Payment systems that allow people to pay using their mobile phones are promised to reduce transaction fees, increase convenience, and enhance payment security. New mobile payment systems also are likely to make it easier for businesses to identify consumers, to collect more information about...

In this paper, we consider why Americans may frame the generation and receipt of unsolicited advertising mail as a privacy violation. We then present data from our nationwide survey showing that a very large majority of Americans, across all ideologies, educational attainment levels, age, and...

Alan Westin’s well-known and often-used privacy segmentation fails to describe privacy markets or consumer choices accurately. The segmentation divides survey respondents into “privacy fundamentalists,” “privacy pragmatists,” and the “privacy unconcerned.” It describes the average...

Homo economicus reliably makes an appearance in regulatory debates concerning information privacy. Under the still-dominant U.S. “notice and choice” approach to consumer information privacy, the rational consumer is expected to negotiate for privacy protection by reading privacy policies and...

Media reports teem with stories of young people posting salacious photos online, writing about alcohol-fueled misdeeds on social networking sites, and publicizing other ill-considered escapades that may haunt them in the future. These anecdotes are interpreted as representing a generation-wide...

This is a collection of the reports on the Annenberg national surveys that explored Americans' knowledge and opinions about the new digital-marketing world that was becoming part of their lives. So far we've released seven reports on the subject, in 1999, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2009, 2010, and 2012....

Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act established both "safe harbors" from liability for online service providers and the well-known "notice and takedown" process for removing online infringements of copyrighted material. In the ensuing two decades, the notice and takedown process...

It has long been recognized in Europe and elsewhere that standards-development organizations (SDOs) may adopt policies that require their participants to license patents essential to the SDO’s standards (standards-essential patents or SEPs) to manufacturers of standardized products...

Many works that libraries, archives, and historical societies would like to digitize are “orphan works,” that is, works for which the copyright holder either is unknown or cannot be located after a diligent search. Due to copyright risk if an owner later shows up, nonprofit libraries and...

Historically, Open Innovation Communities (OICs), such as those who make free and open source software (FOSS), have opted out of the patent system for three main reasons: Patents are expensive to acquire and enforce; they are philosophically, culturally, and politically anathema to many OIC...