Shaping competition on the Internet: Who owns product and pricing information?

The Internet and its technology offer the potential to transform the way in which retailing is conducted and to shift some bargaining power from producers to consumers. The law therefore must carefully scrutinize claims by sites that seek to restrict access to software tools that would help this shift to occur. It must separate sites' "legitimate" motivations from their anti-competitive ones and consider how best to balance legally cognizable private harms against the public benefit. This Article starts the debate with a proposed balancing test to address unauthorized access to obtain uncopyrighted information, but its main contribution is to remind Internet users of all types that the law has a major role to play in shaping competition in this still relatively new medium.