Hannibal Travis

Google Book Search (GBS) has captured the attention of many commentators and government officials, but even as they vigorously debate its legality, few of them have marshaled new facts to determine its likely effects on publishing and other information markets. This Article challenges the conventional wisdom propounded by the U.S. and German governments, as well as Microsoft and other competitors of Google, concerning the likely economic impact of mass book-digitization projects. Originally advanced by publishing industry lobbying groups, the prevailing account of mass book-digitization projects is that they will devastate authors and publishers, just as Napster and its heirs have supposedly devastated musicians and music labels. Using the impact of GBS on the revenues and operating incomes of U.S. publishers believing themselves to be the most affected by it, this Article finds no evidence of a negative impact upon them. To the contrary, it provides some evidence of a positive impact, and proposes further empirical research to identify the mechanisms of digitization’s economic impact. The debate surrounding the GBS settlement is critically important to students, writers, researchers, and the general public, as it may decide whether a federal appellate court or even the U.S. Supreme Court allows the best research tool ever designed to survive. If the theory of Microsoft and some publishing trade associations is accepted, the courts may enjoin and destroy GBS, just as Napster was shut down a decade ago. The Article aims at a preliminary estimate of the economic impact of mass digitization projects, using GBS as a case in point. It finds little support for the much-discussed hypothesis of the Association of American Publishers and Google’s competitors that the mass digitization of major U.S. libraries will reduce the revenues and profits of the most-affected publishers. In fact, the revenues and profits of the publishers who believe themselves to be most aggrieved by GBS, as measured by their willingness to file suit against Google for copyright infringement, increased at a faster rate after the project began, as compared to before its commencement. The rate of growth by publishers most affected by GBS is greater than the growth of the overall U.S. economy or of retail sales. Thus, the very publishers that have sued Google have seen their revenues grow faster than retail sales or the U.S. economy as a whole (measured by gross domestic product). This finding parallels some of the research that has been done since the Napster case on the economic impact of peer-to-peer file sharing on sales of recorded music. Future studies may provide a more granular estimate of the economic impact of frequent downloads or displays of pages of particular books on the sales of such books

Studies on nationalism and the emergence of modern ethnic identities rarely examine sources dating from the period between 0 CE (A.D.) and 1453 CE, or the period between the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the mid-first millennium CE and the Age of Discovery in the mid-second millennium CE. Testing generally accepted theories of national and ethnic distinctiveness against these sources reveals that a similar case exists for the existence of an Assyrian identity and nation as for a Greek, Kurdish, Jewish, or Persian identity or nation. Assyrian populations, religions, and political formations survived in present-day Iraq, Iran, and Turkey from 0 CE well into the 1800s CE. Commentators on modern nationalism in relation to Assyrian identity have assumed, with little evidence, that the non-Arab, non-Jewish peoples of the East lacked the agency or the intellect to maintain a consistent identity or national movement, and that these peoples relied in their ignorance and indolence on the theories of Western missionaries and colonial officials. In the 1980s, a new generation of scholars emerged who posited that nations and peoples emerged in conjunction with modern capitalistic cultural forms and secular nationalistic liberalism. The new theory of "imagined communities" represented a departure from a long tradition of historical and cultural work which assumed nations and peoples as subjects of analysis without critically examining the linguistic, cultural, or religious foundation of these groups of individuals or families. This new theory, however, has the risk of degenerating into a vulgar instrumentalism, which speculates that identity entrepreneurs can manufacture ethnic, racial, or religious identity for their own purposes and little objective foundation. Thus, more recent research points out the flaws in grounding national and ethnic distinctions in modern nationalism by compiling evidence that nations and peoples perceived themselves and were perceived as such by other collectivities, long before the rise of European humanism or the Enlightenment. This study attempts to show that the longevity and diversity of national and ethnic distinctions undermines a one-size-fits-all explanation of such distinctions in the manner of Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities.” The evidence from the Assyrian case suggests that the undifferentiated hordes of Asia did not coalesce and order themselves in modern times and under Western influence into nations created and sustained by advanced technology. This “Imagined Communities” narrative suffers from hindsight bias and an exaggerated Eurocentrism. It also insults and infantilizes the peoples and nations of premodern eras and non-Western regions by assuming they lacked the intelligence with which modern Europeans constructed national cultures, laws, literatures, schools, and economies. Historians have long since disproved such ideas. By examining translations of and academic commentary on Aramaic, Greek, Roman, and Persian literature and inscriptions, among other sources, this Essay demonstrates that the British Empire invented neither the modern Assyrians as a people, nor the territory of modern Assyria that was considered for statehood by the League of Nations after World War I. Rather, the identification of present-day northern Iraq, northwestern Persia, and southeastern Turkey as “Assyria” draws support from the Middle Assyrian and Neo-Assyrian usage of the second and third millennia BCE, and the Greek, Roman, Persian, and Aramaic usage in the first millennium CE. Finally, the contribution of ancient Assyria to the cultures, languages, and religions of the non-Muslim populations of contemporary Iran, Iraq, and Turkey may no longer be doubted, especially when it comes to the Assyrian Christians, Mandaeans, and Yezidis. This ancient contribution is present in these peoples' daily vocabularies, place-names, and indigenous beliefs

The U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples requires states to provide an effective remedy to indigenous peoples deprived of their cultural, religious, or intellectual property (IP) without their free, prior and informed consent. The Declaration could prove to be important safeguard for the indigenous peoples of Iraq and Turkey, the victims for centuries of massacres, assaults on their religious and cultural sites, theft and deterioration of their lands and cultural objects, and forced assimilation. These peoples, among them the Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Yezidis of Turkey and Turkish-occupied Cyprus, and the Armenians, Assyrians, Yezidis, and Mandaeans of Iraq, have lost more than two-thirds of their peak populations, most of their cultural and religious sites, and thousands of priceless artifacts and specimens of visual art. The European Union has probed these violations of indigenous people's rights as part of the process of bringing Turkish laws and policies into compliance with European human rights standards. The United States has investigated violations of the rights of Iraq’s indigenous peoples in reports issued by the various executive agencies and legislative committees. My paper will summarize the results of these inquiries, and propose four reforms. First, restitution or compensation should be implemented for the widespread destruction of indigenous peoples’ cultural and intellectual properties by previous Turkish and Iraqi regimes. Second, efforts to promote the security of indigenous peoples’ surviving intellectual and cultural patrimony must be adopted. Third, transnational corporations and other large enterprises such as museums and publishers should respect the rights of indigenous people to protect, access, and use their cultural and intellectual property held outside of Turkey and Iraq. Fourth, policies within Turkey and Iraq that restrict the preservation and transmission of indigenous cultural and intellectual manifestations must be reformed or abolished. This article also describes the growing body of law governing indigenous peoples' rights, particularly in Europe. Applicable general international law standards are set forth in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948, the the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the Hague Convention with Respect to the Laws and Customs of War on Land, the Hague Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, the Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, the Convention on Biodiversity, the ILO Convention No. 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. European standards are embodied in the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the Copenhagen principles on human rights in the EU, the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, the OSCE Oslo Recommendations Regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities, and the Council of the European Union's Framework decision on Racism and Xenophobia. In the United States, additional standards are set forth in the Foreign Relations Act of 1961, the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, the Alien Tort Claims Act, and the Torture Victims Protection Act

This paper will describe the drafting history of the Principles of the Law of Software Contracts, with particular attention to the extent of consumer and public-interest group representation in the process. The drafting process, I will argue, did not take adequate stock of problems identified in the late 1990s with proposed Article 2B of the Uniform Commercial Code, and then the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (“UCITA”), including provisions encouraging terms in violation of public policy, that constitute copyright or patent misuse by attempting to prohibit fair use or withdraw material from the public domain, or that are not properly disclosed before the purchase. The difference between the present situation and the 1990s, however, is the much greater importance today of European Community directives on the subject of consumer protection and electronic commerce, particularly given the explosion in e-commerce between the United States and Europe. This paper will analyze whether the Principles do enough to protect the interests of consumers and the public in four key areas: (1) consistency with U.S. federal and state statutory and common law, (2) clear and conspicuous disclosure of all relevant terms and conditions prior to the sale, (3) regulation and prevention of one-sided and unconscionable contract terms, and (4) consistency with European Community and domestic European law. My thesis is that the Principles and the comments thereto appear to sanction conduct that is in tension with the federal Copyright and Patent Acts, the common law of several U.S. states, and the European Community’s directives, especially those on the Legal Protection of Software Programs (1991), Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts (1993), and Protection of Consumers in Respect of Distance Contracts (1997). To that extent, the Principles seem to be an imperfect attempt to unify the law of software contracts, codify best practices, or develop the law in a desirable direction. Finally, the paper will discuss whether and when it is appropriate to harmonize U.S. and E.C. law and public policy

This chapter in a forthcoming book attempts to map global patterns by which local tyrannies become sources of potentially global infringements on freedom of expression, particularly but not exclusively on the YouTube Web site. It illustrates certain parallels between the efforts to force copyright filters on YouTube and the Web in the West, and to harden the Great Firewalls of China, Arabia, and Persia in the East. The parallels include preemptive filtering, deep packet inspection, overbroad restrictions, and harms to user privacy. Generally speaking, blasphemy and seditious libel are the dominant forms of censorship in the impoverished and/or dictatorial societies of Africa and central and southern Asia, with insulting the great leader similarly controversial at the fringes of Asia including China, Thailand, and Turkey, and in the South Atlantic including Colombia, Honduras, and Zimbabwe. By contrast, intellectual property is prompting many of the Web site takedowns for political and cultural speech in the North Atlantic including Europe and the United States. Resistance to censorship around the world employs both legal and extra-legal tactics. Internet freedom has worked its way into our constitutional and statutory law in the North Atlantic and Europe, and parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Therefore, a judicial consensus is emerging that freedom of expression must rein in the enforcement of corporate catalogs of intellectual property rights. In large swaths of Africa and Asia, however, constitutions often do not mandate robust judicial protection of freedom of expression, so public intolerance of censorship presents a more direct battle of forces. In these societies, self-help, surreptitious defense of new public spheres, trans-border cooperation, and voting with one’s feet are more likely to succeed than filing lawsuits or asserting constitutional rights. There, YouTube bans and shutdowns of the entire Internet with proxy servers and aid from foreign Web firms, sometimes enjoying explicit diplomatic support