Yale Symposium to Explore Legal Aspects of Reputations on the Internet

New Haven, Conn. — Yale University will hold an interdisciplinary conference titled “Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace,” December 8 at Yale Law School, 127 Wall St.

The day-long program will address such questions as: How do you know you can trust a vendor when you shop online? When you search the Internet for information, what sites can you rely on to be accurate? How do businesses, individuals and information sources manage their online reputations?

The symposium is hosted by the Law School’s Information Society Project (ISP) and sponsored by Microsoft Corporation. It is free for Yale students and faculty. The cost to the public is $95 and includes lunch. To register or obtain more information, including the complete schedule, visit http://isp.law.yale.edu/reputation.

“A new generation of Web tools based on collaborative participation and information sharing is becoming mainstream,” said ISP Executive Director and Lecturer in Law Eddan Katz. “This symposium will provide an excellent opportunity to discuss publicly, for the first time, the legal implications of these tools.”

“Reputation economies in cyberspace have a broad effect on the ways in which we study, conduct business, shop, communicate, create—even procreate,” said Shay David, Microsoft Visiting Fellow at the ISP. “This landmark interdisciplinary event will further our understanding of reputation economies’ impact on technology and society.”

Panels will address the norms for cyber-reputations and how they differ from offline models, issues of anonymity and privacy, quality assurance, “ownership” of online reputations and transportability of reputations from one system to another.

Panelists will include Michel Bauwens of The Foundation for Peer to Peer (P2P) Alternatives; Daniel J. Solove ’97, associate professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and author of “The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor and Privacy on the Internet”; Mari Kuraishi, president of the GlobalGiving Foundation; and former Federal Trade Commissioner Mozelle Thompson, a member of Facebook’s Privacy and Safety Team.

The Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School was founded in 1997 by Professor Jack Balkin to study the impact of the Internet and other information technologies on law and society. More information about Yale ISP is available at http://isp.law.yale.edu/.