About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

18 Kor. U. L. Rev. 99 (2015)
The Electronic Silk Road and Information Intermediaries

handle is hein.journals/korunilre18 and id is 111 raw text is: THE ELECTRONIC SILK ROAD AND INFORMATION INTERMEDIARIES. Anupam Chander Nearly every company set up in a garage in Silicon Valley hopes to take over the world. There is reason for such optimism. Again and again, Silicon Valley firms have become the world's leading providers of Internet services. How did Silicon Valley become the world's leading supplier of Internet services? Popular explanations for Silicon Valley's recent success revolve around two features. First, Silicon Valley bestrides the great academic centers of Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, and sits near the artistic and intellectual hub of San Francisco. Second, the center of venture capital in the United States also happens to be in Menlo Park, California, allowing both industries to profit from each other in a symbiotic relationship. But education and money coincide in other parts of the United States as well. Why did those parts not prosper in the manner of Silicon Valley? More fundamentally, did not the Internet make geography irrelevant? Scholars answer that Silicon Valley's advantage lies in the economies of agglomeration. Ronald Gilson argued that California's advantage was its labor law, which he believes encourages knowledge spillovers and agglomeration economies by facilitating employee mobility. While these standard accounts do much to explain the dynamism of Silicon Valley relative to other parts of the United States, they do not explain the relative absence of such Internet innovation hubs outside the United States, or the success of Silicon Valley enterprises across the world. Law played a far more significant role in Silicon Valley's rise and its global success than has been previously understood. It enabled the rise of Silicon Valley while simultaneously disabling the rise of competitors across the world. In this Article, I will argue that Silicon Valley's success in the Internet era has been due to key substantive reforms to American copyright and tort law that dramatically reduced the risks faced by Silicon Valley's new breed of global traders. Specifically, legal innovations in the 1990s that reduced liability concerns for Internet intermediaries, coupled with low privacy protections, created a legal ecosystem that proved fertile for the new enterprises of what came to be known as Web 2.0. I will argue that this solicitude was not accidental - but rather a kind of cobbled industrial policy favoring Internet entrepreneurs. In a companion paper, Uyin L and I show that these aspects of copyright and tort law were May 13, 2015. Adapted from Anupam Chander, How Law Made Silicon Valley, 63 Emory L. J. 639, (2014).

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most