Searching for Search Law
posted by Frank Pasquale
I’ve been writing and speaking on search engines a bit this past week, first at Hofstra’s Reclaiming the First Amendment Conference and later on David Levine’s Hearsay Culture radio show. If you want to hear that show, just hop on KZSU Live tonight at 8PM EST (5PM PST). Or you can wait till it shows up on iTunes…but due to copyright concerns, you’ll miss out on Dave’s superb selection of engine-related music that will accompany the live broadcast. (Nevertheless, any tech law fans will want to subscribe to Levine’s show–he has a knack for enlivening legal topics with all manner of social, political, and economic discussions.)
Whatever you think about government regulation here, search engines are one of the most important tech phenomena to be shaped by law in the 21st century. A few prophetic scholars (like Niva Elkin-Koren and Helen Nissenbaum) saw this about 5 years ago; I’m part of a group building on their work to theorize it now. Our guest blogger Eric Goldman just covered a search conference in Haifa (and a prior Yale confab); he’s also got some very interesting pieces promoting the wisdom of laissez-faire here. James Grimmelmann’s The Structure of Search Law does a nice job of simultaneously describing search law as it stands and proposing modest steps for its development.
As for my own views, I’m afraid I’ll have to refer you to my podcast (and a forthcoming paper I’m co-authoring with Oren Bracha). But if anyone wants to recommend other search law scholarship in the comments, please feel free. I hope to highlight some interesting European work on the topic in a future post.
January 24, 2007 at 10:55 am
Posted in: First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Technology
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Responses (1)
Norton - February 8, 2007 at 9:34 am
Blogs to watch here: battelle, morgret designs, searchenginewatch.
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