University of California Hastings College of the Law
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Exploitation of User Generated Content For Generative Ai: Making a Case for Data Privacy Rights in Your Social Media Posts
No full textNearly all user-generated content contains personal data. Yet, Big Tech companies can exploit the user-generated content you posted because under current legal frameworks, the information is already public (no matter how many sordid details you’ve shared in that social media post). In the age of the great generative AI arms race between OpenAI, Google, and Meta, technology companies are collecting mass amounts of user-generated content on their platform for training AI models. This Note argues that current data privacy practices with respect to user-generated content is anti-consumer, because it fails to take today’s technological advancements, business practices, and online norms into account. The scale at which user-generated content can be collected and processed has changed drastically. Exploitation of user-generated content for out of scope uses, especially in AI training, creates unique economic and individualistic harms that can only be addressed with data privacy rights. When platforms capitalize on user-generated content without the user’s affirmative knowledge or consent, that feeling of nakedness as a person’s content is freely posted in one context but exploited in a different context, is a fundamental violation of privacy no matter how legal the practice is in current jurisprudence. This forced dilemma—to accept the Terms of Service and enable your content to be used for AI training, or to cease your use of the online service altogether—is a scheme that consolidates power for platforms while shifting harm onto individuals
To Insure Domestic Tranquility and Provide for the Common Defence: The Preamble’s Concern with Internal and External Threats
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The Income Tax as a Market Correction
No full textI confess. As a tax professor, it has long hurt my feelings that economists label tax as a market distortion. My field is summed up as an impurity on the otherwise pristine complexion of the economist’s pure market. I like to think that tax scholars are not so disparaging of economics. We do not view economically motivated action as a distortion to our tax system, but as a component of it. It is tax planning. This Article proposes that tax should be viewed as a component of a market system. Just as tax scholarship acknowledges that an imagined world in which tax is imposed in isolation does not and cannot exist, might economic scholarship similarly concede that it lacks a robust basis to characterize tax as a distortion to the market, as opposed to a component of it? After all, could a market exist without government enforcement of market rules, and could a lasting, functioning government exist without tax?
This Article argues that an income tax is the vestibular system of our market economy. It can balance the market and help send better information to our brains. Without an income tax to balance the otherwise harmful effects of excessive risk aversion, narrow framing, and the disposition effect, transactions would be made by brains that are preoccupied with avoiding loss. The market system would lean inefficiently against risk. Luckily, an income tax ramps up risktaking and counterbalances risk aversion. Viewing tax as a component of a market system, rather than viewing it in isolation, reveals that the income tax corrects the market. It mitigates the harmful economic consequences of loss aversion.
The implications of this insight are significant. They support arguments that: higher income tax rates might fuel economic growth, loss offsets encourage risk-taking better than preferred rates do, and the realization requirement offers additional corrective power
The First Amendment, Global Corporate Responsibility Standards, & the Quest for Online “Speech Nirvana”
No full textWith large and powerful social media companies operating as worldwide speech regulators, it is unsurprising that governments have attempted to not only regulate how these companies address platform speech but also pressure them to deliver preferred speech outcomes. In 2024, the Supreme Court decided two cases addressing both themes in the U.S. context. In Moody v. NetChoice, the Court explained how legislation regulating private platform curation of usergenerated content runs afoul of First Amendment protections. And, in Murthy v. Missouri, the Court appeared to erect significant hurdles to challenging alleged governmental coercion of such platforms. These cases have left many wondering what can be done to achieve the legitimate societal aim of promoting broad and fair protections for user-generated speech on large social media platforms while addressing illicit governmental interference with such discourse. This Essay seeks to spur a dialogue about the potential for global corporate responsibility and free expression standards to provide a way forward. Under such standards, companies would apply a principled free expression framework in curating platform speech as well as proactively resist illicit governmental pressure. That said, as corporate adoption of these standards remains voluntary, this Essay urges a range of stakeholders to seize this norm-building moment to encourage platform adoption of these global standards or otherwise risk cementing unprincipled approaches to online speech