St. John's University Law Faculty Blog

On Friday, March 28, Professor Elaine Chiu participated as a panelist in the Social Media & Social Justice Symposium hosted by Pace Law Review at the New York State Judicial Institute in White Plains, New York.  Her paper entitled, Personal Information Involuntarily Made Public: Protecting Women with Existing Practices, was selected to be part of a panel that discussed the need for greater government intervention in regulating and supplementing social media.  Professor Chiu presented on her proposal to create a domestic violence database that would identify serial batterers to the public.  This proposal was the subject of her article entitled, That Guy’s A Batterer: A Scarlet Letter Approach to Domestic Violence in the Information Age, that was published in the Family Law Quarterly.   In this presentation, Professor Chiu emphasized the importance of such information-sharing by the government in light of the high numbers of people using social media to form romantic relationships and the lack of verification of the voluntary information shared in these media.  Professor Chiu also noted that the information that people tend to disclose in social media is incomplete and often misleading and that there may be valuable lessons to be drawn from the well-established system of individual credit histories we use to protect lenders and our credit markets.   Her new paper will be published in the summer issue of the Pace Law Review.

Today, Tuesday, April 1, Professor Eva Subotnik will be the featured speaker at Columbia Law School’s Current Issues in Copyright colloquium, focusing on the topic of fair use.  Professor Subotnik will be presenting views drawn from her forthcoming article Intent in Fair Use.  An abstract for the article follows:

This Article explores the role of intent in the context of fair use.  Specifically, it examines whether a claim of fair use of a copyrighted work should be assessed solely from an “objectively reasonable” vantage point or should, additionally, allow for evidence from the subjective perspective of the user.  Courts and scholars have largely sided with the former view but have failed to explain fully why this should be the case or whether there might be countervailing benefits to considering evidence of subjective intent.  Crucially overlooked is the possibility that taking the user’s perspective into account would promote copyright’s utilitarian values by stimulating socially beneficial uses that would not otherwise occur.  In addition, formal recognition of the role intent plays in fair use would bring needed transparency to judicial practices in this area.  This Article first develops a framework for evaluating the degree to which courts, parties, and scholars have deemed conscious compliance with fair use principles relevant to the fair use analysis.  It then argues for a limited role for evidence of subjective intent, proposing criteria for when such evidence should, and should not, be weighed in the fair use calculus.

Eva Subotnik