushnet.
• Publishing a new ebook in a couple of weeks (big announcement forthcoming).

Scholarship

• Fully updated my overview of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) (on its way to becoming my most downloaded SSRN posting ever)
• Published Copyright’s Memory Hole in the BYU Law Review (co-authored with Jessica Silbey). This project took over 4 years! The article explores the intersection of copyright law and privacy/reputation law, and it shows how privacy and reputational motivations can prompt some people to weaponize copyright law for anti-social purposes.
• Published The U.K. Online Harms White Paper and the Internet’s Cable-ized Future in the Ohio State Technology Law Journal. This short piece is a pivotal piece in my scholarship. It describes what happens when Web 2.0 (the era of UGC) collapses–a virtually certain outcome at this point–and is eclipsed by Web 3.0, which will look a lot like Netflix or the cable industry.
• Published How Section 230 Enhances the First Amendment as an American Constitution Society (ACS) Issue Brief. This is an updated, expanded, and reorganized version of last year’s piece, Why Section 230 Is Better Than the First Amendment, which explains how Section 230 offers critical substantive and procedural benefits that the First Amendment does not provide.
• Published a chapter providing a (relatively) succinct overview of Section 230 in a 2020 book, The Oxford Handbook of Online Intermediary Liability.
• My 2018 essay, Of Course the First Amendment Protects Google and Facebook (and It’s Not a Close Question), was republished in a 2020 book, The Perilous Public Square.
• Published Americans Would Probably Love Section 230—If They Understood It as part of a report prepared by the Knight Foundation and Gallup.

Policy-Related Blog Posts

Normally I do about 125 blog posts a year. So far this year, Venkat and I, and guest bloggers, have already published about that many posts, so it’s been a high-volume year for blogging. Of those posts, I’m highlighting the policy-related posts because they are longer, and take much more time to write, than my typical posts:

• Comments on NTIA’s Petition to the FCC Seeking to Destroy Section 230 (3100 words)
• The EARN IT Act Has Gotten Even More Terrible. So Of Course It’s Moving Forward (1500 words)
• While Our Country Is Engulfed By Urgent Must-Solve Problems, Congress Is Working Hard to Burn Down Section 230 (2300 words)
• Comments on the “Platform Accountability and Consumer Transparency Act” (the “PACT Act”) (5400 words)
• A Review of the “Final” CCPA Regulations from the CA Attorney General (3300 words)
• Trump’s “Preventing Online Censorship” Executive Order Is Pro-Censorship Political Theater (5800 words)
• Recap of the USDOJ’s Section 230 Roundtable (1500 words)
• The EARN IT Act Partially Repeals Section 230, But It Won’t Help Children (2900 words)

I list the word count in part because writing each and every one of those words for each and every one of those posts was 100% joyless.

Other Projects

• Announced the Trust & Safety Professional Association (TSPA) and Trust & Safety Foundation (TSF)
• Converted my Internet Law course to teach it online-only. In preparation of this, I took *two* online courses this summer teaching me how to teach online.
• Launched Santa Clara Law’s Privacy Law Initiative with $750,000 of gifts. We hired an incoming managing director for the initiative who we’ll announce shortly. We also hired Lourdes Turrecha as our Privacy Law Fellow. She will be adding a new course on Privacy Tech to our privacy curriculum.
• Contributed to a Supreme Court filing in Malwarebytes v. Enigma Software.
• Filed a third set of comments with the CA DOJ regarding the CCPA
• Sent a letter to Congress on behalf of 46 Internet and media law academics to Congress regarding Section 230’s benefits (co-authored with David Levine)

Also, two pre-shutdown op-eds that I haven’t previously mentioned on the blog:

• Should Amazon Be Responsible When Its Vendors’ Products Turn Out to Be Unsafe?, Wall Street Journal, February 28, 2020
• What We’ve Learned From California’s Consumer Privacy Act So Far, The Hill, January 11, 2020