I L L U S T R A T I O N B Y J U S T I N M E T Z

A product review posted on Ama-
zon might attract hundreds of com-
ments that contribute substantively
to the review’s value and credibility.
Videos on YouTube might respond
to, excerpt, or satirize one another.
Ongoing conversational threads on
Twitter are held together by hashtags
[e-mail] mers use their
avatars to interact with one another
against the backdrop of a virtual uni-
verse and, in so doing, create new
forms of data that build on the game’s
commercial content. Moreover, as in-
dividuals develop rich personal pro-
files, they publish new kinds of on-
line representations of themselves.

This complex non-professional dig-ital-media landscape, along with newfound opportunities for copying, excerpting, and remixing professionally produced media, poses new challenges for managing intellectual property.

Many social, legal, and technological
forces shape our perceptions of who can
do what with Internet content. As law
professor and social activist Lawrence
Lessig points out, in addition to legal
notions of copyright, market forces and
technologically enforced prohibitions
constrain users’ actions; additionally,
emerging social norms make some on-
line user behaviors seem acceptable to
most people, while other behaviors are
perceived as reprehensible. 6

In Order Without Law, property law scholar Robert C. Ellickson demonstrated how people settle their disputes and regulate their behavior via these social norms; his analysis shows the importance of the norms and how they can be as effective as law. 3 Legal scholar John Tehranian has highlighted how ordinary people (rather than legal scholars or jurists) now have a heightened awareness of the issues surrounding content ownership and, at the same time, the gap between