Law and the Geography of Cyberspace
6 W.I.P.O.J., Issue 1 (2014)
9 Pages Posted: 6 Jun 2015 Last revised: 26 Jun 2015
Date Written: June 4, 2015
Abstract
The Internet was supposed to end geography. Anyone, anywhere could now run a newspaper, a search engine, a game service, and the world could access it. After millennia of geography dictating destiny, the world was now flat, and opportunity evenly distributed everywhere. Yet, a quick glance at the world’s leading internet companies, from Facebook to Zillow, leads one remarkably often to the United States. In this article, I argue that law played a crucial role in creating the geography of cyberspace — specifically, that flexible intellectual property rules which permitted internet entrepreneurship in the United States proved a key ingredient in American commercial success on the Internet.
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