Professor Chander's 'How Law Made Silicon Valley' Featured in Washington Internet Daily

"How Law Made Silicon Valley," a new paper by Professor Anupam Chander, is the subject of an article in the February 3 edition of the Washington Internet Daily. 

In the work-in-progress, Professor Chander suggests that "Silicon Valley's success in the Internet era has been due to key substantive features of 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. ... [T]his was not accidental - but rather a kind of (cobbled) industrial policy favoring Internet entrepreneurs. These aspects of copyright and tort law were not driven by commercial considerations alone, but were undergirded in large part by a constitutional commitment to free speech."

The article describes Professor Chander's paper as a "contrarian account" that challenges "conventional wisdom that engineers and entrepreneurs, not public policy, produced the U.S. Internet boom," and includes a range of responses to the paper.

Professor Anupam Chander is a leading scholar in the law of globalization and digitization, and has written widely on international law and cyber law.  He is also Director of the California International Law Center at King Hall.