My Casebook Turns Six

The Sixth (sixth! sixth!) Edition of my casebook Internet Law: Cases and Problems is now available. I apologize for the lateness of this update; it was a busy summer.

The big news is a new section on the physical world. For years, people have been asking me when I was going to cover drones, robots, and the sharing economy. My answer had always been that these aren’t really Internet legal issues, as interesting as they may be. That hasn’t changed, but this spring I realized that we can still learn from Internet law when thinking about these “real”-world legal issues. With that, the section fell into place. I don’t try to teach any substantive law. Instead, I tee up what I think are interesting policy problems in ways that connect them back to the themes of the casebook: code is law, government control, generativity, etc. It’s at the very end of the book, together with some sections I love but that have never quite felt at home anywhere else: on virtual property, defective software, and social media in litigation. They make for a new chapter I call “Beyond the Internet.”

Most of the rest of the updates are the usual shuffling required to keep up with a field that continually renders obsolete things you thought you knew. I cover the iPhone unlocking fights with new materials on compelled assistance, using CALEA as the main teaching text. I added the Data Protection Directive and Schrems to beef up the E.U. materials; I added more on the limits of Section 230; I refocused the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act section on the two Ninth Circuit Nosal opinions. There’s more on Bitcoin, more on filtering, and a bit more on warrant jurisdiction. There’s a bit less on the NSA, and the usual tightening up and revisions throughout. And the typefaces are even spiffier!

As before, the book is available in two formats: a $30 pay-what-you-want DRM-free PDF download from Semaphore Press, and a $65.30 perfect-bound paperback from Amazon. This time, though, I’m happy to say that one-third of the net revenues from sales of this edition of the book will be donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.