Controversy shrouds sharing economy platforms. It stems partially from the platforms’ economic impact, which is felt most acutely in certain sectors: Uber drivers compete with taxi drivers; Airbnb hosts compete with hotels. Other consequences lie elsewhere: Uber is associated with a trend toward low-paying, precarious work, whereas Airbnb is accused of exacerbating real estate speculation and raising the cost of long-term rental housing.
While governments in some jurisdictions have attempted to rein in the platforms, technology has enabled such companies to bypass conventional regulatory categories, generating accusations of “unfair competition” as well as debates about the merits of existing regulatory regimes. Indeed, the platforms blur a number of familiar distinctions, including personal versus commercial activity; infrastructure versus content; contractual autonomy versus hierarchical control. These ambiguities can stymie legal regimes that rely on these distinctions as organizing principles, including those relating to labour, competition, tax, insurance, information, the prohibition of discrimination, as well as specialized sectoral regulation.
This book is organized around five themes: technologies of regulation; regulating technology; the sites of regulation (local to global); regulating markets; and regulating labour. Together, the chapters offer a rich variety of insights on the regulation of the sharing economy, both in terms of the traditional areas of law they bring to bear, and the theoretical perspectives that inform their analysis.
Published in English.

Derek McKee, A.B., B.C.L./LL.B., S.J.D., has been Professor of Law at the Université de Sherbrooke since 2012. His teaching and research focus on administrative law, tort law, and transnational law, including the relationship between domestic and international law in Canada. He is now professor at the Université de Montréal.

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Finn Makela, B.A., M.A., LL.B/B.C.L., LL.D is an associate professor at the Faculty of Law, Université de Sherbrooke. His primary areas of teaching and research are labour and employment law, legal theory and legal methodology.

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Teresa Scassa is the Canada Research Chair in Information Law at the University of Ottawa, where she is also a professor at the Faculty of Law. She is a founder and former editor of the Canadian Journal of Law and Technology; author of Canadian Trademark Law (LexisNexis, 2010); co-author of Electronic Commerce and Internet Law in Canada (CCH Canadian Ltd, 2012), which was the winner of the 2013 Walter Owen Book Prize; and co-author of Canadian Intellectual Property Law: Cases, Notes and Materials (Emond Montgomery, 2013). She is also a co-editor of the recently published Intellectual Property for the 21st Century: Interdisciplinary Approaches (Irwin Law, 2014). She is a member of the External Advisory Committee of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, and of the Canadian Government Advisory Committee on Open Government. She has written widely in the areas of intellectual property law, law and technology, and privacy.

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Harry Arthurs is University Professor Emeritus and President Emeritus at York University. He has served as Dean of Osgoode Hall Law School (1972–77) and President of York University (1985–92). He is a former associate of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

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Francesco Ducci is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. He specializes in competition law as well as economic analysis of law.

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Marie-Cécile Escande-Varniol is a senior lecturer at the Institut d’Études du Travail de Lyon (IETL), Université Lumière Lyon 2 (France). She is director of the Master Droit social, mobilité internationale des travailleurs. She is a member of the CERCRID (Centre de Recherche Critique sur le Droit.

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Vincent Gautrais is Full Professor and L. R. Wilson Chair in Information Technology and E-commerce Law at the Faculty of Law, Université de Montréal. He is also the director of the Centre de recherche en droit public. He previously held the Université de Montréal Excellence Chair in Security and Internet Law.

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Michael Geist is a law professor at the University of Ottawa, where he holds the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law. He has obtained a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) degree from Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Master of Laws (LL.M.) degrees from Cambridge University in the UK and Columbia Law School in New York, and a Doctorate in Law (J.S.D.) from Columbia Law School.

Dr. Geist has written numerous academic articles and government reports on the Internet and law, is a nationally syndicated columnist on technology law issues for the Toronto Star and Ottawa Citizen, is the editor of Internet and E-commerce Law in Canada and the Canadian Privacy Law Review (Butterworths), and is the author of the textbook Internet Law in Canada (Captus Press), which is now in its third edition. He is the author of the popular BNA's Internet Law News and maintains a popular blog on Internet and intellectual property law issues.

Dr. Geist is actively involved in national Internet policy development and was a member of Canada's National Task Force on Spam. He has received numerous awards for his work, including Canarie's IWAY Public Leadership Award for his contribution to the development of the Internet in Canada, and he was named one of Canada's Top 40 Under 40 in 2003.

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Eran Kaplinsky (LLB, Tel Aviv University; LLM, SJD, University of Toronto) is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Alberta. Eran’s scholarship focuses on municipal, planning, and property law. He has taught courses in these areas at the University of Toronto, Ryerson University, and Université de Sherbrooke, in addition to the University of Alberta. This is his first scholarly contribution in the area of animal law.

 

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Nofar Sheffi is a lecturer at the University of New South Wales Faculty of Law. She specializes in contract theory, law and technology, as well as critical and social legal theories.

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Sabrina Tremblay-Huet. is a doctoral candidate and lecturer at the Université de Sherbrooke Faculty of Law. She specializes in tourism law, international human rights law, and critical legal theory.

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Eric Tucker, B.A., LL.B., LL.M. is a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. He has published extensively on the history and current state of labour and employment law. He is the author of Administering Danger in the Workplace (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990) and co-author of Labour Before the Law: The Legal Regulation of Workers’ Collective Action (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001, with Judy Fudge) and Self-Employed Workers Organize (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005, with Cynthia Cranford, Judy Fudge, and Leah Vosko). He is also the editor of Working Disasters: The Politics of Recognition and Response (Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company, 2006).

 

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MARIANA VALVERDE is a Professor at University of Toronto Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, and a Fellow of the Royal society of Canada. Her fields of study are the legal regulation of sexuality, sociolegal theory, historical sociology, and urban governance and law. She has written eight books, co-edited four anthologies and over 45 articles. In 2016 she received the Kalven prize of the Law and Society Association, for her longstanding contribution to empirical socio-legal scholarship. In addition to scholarly publishing, Mariana also writes for magazines, newspapers, and online forums, mostly on public-private infrastructure partnerships but occasionally on other topics; she has been published in The Conversation and Spacing Magazine. She lives in Toronto.

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