Public Affairs Discussion Group

Privacy and Online Social Networks

Jacqueline Lipton, J.D. - Professor and Associate Dean of Law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law




Friday April 1, 2011
12:30-1:30 p.m.
Crawford Hall - Room 9
Inamori Center
Case Western Reserve University

Concerns about privacy are deeply ingrained in both American culture and legal theory. Yet one has to wonder how concerns about invasion of privacy fit with developments in technology and communication. What are "reasonable expectations of privacy" in the world of Facebook and other social networks? Basic concepts come into question: Privacy in regard to whom? Do motivations matter? What makes information private? What conduct matters? What would a remedy be?

Professor Lipton, a leading scholar of law, technology, and especially cyberspace, will speak and lead a discussion.

There will be no parking available in the visitors lot next to Crawford Hall from March 29th until April 29th. A few of the handicapped parking spaces may still be available but space will be severely limited. Parking options for visitors from beyond campus include the Severance Hall parking garage on East Boulevard, the small lot on Adelbert Road just uphill from Euclid Ave, and other lots on campus.

More About Our Guest....

Professor Lipton joined the Case Western Reserve University School of Law faculty in 2001, having previously held positions in prominent law schools in the United Kingdom and Australia. Her writing and teaching is focused in the areas of commercial law, cyberlaw, and intellectual property law with a comparative/international focus. She has authored numerous law review articles in these areas, including recent publications in the Northwestern University Law Review, the Iowa Law Review, the UC Davis Law Review, the Boston College Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, the Washington and Lee Law Review, the Washington University Law Review, the Hastings Law Journal, the Wake Forest Law Review, the Florida Law Review, and the Cardozo Law Review (de novo inaugural online supplement). She is the co-author of the second and third editions of Cyberspace Law: Cases and Materials (Aspen, 2006 & 2010) with Professor Raymond Shih Ray Ku. She also authored Security Over Intangible Property (Thomson, 2000), the first text devoted solely to the issue of securitization of intangible property, including intellectual property. She is currently completing a text on Internet domain name governance issues with particular focus on the balance between trademark interests and free speech for the Edward Elgar International Intellectual Property series. Prior to her academic work, Professor Lipton held positions in several leading Australian commercial law firms, as well as serving as inhouse counsel for a major Australian bank. In the spring of 2010, Professor Lipton visited at the University of Florida Levin College of Law and served as Acting Director of its International Center for Automated Information Research (ICAIR).

As a commercial lawyer in Australia in the early 1990s, Professor Lipton became interested in the impact of new methods of electronic share trading on secured financing transactions involving marketable securities as collateral. She then became interested more generally in the evolution of secured finance practice in an age where potential collateral was increasingly becoming 'intangible', and often electronic.

Professor Lipton began to research and write significantly in this area initially from an Australian perspective and then with a more global outlook, incorporating law and practice from the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. Her scholarship in this area has included a number of law review articles in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia as well as a text, Security Over Intangible Property published by LBC/Thomson in Australia (2000). Professor Lipton also undertook significant research in this area in the course of completing my LL.M dissertation at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom (1998) and my Ph.D at Griffith University in Australia (2001).

Professor Lipton has taught and studied law in three jurisdictions - the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia - and over the years had become interested in the relationship between law and technology in a broader context. She has written much about shifting notions of "property" in the information age. Her more recent scholarship has focused on the concept and protection of "privacy" in the context of Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, and online social networks, including Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. IProfessor Lipton incorporates many related issues into her teaching and scholarship at CWRU and at the University of Florida. The subjects she currently teaches include Cyberlaw, Intellectual Property Survey, International Intellectual Property, and a seminar on Commercial Information and the Law which focuses on intellectual property, contract, tort, and privacy issues in the digital information age.

Friday Lunch Upcoming Topics and Speakers:

April 8: Special Inamori Center Event.

April 15: Mark Naymik, Reporter, Cleveland Plain Dealer: Ohio's Budget Battle

April 22: Jon Groetzinger, Visiting Professor of Law and Director, China Legal Programs: Developing the Legal Profession in China.

The Friday Lunch discussions are held on the lower (ground) level of Crawford Hall. Visitors with mobility issues may find it easiest to take advantage of special arrangements we have made. On most Fridays, a few parking spaces in the V.I.P. lot in between Crawford Hall and Amasa Stone Chapel are held for participants in the lunch discussion. Overflow parking is also available in the Severance Hall parking garage on East Boulevard.

Visitors then can avoid walking up the hill to the first floor of Crawford by entering the building on the ground level, through the garage area under the building. The further door on the left in that garage will be left unlocked during the period before the Friday lunch. On occasion, parking will be unavailable because of other university events.

For more information about these and other Center for Policy Studies programs, please see http://policy.case.edu.

March 25, 2011

Upcoming Events

Creativity, Copyright, and the Universal Library: Romanticism and Writing at Times of Media Revolution

Adrian Johns, Ph.D., Professor of History at the University of Chicago, April 12, 2011, 4:00 p.m., Moot Courtroom (A59), Case Western Reserve University School of Law, 11075 East Blvd., Cleveland, Ohio. Organized by the Center for the Study of Writing in conjunction with the Department of English, the Department of History, the School of Law, and the Kelvin Smith Library at Case Western Reserve University.

Google's ambition to produce a massive online 'library' of digitized books has provoked passionate reactions from the publishing industry, authors, and other groups. In fact, debates over the purpose and possible impact of 'universal' libraries are nothing new, and in the past such debates have had a significant impact on the constitution of the information economy itself. I want to draw attention to a particularly consequential conflict, which raged in the years around 1800. As publishing took on its modern form, and with the advent of new printing technologies, Britain's parliament proposed that copyright law be used to create a universal deposit library. Tying commercial print to the collection of learning would, in its eyes, lead to the climax of Enlightenment. But the project proved unexpectedly controversial. An alliance of poets, antiquarians, naturalists, and publishers fought bitterly against the scheme, arguing on Romantic grounds that it betrayed the very nature of creativity. By collecting the output of an industrial, proprietary publishing sector, it would immortalize mediocrity and demoralize future generations. The outcome of the contest was a critically important change in copyright itself -- one that has survived to play a major role in shaping the Google debate, in our own moment of radical change in media and information.

Democratic Peace and War in Africa: A Comparison of Risk, Reciprocity, and Citizenship in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire

Professor Lauren M. MacLean, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Indiana Thursday April 14, 2011 4:30-6:00 p.m. Mandel Center Building, Room 115 11402 Bellflower Road Cleveland, OH. This program is sponsored by the Center for Policy Studies and made possible by the generosity of Ms. Eloise Briskin.

Professor Lauren MacLean will discuss the divergent paths of democratization in neighboring Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire. Why has Ghana turned over power to the opposition in peaceful, competitive elections while Cote d'Ivoire has been wracked with ethno-regional civil war? Rather than focus on the roles of international mediators and national political elites, she will take us to rural villages in very similar regions on either side of the border for an analysis of everyday politics at the grassroots. Based on eighteen months of survey research and in-depth interviews at the village level, her findings point to the key role of changing informal institutions of reciprocity (that is, the way village residents exchange help with their families, friends and neighbors) in shaping differences in indigenous notions of citizenship and political participation in neighboring Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire.