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Full-Text Articles in Law

A Dispatch From The Crypto Wars, A. Michael Froomkin Jan 2006

A Dispatch From The Crypto Wars, A. Michael Froomkin

Articles

Matt Curtin's Brute Force is a primarily personal account of one early effort to harness the power of distributed computing. In 1997, Mr. Curtin and other members of the DESCHALL (DES Challenge) project built, distributed, and managed software that united thousands of computers, many of them ordinary personal computers, in the search for a single decryption key among 72 quadrillion possibilities. The DESCHALL project sought to demonstrate that DES, then the U.S. national standard encryption algorithm, was no longer as secure as advertised. While Brute Force also offers some background on encryption regulation, export control policy, and other aspect of …


Ip's Problem Child: Shifting The Paradigms For Software Protection, Jacqueline D. Lipton Jan 2006

Ip's Problem Child: Shifting The Paradigms For Software Protection, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

Computer software is somewhat of a problem child for intellectual property law. Courts and legislatures have struggled to encourage innovations in software development while, at the same time, attempting to avoid undesirable digital information monopolies. Neither the patent nor the copyright system has provided a particularly satisfactory paradigm for software protection. Although patents have received greater attention than copyrights in the software context (consider, for example, the recent BlackBerry case), copyright law arguably creates more insidious undercurrents in today's marketplace. This is partly because we have not yet appreciated the potential impact of recent developments in programming methodology and digital …


Computer Models For Legal Prediction, Kevin D. Ashley, Stephanie Bruninghaus Jan 2006

Computer Models For Legal Prediction, Kevin D. Ashley, Stephanie Bruninghaus

Articles

Computerized algorithms for predicting the outcomes of legal problems can extract and present information from particular databases of cases to guide the legal analysis of new problems. They can have practical value despite the limitations that make reliance on predictions risky for other real-world purposes such as estimating settlement values. An algorithm's ability to generate reasonable legal arguments also is important. In this article, computerized prediction algorithms are compared not only in terms of accuracy, but also in terms of their ability to explain predictions and to integrate predictions and arguments. Our approach, the Issue-Based Prediction algorithm, is a program …