Just published: "DISSONANT PARADIGMS AND UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES"

["Don Labriola" <don@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This paper proposes a new legal model that tempers the harshness of Law and Economics theory with principles culled from social
psychology, business management, and science history.  It describes a different way to approach legal disputes that arise between
communities on opposite sides of a paradigm shift and explains why the holding in Sony v. Universal (the "Betamax" case) ultimately
benefited all parties, while the Napster decision produced unintended consequences that ultimately doomed the record industry.
Copies may be downloaded freely from the JOLT link below.


DISSONANT PARADIGMS AND UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES:
CAN (AND SHOULD) THE LAW SAVE US FROM TECHNOLOGY?
By Don Labriola (PC Mag, Albany Law School, et al)

Published Nov. 9, 2009
Richmond Univ. Journal of Law and Technology
http://law.richmond.edu/jolt/index.asp

Technologies like digital audio, the Internet, and broadband
communications spur economic growth and foster new patterns of
commerce and social interaction. But they also spawn disruptive
innovations that force established industries to forge novel responses or
risk falling by the wayside.

Industries faced with such challenges often look to the law for
help, as do new-technology upstarts that feel bullied by their entrenched
competition. But legislatures and the courts have rarely done more than
delay the inevitable. One reason has been the all-too-common failure of
conventional legal analysis to address the irreconcilable differences
between warring factions' basic assumptions, beliefs, and norms of
behavior.

This article argues that such disparities are functionally similar
to the "cognitive dissonances" that behavioral and social psychologists
observe in conflicted individuals and synthesizes a dissonance-based
legal model suited to such controversies.

It concludes that lawmakers and courts seeking to remedy
the social ills caused by technological disruption should
consider classical dissonance-reduction strategies used
successfully in the social sciences.