On Thursday, August 23, 2001, at 04:43 PM, r.duke@freedom.net wrote:
I would have thought that new interpretations of things like federal and state jurisdictions would be needed. Given the arguments over the recent decision on Yahoo from France, I'd say there are questions to be answered. Is a company under your jurisdiction as soon as you can see its servers? Are ISPs carriers, or providers? What about their webservers, which store and provide, as opposed to simply carrying?
In the Yahoo case, how does U.S. law affect what France claims is true under their law? Apropos of what Greg said, in which recent cases actually going to trial in the U.S. is "new law" involved? Not the Bell case, not the Parker case, not even the Adobe case.
Tell me if I'm wildly off base - I don't mind, but it seems to me that at the moment, these issues are not obvious and written in stone.
Oh, I agree there are interesting issues...it's one reason I joined the Cyberia list of lawyers and professors and wannabees back around 1994-5. And back then, many of these issues were new to a lot of us all, even to the law professors (Volokh, Froomkin, Post, Lessig, that sort). But there just aren't a lot of these cases moving through the courts. The Napster case was the biggest recent such case, and yet it is hard to argue that there is any new law at issue. ("But, your honor, my client is not just setting up a flea market for trading stolen goods...he's using COMPUTERS to do it! That makes it different, you see...") Eventually there may be some new law, as some cases eventually reach the Supreme Court or as legislatures pass various laws. But is there "new law" for beginning lawyers to work on? Do the math. Cf. the Amateur Action case of the mid-90s for some insights into how Kentucky, IIRC, decided its laws applied to a site based in California. A junior lawyer in this case would not have been doing "Internet law." Technology will push the law more than lawyers will push the law. --Tim May