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52 Stan. L. Rev. 1049 (1999-2000)
Freedom of Speech and Information Privacy: The Troubling Implications of a Right to Stop People from Speaking about You

handle is hein.journals/stflr52 and id is 1069 raw text is: Freedom of Speech and Information
Privacy: The Troubling Implications of a
Right to Stop People From Speaking
About You
Eugene Volokh*
Proposed information privacy rules that give us the power to control
... information about ourselves sound undeniably appealing. The First
Amendment, however, generally bars the government from control[ling the
communication] of information, either by direct regulation or through the
authorization of private lawsuits. This article argues that: (1) While privacy
protection secured by contract turns out to be constitutionally sound, broader
information privacy rules are not easily defensible under existing free speech
law. (2) Creating new free speech exceptions to accommodate information pri-
vacy speech restrictions could have many unfortunate and unforeseen conse-
quences. Most of the justiications given for information privacy speech
restraints are directly applicable to other speech control proposals that have
already been suggested, and accepting these justifcations in the attractive case
of information privacy speech restrictions would create a powerful precedent
for those other restraints.
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................... 1050
I. INFORMATION PRIVACY SPEECH RESTRICTIONS.......................................... 1054
II. CONTRACT...................................................................................................1057
A. Permissible Scope................................................................................1057
B. Limitations ...........................................................................................1061
C. Government Contracts......................................................................... 1062
D. Contracts with Children....................................................................... 1063
III. PROPERTY.................................................................................................... 1063
A. Intellectual Property Rules as Speech Restrictions.............................. 1063
B. Existing Restrictions as Supposed Precedents ..................................... 1065
1. Copyright law ............................................................................... 1066
2.   Trademark  law.............................................................................. 1067
* Professor of Law, UCLA Law School (volokh@Iaw.ucla.edu). Many thanks to Stuart
Benjamin, Jerry Kang, Marty Lederman, Michael Madison, Dawn Nunziato, and Malla Pollack for
their very helpful advice. Thanks also to Paul Schwartz for his thoughtful, gracious, and generous
commentary on this piece, Paul M. Schwartz, Free Speech vs. Information Privacy, 52 STAN. L.
REV. 1559 (2000). Copyright © 2000 by Eugene Volokh and the Board of Trustees of the Leland
Stanford Junior University.

1049

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