| | | | |

Internet, Privacy, and Progressive Halakhah 89 life,-- the right to be let alone; the right to liberty secures the exercise of extensive civil privileges; and the term‘property’ has grown to comprise every form of possession-- intangible, as well as tangible.””” Such a law must therefore have the capacity to respond to the current challenge, namely to protect the individual from the assaults launched by yellow journalists and the 19"­century progenitors of the paparazzi. Warren and Brandeis locate the source of that protection in the well-established common law provision that empowers the individual to determine whether and to what extent his“thoughts, sentiments, and emotions[would] be communicated to others.””® The law already provides that one cannot be compelled to share one’s thoughts with the world, no matter what their form of expression. Importantly, claim the authors, this right is to be distinguished conceptually from all other legal categories. It is not, for example, comparable to copyright, which protects one’s proprietary interests in literary or artistic works after they are published; the right not to publish or communicate one’s thoughts inheres, by contrast, before publication. For this reason, it cannot be understood as a species of property right, since there is no material value to words, ideas, and thoughts that have not yet been set down in literary or artistic form. Rather,“the protection afforded to thoughts, sentiments, and emotions, expressed through the medium of writing or of the arts, so far as it consists in preventing publication, is merely an instance of the enforcement of the more general right of the individual to be let alone...”. The general principle that lies at the basis of these laws“is in reality not the principle of private property, but that of an inviolate personality.”” Nor can the principle be drawn by analogy from existing laws protecting individuals against injury stemming from breach of contract or confidence.” Rather, the protection must exist“against the world,” against anyone who would injure us, even in the absence of a contract or prior agreement with that person. The right of which we are speaking, say Warren and Brandeis , is not a subset of property or of contract law, nor is it derivative of any existing tort; it is, rather, its own, self-standing right.“The principle which protects personal writings and any other productions of the intellect of or the emotions is the