ERIC GOLDMAN: ...do a turn-over to the audience for your questions to Judge Kozinski. Yes, go ahead, sir. MALE PARTICIPANT: The Internet has often been considered a bastion of libertarianism. Does that perception affect how you think about cases involving the Internet? ERIC GOLDMAN: I'm going to repeat the question for those listening on the tape. The question is that the Internet's been characterized as a bastion of libertarianism. Does that affect how you think about cases? JUDGE ALEX KOZINSKI: Yes, I don't quite know what they mean. People say all sorts of things on the Internet, so I don't believe half of it. There's a certain sort of lawless, wild west quality about cyberspace; there's no doubt about that. You've got sort of servers all over the world providing content; you don't really know where you're connecting. It is in many ways beyond the full grasp of government regulation because it's so vast and so diffused. So there is something to that notion. I don't know that that particularly affects -- The problems I get in the Internet area tend to be pretty well defined, like this one, you know, who owns sex.com or can you convert it? So I can't say I think too carefully about this other data as far as ethical issues about Internet. Maybe I should. Maybe if you set up a legal system we ought to think about the implications -- so there's more or less a stateless aspect of the Internet. Because it's certainly changing our perceptions about a lot of things. We can also push content into various parts of the world and nobody can stop it. Totalitarian regimes can't stop it. There's no stopping it. So interesting question, but I can't say. My focus when I have cases is so narrow that probably doesn't come into play. ERIC GOLDMAN: Other questions for Judge Kozinski? Because if you don't have them, I have a few more, but I'd rather hear from you than from me. Anyone else want to take a crack at this? Yes, go ahead sir. MALE PARTICIPANT: You brought up a couple of times that the Internet is so different it might require a different regime. Do you think like a separate law for the Internet -- do you think that that would be a preferable system than trying to take the old-world laws and apply it to the Internet? JUDGE ALEX KOZINSKI: Well, I mean, they're constantly updating all sorts of laws to try to sort of deal with the fact that the age of communication has changed. The much maligned Patriot Act, much of it was an attempt to bring into the twenty-first century laws that dealt with technology that was still tied to copper cables connecting single telephone lines. And so the tendency of the law is to try to extend existing rules to the new environment. I'm just speculating that it might be worthwhile trying to think about whether this new environment should really be dealt with by a whole different set of relationships and laws -- not in everything, but at least when it comes to commerce, to transactions. But we're so busy trying to bring it into conformity to existing laws, I think the tendency will be to have existing or extended and that then becomes the status quo. And by the time we turn around and try to think about it and say, These are new, we should have thought about it differently, it will be ossified. But I think there are people thinking about it; there's people definitely thinking and writing about it. And I think it's worth doing because I think the regime is still in flux. ERIC GOLDMAN: I do want to reinforce a point on that. There is a great deal of benefit to thinking about the question. How far can we take laws predicated on certain technological or social interaction assumptions and extend them to the new technology and the new social interactions on the Internet? The reality is that there are a bunch of cyberspace-specific laws, and so we still need to keep our eye on that theoretical question. But we also have made a bunch of decisions over the last decade that have answered that question in the affirmative. We will regulate it differently. In some ways we'll regulate it more stringently than we would the same kind of conduct offline. And in other cases, we're going to regulate it more permissively. Something like 47 USC 230, that we'll talk about in a few weeks, is an example where Congress made a policy choice saying, We're going to liberalize activity on the Internet; we're not going to try and constrain it. And we will treat things differently online than offline, specifically because of that. We may have time for one last question. Does anyone want to field -- yes sir? MALE PARTICIPANT: With the case of innovation, how difficult is it as a jurist to sort of keep up with it? And do you feel to do a lot of extra work to educate yourself about the technology with the cyberspace space? JUDGE ALEX KOZINSKI: You know, I don't find it that hard. I understand a good deal about how all the stuff works. I build my own computers. I have my own home server. I understand. It doesn't take that much. It's not that complicated. I don't know whether judges who are of an earlier generation still whether they -- I know I have colleagues who don't use a computer at all. ERIC GOLDMAN: Tough to do in this modern day and age. JUDGE ALEX KOZINSKI: Oh, they manage. No Blackberry, I don't have a Blackberry. But no, they don't. They use email because all of our communications in the court are by email, but they have somebody type it for them and send it out. It's not undoable. I think maybe they have more difficulty grasping some of these concepts because they don't come quite so easy to them. All of the stuff is sort of hard. Any time you try to bring some existing models and get them to apply to new facts, new fact situations, new technologies, there's always a difficult learning process. But it's inevitable and it's constant. In 1967, the Supreme Court had to figure out what the implications were of putting a tape recorder on the top of a phone booth. You have to understand what a phone booth does, which I guess they all probably did. But tape recorders were still pretty new at the time and the implications of those things. So I don't think there's any sort of unique challenge here. I think it's interesting. I think it's new. And I think we'll get better. ERIC GOLDMAN: Well, with that, we've reached our appointed hour. For my students, I just want to mention next week we will conclude our discussion online trademark. And then we will begin our discussion on online pornography, so please read the materials for that for next week. JUDGE ALEX KOZINSKI: The class doubles. ERIC GOLDMAN: Huh, what? JUDGE ALEX KOZINSKI: People will audit. ERIC GOLDMAN: I will warn you, that nobody can squash the excitement out of pornography better than a law professor. So I will warn you that this is actually one of the least exciting areas, so you're warned. But I do want to say thanks to Judge Kozinski for squeezing us in. This has been a real treat. Thank you very much for doing that.