Our community needs a fresh framework for imagining tech governance, which has been largely defined by bros wearing Patagonia vests, billionaires wanting to colonize Mars, and the lawyers who litigate or lobby for them. Problems with this approach are especially evident in cyberlaw. Iconic cyberlaw cases center technologies that appropriate pirated nude images to fuel search engines, ones that profit from harmful user-generated videos, and others that rely on scraped images to create a hotness ranking website of peers. But none of the coders behind those technologies lost lawsuits over legality. Rather, those tools blossomed into Google Image Search, YouTube, and Meta, all run by the companies with the power to shape tech governance.
Those tools share something else: misogyny. Coders engineered them to exploit women’s bodies. Eric Schmidt, the co-founder of Google, confessed that Google Image Search was launched to oogle Jennifer Lopez’s body in her gauzy green Grammy’s gown. YouTube was launched to oogle Janet Jackson’s bared breast after Justin Timberlake ripped her bodice during the Super Bowl Halftime Show. And in Congressional testimony, Mark Zuckerberg admitted that he’d launched FaceMash to oogle his women peers in the Harvard Class of 2006. Those women never gave their consent to be used for profit, and they suffered for their exploitation without compensation.
Feminist cyberlaw provides that fresh framework for imagining tech governance. Pioneered by Amanda Levendowski (me) and Meg Leta Jones, feminist cyberlaw examines how gender, race, sexuality, disability, and class shape cyberspace and the laws that govern it. Drawing on more than a decade of my cyberlaw practice and teaching, this Lab will explore how copyright emerged as the most powerful cyberlaw to counter oppressive tech governance. Not only does it play a role in all three of the technologies highlighted above, this Lab explores a trio of case studies about biased artificial intelligence, invasive face surveillance, and nonconsensual intimate imagery that exposes why copyright can be a powerful tool for forcing technologies to be just, not just legal.
To put feminist cyberlaw lessons into practice, participants will be invited to redact portions of legal documents using a custom Mozilla-compatible bookmarklet co-created by Georgetown Law students and faculty, empowering participants to create redactive poems that radically reimagines tech governance through feminist cyberlaw futures. (Of course, this exercise also implicates copyright.)
Amanda Levendowski Tepski works as the Founding Director of the Intellectual Property and Information Policy Clinic, which produces creative legal and sociotechnical work for justice-minded artists, nonprofits, and coalitions. Her research has informed Clinic matters about face surveillance, biased AI systems, and nonconsensual intimate imagery. Her first book, Feminist Cyberlaw (U. Cal. Press 2024,), an open-access anthology with Meg Leta Jones, explores how gender, race, sexuality, disability, and class shape cyberspace and the laws that govern it. Professor Tepski also publishes articles and essays in leading law journals, and her work has been covered by 60 Minutes, 99% Invisible, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, and the US Copyright Office, as well as supported by fellowships with Gender+ Justice and Center for Transnational Legal Studies. In 2021, Public Knowledge recognized her as a 20/20 Visionary, one of twenty future leaders in technology policy.