2024-25 Events
CILS - "Data as Public Goods or Private Properties?: A Way Out of the Conflict Between Data Protection and Free Speech"
Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024 | 12 - 1 PM | King Hall, Rm 1301 | Recording Link
The relationship between data and speech is often overlooked. Transferring data to another person is speech. Collecting data implicates the right to know-the alter ego of freedom of speech. Using data for a new purpose is research, as research involves finding new meanings behind pre-existing data. Once these relationships are recognized, various conflicts between data protection laws and freedom of speech are not surprising. After all, data protection laws give data subjects (persons that the data refer to) ownership-like control over transferring, collecting, and researching personal data. As one example of this conflict, data protection law has been invoked under the banner of the “right to be forgotten” to restrict access to data that has been made publicly available. Also, the recent controversy around the TikTok bans brought into urgent focus the use of data protection law as an alternative method of protecting American users’ data. Through this talk, we will try to helicopter us out of the conflict to explore how new approaches to data protection affect new legislative trends, including the California Consumer Privacy Act, and how we should approach the latest threats to privacy, such as the use of facial recognition technology in public places.
Professor Kyung Sin Park teaches at Korea University Law School. He is the co-founder and director of Open Net, the premier digital rights advocacy organization in Korea. Professor Park served as a Commissioner of the Korean Communication Standards Commission, a Presidentially appointed Internet content regulation body (2011-2014). He also served as a board member of Global Network Initiatives, a self-regulatory coalition of global platforms and telecommunication network operators, and as a member of the Advisory Network to Freedom Online Coalition, an inter-governmental body of countries committed to Internet freedom. Until 2020, he served as a member of the High-Level Panel on Media Freedom, a group of legal experts advising an inter-governmental body committed to media freedom. He is one of the leading authors of the Necessary and Proportionate Principles on Communications Surveillance and the Manila Principles for Intermediary Liability. Professor Park also served as a Member of the National Media Commission, a Parliament-appointed advisory body on newspaper-broadcasting co-ownership bans and other media and Internet regulations (2010). Professor Park graduated from Harvard University (Physics) and UCLA Law School (JD). He has served as a Visiting Professor of Law at UC Davis Law School (2017, 2024), UCLA (2024), and UC Irvine (2017, 2023, 2024).
CILS - The War on Social Media: Updates From the Front Line
Monday, Oct. 21, 2024 | 12 - 1 PM | King Hall, Rm 1301 | Recording Link
Join us for an insightful discussion led by Professor Ash Bhagwat on the global efforts to regulate social media platforms. The conversation will cover significant developments such as the laws enacted in Florida and Texas in response to Donald Trump’s deplatforming, the European Union’s Digital Services Act, the arrest of Telegram’s founder in France, and Brazil’s recent ban on X (formerly Twitter). Professor Bhagwat will also discuss recent legal developments relevant to those regulatory initiatives and explore how different jurisdictions are navigating the complex landscape of social media regulation.
Ash Bhagwat is the Boochever and Bird Endowed Chair for the Study and Teaching of Freedom and Equality and a Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Davis, having joined the faculty in 2011 after seventeen years at UC Law San Francisco. A summa cum laude graduate of Yale University, Professor Bhagwat earned his law degree from The University of Chicago, where he served as Articles Editor of the University of Chicago Law Review. He clerked for Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court. He practiced appellate and regulatory law in Washington, D.C., before transitioning to academia.
He is the author of The Myth of Rights (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Our Democratic First Amendment (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and his work has been published in leading law journals such as the Yale Law Journal and Supreme Court Review. Professor Bhagwat has also served on the Board of Governors of the California Independent System Operator and is a member of the American Law Institute.