Forum shopping by patent litigants is nothing new. However, in recent years, there has been an increase in forum shopping by patentee plaintiffs. Because of this forum shopping phenomenon, the Eastern District of Texas, a technological backwater, is on pace to become the leading patent docket in the United States. This Article empirically analyzes the reasons for the popularity of the Eastern District among patentee plaintif and considers a number of possible legislative solutions to the problem of forum shopping gone awry.

As the 110th Congress begins to flex its atrophied oversight muscle, it bears remembering that, in the ongoing debate over who should have the authority to authorize and oversee foreign intelligence surveillance programs, someone must, and the existing mechanisms, in particular, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 ("FISA') and its related procedures, are no longer adequate and must be updated. The FISA simply did not anticipate the nature of the current threat to national security from transnational terrorism, nor did it anticipate the development of global communication networks or advanced technical methods for intelligence gathering.

After years of failing to meet expectations, both internet and satellite radio programming are finally challenging terrestrial radio in a manner similar to cable's challenge to broadcast television a generation earlier; these new technologies threaten to hijack market share and revenue from a traditional broadcast medium much as cable did. Broadband technology enables one to broadcast talk radio and music over the internet to reach listeners via their personal computers. Satellite broadcasters use a pay model, selling special radios for listeners to tune into digital satellite programming. Online and satellite stations are increasing their audiences while traditional radio has struggled for over a decade to maintain its audience. The recent high-profile signing of Howard Stern by Sirius Satellite Radio and the 43% average yearly growth in listeners that internet radio has experienced since 2000 have pushed these new media to the forefront of popular culture.

Since the creation of the first pre-Web Internet search engines in the early 1990s, search engines have become almost as important as email as a primary online activity. Arguably, search engines are among the most important gatekeepers in today's digitally networked environment. Thus, it does not come as a surprise that the evolution of search technology and the diffusion of search engines have been accompanied by a series of conflicts among stakeholders such as search operators, content creators, consumers/users, activists, and governments. While few tussles existed in the initial phase of innovation where Internet search engines were mainly used by 'techies' and academics, substantial conflicts emerged once the technology got out of the universities and entered the commercial space. When search technology advanced and search services gained commercial significance, these conflicts became more severe and made their way into the legal arena. At the core of most of these disputes were controversies over intellectual property, particularly trademark and copyright issues.

The problem of global information flows via computer networks raises issues of competition, interoperability, and standard-setting parallel to those in the analysis of technical standards. Uniform standards, whether technical or legal, give rise to a constellation of positive and negative network effects. As a global network based upon the "end to end" principle of interoperability, the Internet mediates between different, otherwise incompatible computing platforms. To the extent that law and technological "code" may act as substitutes in shaping human behavior, the Internet similarly mediates between different, otherwise incompatible legal platforms. Much of the legal and social controversy surrounding the Internet stems from the interconnection of such incompatible legal systems. As with technical systems, problems of incompatibility may be addressed by the adoption of uniform legal standards. This, however, raises legal standard-setting problems similar to those seen in technical standard setting, where the standard may be "tipped" in favor of dominant producers. In particular, if law is considered a social product, the benefits of interjurisdictional competition and diversity may be lost as a single uniform legal standard dominates the market for law.

This paper assesses national and international responses to tax challenges presented by cross-border electronic commerce. Ten years after these challenges were first identified, a survey of national government reactions shows that many countries have not passed any significant tax legislation or administrative guidance with respect to the taxation of global e-commerce. This lack of action at the national level can be explained in large part by the leadership role taken by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in developing the guiding principles and, subsequently, the tax rules to confront the e-commerce tax challenges. The OECD's general success with e-commerce tax reform demonstrates the OECD's ability to act as a kind of informal (lower case) world tax organization, which emphasizes deliberation, consensus-building and the use of non-binding mechanisms such as the OECD model tax treaty. Moreover, the OECD's success suggests that calls for a more formal (upper-case) World Tax Organization, which could impose binding tax rules on participating nations, may be misplaced.

The Internet is often regarded as a challenge to the nation-state's ability to regulate flows of finance, information, and symbols. Rather than examining whether it is possible to enforce regulation on such a media, this paper addresses two additional fundamental questions: (1) what do regulatory discourses and attempts to regulate reveal about the nation-state's political authority under globalization, and (2) how does this authority vary across social, political, and cultural contexts? In order to address these challenging queries we follow a unique path, both empirically and theoretically. Theoretically, we argue that political authority is a pivotal common denominator that undergirds diverse understandings of globalization. We then critically examine different conceptions of political authority and construct a typology that orients our study. Empirically, we follow our typology by comparing two historical phenomena: attempts by the Catholic Church to regulate the printing press during the 15th and 16th centuries, and attempts by China, Malaysia and the United States to regulate the Internet. Despite certain important commonalities, we posit that each of these cases illustrates a different model of the legitimization processes and transformations in political authority that occur under globalization.

A few years ago, it was fanciful to imagine a world where intellectual property owners - such as record companies, soft ware owners, and publishers - were capable of invading the most sacred areas of the home in order to track, deter, and control uses of their products. Yet, today, strategies of copyright enforcement have rapidly multiplied, each strategy more invasive than the last. This new surveillance exposes the paradoxical nature of the Internet: It offers both the consumer and creator a seemingly endless capacity for human expression - a virtual marketplace of ideas- alongside an insurmountable array of capacities for panoptic surveillance. As a result, the Internet both enables and silences speech, often simultaneously. This paradox, in turn, leads to the tension between privacy and intellectual property. Both areas of law face significant challenges because of technology's ever-increasing pace of development. Yet courts often exacerbate these challenges by sacrificing one area of law for the other, by eroding principles of informational privacy for the sake of unlimited control over intellectual property. Laws developed to address the problem of online piracy- in particular, the DMCA -have been unwittingly misplaced, inviting intellectual property owners to create private systems of copyright monitoring that I refer to as piracy surveillance. Piracy surveillance comprises extrajudicial methods of copyright enforcement that detect, deter, and control acts of consumer infringement. In the past, legislators and scholars have focused their attention on other, more visible methods of surveillance, namely those relating to employment, marketing, and national security. Piracy surveillance, however, represents an overlooked fourth area that is completely distinct from these other types, yet incompletely theorized, technologically unbounded, and, potentially, legally unrestrained. The goals of this Article are threefold: first, to trace the origins of piracy surveillance through recent jurisprudence involving copyright; second, to provide an analysis of the tradeoffs between public and private enforcement of copyright; and third, to suggest some ways in which the law can restore a balance between the protection of copyrigh t and civil liberties in cyberspace. This paper was selected as the winning entry for the 2004 Yale Law School Cybererime and Digital Law Enforcement Conference writing competition, sponsored by the Yale Law School Information Society Project and the Yale Journal of Law and Technology.

Well-established legal principles govern evidentiary issues arising from technology developments. In the United States, the Supreme Court and Courts of Appeals in every circuit draw from non-computer and non-wireless Fourth Amendment doctrine to address nascent electronic evidence issues. I agree that legal analyses drawing from historical treatment can be effective, but will argue in this Article that Internet access raises difficult legal issues to which standard Fourth Amendment analysis cannot be easily applied. Furthermore, the analyses will become more difficult with the introduction of wireless Internet access. As wireless Internet connectivity burgeons throughout the world, unsecure connections will likely become a haven for illegal activity. Courts should consider and investigate the unique issues presented by wireless Internet access in depth to avoid setting unwanted precedents when they are, inevitably, presented with a defendant whose wireless connection was used to commit a crime.

Current legal scholarship on architectural regulation of software focuses on how its lack of transparency may frustrate public accountability or, by the same token, enhance its effectiveness. This paper argues that architectural regulation poses deeper dangers to the very concept of law. Ordinarily, we think of law as rules that a person thinks about when deciding how to act, and which human beings must decide to enforce. Law as architecture operates differently. instead of affecting our calculus of choice, it structures the very conditions of action, such as social settings and the resources available in those settings. Thus, architectural regulation operates surreptitiously and may not even be perceived as governmental action. Architectural regulation thus allows government to shape our actions without our perceiving that our experience has been deliberately shaped, engendering a loss of moral agency. Because our norms are often the product of social experience with and discourse about new technologies, architectural regulation poses the danger that government can distort the evolution of constitutional norms like privacy.