Regulating Social Network Sites: Data Protection, Copyright and Power(Elgar Law, Technology and Society series)

Drawing on rich, empirical case studies this innovative book provides a contemporary and comprehensive exploration of the plural, dynamic and precarious processes, materials, practices, interventions and relationships on social network sites, and their resultant power effects, when copyright and data privacy rights are at stake. In pursuit of this objective, chapters develop a cutting-edge conceptual power lens that brings together Actor-Network theory and Foucauldian scholarship on power. Applying this analytical framework to the case studies of Facebook (data protection) and YouTube (copyright), Asma Vranaki draws critical attention to underexplored and novel matters in digital regulation. These matters include resistance; the materiality of regulation; complex, contingent, fragile and dynamic digital ‘regulatory spaces’; the contingency of power; law as a heterogenous ‘assemblage’; the unintended consequence of local orderings; and the links between power and spaces. Ultimately, the author demonstrates that power effects are highly localised, precarious and contingent outcomes of manifold, complex and fluid alliances between diverse humans and non-humans. Advancing various contentions on how social network sites can be successfully regulated, the empirical analyses and multi-disciplinary approaches in this book will prove invaluable to students, scholars and practitioners of law, particularly those interested in regulation, data protection and copyright in social network sites.

Table of Contents:
Contents: 1. Introduction to Social network sites: Power, regulation and law 2. Regulating digital environments: From the Wild West to regulation to power 3. SNS as ‘assemblages’: Of power, relationality and resistance 4. YouTube, piracy and copyright: A socio-legal-technological tale 5. YouTube, copyright and power 6. Data privacy regulation on Facebook: A socio-legal-technological achievement 7. Investigating regimes of power on Facebook 8. SNS: Of regulation and power Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Asma Vranaki, Senior Lecturer in Law, School of Law, University of Bristol, UK

Review :
‘Lawyers are nowadays used to the idea that law needs to be studied in its context. This book’s major insight is that context is not merely the background to law, but rather that the web of power relationships between actors is the primary context which shapes the law and gives it meaning in action. Power is not reserved to lawmakers and platform owners – all actors have some degree of power. Thus we learn that YouTube’s copyright notice and takedown processes and its Content ID system are merely influenced by the content of law rather than determined by it, and that rights owners and content creators use these ‘legal’ structures in unexpected ways which give them new meanings. Similarly, data privacy on Facebook is not statically determined by legal texts such as laws and platform terms, but is a dynamic balance whose shifts are determined by power asserted by all players in the Facebook ecosystem. Vranaki’s use of Actor Network Theory and Foucault’s theories of power to analyse these phenomena is always illuminating, and few readers will finish this book without a new and deeper understanding of how law works.’ ‘Asma Vranaki dives into power relationships online, in particular social networks. She critically surveys cyberspace regulation literature, and suggests an improved theory. The core of the monograph studies empirically issues of Facebook on data protection, and YouTube on copyright. The monograph is wonderfully written, sharply analysed, and a joy to read.’