The law provides a number of tools to protect reputation, including defamation, invasion of privacy, and some forms of intellectual property. But each of these tools relies on a certain conception of what reputation is. With the advent of the Internet and pervasive digital capture devices and databases, our understanding of reputation is changing. Whether and how this change should impact these doctrinal areas is a vital question, as the use of these legal tools often implicates competing interests between individuals and between individuals and society.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/4026