For your essay, you will prepare a legal audit of a website, software license, e-contract or other document. To do this, you will basically “trouble shoot” the document for potential legal issues and for areas where the company has ensured that their documents comply with the relevant statutes and cases. For example, as one piece of your essay, you can look at your chosen website’s intellectual property statement to see if it complies with the DMCA safe harbor provisions. In your essay you will want to explain what the DMCA safe harbor is. If your website does comply, explain (with evidence to support your discussion) how the statement fulfills the safe harbor provisions. If it does not, explain why not and what the site would have to do to become compliant. What lawsuits could be filed against the website because it is not compliant? You can recommend solutions/alternatives to the current text based on what you learned in class and in the readings. You will repeat this process for other parts of the website, such as the terms of use (and relevant legislation or law), privacy policy, license terms, and so forth.

Essays should examine and illustrate with examples 3 to 4 legal issues, discussed substantially and with reference to course content as well as relevant and appropriate outside readings (law review articles are a good place to look; Darrell refers to many of these in his citations).