Computer Law Commons^™

Paul Baran, Network Theory, And The Past, Present, And Future Of Internet, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Paul Baran’s seminal 1964 article “On Distributed Communications Networks” that first proposed packet switching also advanced an underappreciated vision of network architecture: a lattice-like, distributed network, in which each node of the Internet would be homogeneous and equal in status to all other nodes. Scholars who have subsequently embraced the concept of a lattice-like network approach have largely overlooked the extent to which it is both inconsistent with network theory (associated with the work of Duncan Watts and Albert-László Barabási), which emphasizes the importance of short cuts and hubs in enabling networks to scale, and the actual way, the Internet …

Law And Modern Technology: Lack Of Tech Knowledge In Legal Profession May Cause Injustice, Md Wahidur Rahman, Marissa Moran

Publications and Research

There is no such field where technology hasn’t reached. It will be a dream to think something without technology. In today’s world every field requires tech knowledge. The courtroom and law offices have changed with the evolution of technology. Most courts don’t accept paper files anymore. Law offices use virtual file to store client information. However, due to old age or other reason a significant number of attorneys and judges are not competent in technology.

This paper will examine the use of technology in our legal system and what problem arises due to lack of proper tech knowledge. Increasing use …

How Supreme A Court?, Thomas E. Kadri

Popular Media

Facebook is planning an independent appeals process for content moderation decisions. But how much power will it have?

How To Make Facebook's 'Supreme Court' Work, Kate Klonick, Thomas E. Kadri

Popular Media

The idea of a body that will decide what kind of content is allowed on the site is promising — but only if it’s done right.

Dean's Desk: Iu Maurer Programs Supporting Careers In Cybersecurity, Austen L. Parrish

Austen Parrish (2014-2022)

A recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report estimated a near 30 percent growth in coming years for information security professionals, far outpacing most other job types. While Indiana University has long recognized the importance of data security and privacy, multiple new initiatives are ensuring that the next generation of chief information security officers, systems analysts, privacy professionals and others will come from our law school.

One of the ways the law school is leading the way is through the university’s new master of science in cybersecurity risk management. That degree program combines the resources of three of IU’s top-ranked schools …

Taxing & Zapping Marijuana: Blockchain Compliance In The Trump Administration Part 3, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Brendan Magauran

Faculty Scholarship

This is the third of a five-part series dealing with the rescission by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions of the Obama-era policy that discouraged federal prosecutors from bringing charges in all but the most serious marijuana cases.

This article focuses on cyber-attacks on the main commercial chain, and the use of a private blockchain using HyperLedger Fabric as a platform.

This fraud is a direct, criminal attack; an attack designed to destroy/corrupt records of marijuana inventory and plant tags throughout the supply chain. The attack allows legalized marijuana to escape the system and be sold on the black market. A …

The Tao Of The Dao: Taxing An Entity That Lives On A Blockchain, David J. Shakow

All Faculty Scholarship

In this report, Shakow explains how a decentralized autonomous organization functions and interacts with the U.S. tax system and presents the many tax issues that these structures raise. The possibility of using smart contracts to allow an entity to operate totally autonomously on a blockchain platform seems attractive. However, little thought has been given to how such an entity can comply with the requirements of a tax system. The DAO, the first major attempt to create such an organization, failed because of a programming error. If successful examples proliferate in the future, tax authorities will face significant problems in getting …

Zappers, Phantomware And Other Sales Suppression Software In The State Of Washington, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Robert Chicoine

Faculty Scholarship

Electronic sales suppression (ESS) is a fraud that has been a (prominent) feature of the North American retail business since at least 1996. The first EES case in the US dates from 1981. ESS is a global problem. Depending on the jurisdiction, and the research study consulted, ESS is estimated to be present in 34% (of Canadian), 50% (of German – two studies), and 70% (of Swedish and Slovenian) businesses. It may be the case today, that “you cannot leave home without” encountering (or participating in) ESS.

The most common types of sales suppression technology are Zappers and Phantomware programming. …

Lsat Practicum: An Application Of Human Based Computation, Seth Rivett

Student Scholarship – Computer Science

Human-based computation can be applied to solve problems too hard for a single computer. Crowdsourcing can be applied to ethical modeling by splitting ethical situations among humans. In this senior research project, the crowdsourcing method is applied to produce an ethical model for what web crawlers are allowed to do on websites. By evaluating questions about terms of use on a website, users provide context for the robots. An obstacle to this project is getting the right crowd to participate in the problem. The crowd of potential law students was selected as students typically answer questions to study for a …

Speech V. Speakers, Thomas E. Kadri

Popular Media

Twitter's new rules about extremist speech blur the lines between people and words.

Symbols, Systems, And Software As Intellectual Property: Time For Contu, Part Ii?, Timothy K. Armstrong

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The functional nature of computer software underlies two propositions that were, until recently, fairly well settled in intellectual property law: first, that software, like other utilitarian articles, may qualify for patent protection; and second, that the scope of copyright protection for software is comparatively limited. Both propositions have become considerably shakier as a result of recent court decisions. Following Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int’l, 134 S. Ct. 2347 (2014), the lower courts have invalidated many software patents as unprotectable subject matter. Meanwhile, Oracle America v. Google Inc., 750 F.3d 1339 (Fed. Cir. 2014) extended far more expansive copyright protection …

The Legal Fate Of Internet Ad-Blocking, Russell A. Miller

Scholarly Articles

Ad-blocking services allow individual users to avoid the obtrusive advertising that both clutters and finances most Internet publishing. Ad-blocking's immense - and growing - popularity suggests the depth of Internet users' frustration with Internet advertising. But its potential to disrupt publishers' traditional Internet revenue model makes ad-blocking one of the most significant recent Internet phenomena. Unsurprisingly, publishers are not inclined to accept ad-blocking without a legal fight. While publishers are threatening suits in the United States, the issues presented by ad-blocking have been extensively litigated in German courts where ad-blocking consistently has triumphed over claims that it represents a form …

Bulk Biometric Metadata Collection, Margaret Hu

Scholarly Articles

Smart police body cameras and smart glasses worn by law enforcement increasingly reflect state-of-the-art surveillance technology, such as the integration of live-streaming video with facial recognition and artificial intelligence tools, including automated analytics. This Article explores how these emerging cybersurveillance technologies risk the potential for bulk biometric metadata collection. Such collection is likely to fall outside the scope of the types of bulk metadata collection protections regulated by the USA FREEDOM Act of 2015. The USA FREEDOM Act was intended to bring the practice of bulk telephony metadata collection conducted by the National Security Agency (“NSA”) under tighter regulation. In …

The Indecency And Injustice Of Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act, Mary Graw Leary

Scholarly Articles

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is a 1996 law wholly inadequate to address 21^st Century problems. The most egregious example of this is online sex trafficking, which was allowed not only to exist, but also to thrive due, in large part, to §230. This Article examines the development of the jurisprudence regarding online advertising of sex-trafficking victims and juxtaposes the forces that created § 230 with those preventing its timely amendment. This Article argues that, although § 230 was never intended to create a regime of absolute immunity for defendant websites, a perverse interpretation of the non-sex …

Topic Modeling The President: Conventional And Computational Methods, J.B. Ruhl, John Nay, Jonathan Gilligan

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Legal and policy scholars modeling direct actions into substantive topic classifications thus far have not employed computational methods. To compare the results of their conventional modeling methods with the computational method, we generated computational topic models of all direct actions over time periods other scholars have studied using conventional methods, and did the same for a case study of environmental-policy direct actions. Our computational model of all direct actions closely matched one of the two comprehensive empirical models developed using conventional methods. By contrast, our environmental-case-study model differed markedly from the only empirical topic model of environmental-policy direct actions using …

Licensing & Law Who Owns An Avatar?, Tyler T. Ochoa, Jaime Banks

Faculty Publications

Both players and game developers have great influence over how avatars—via their assembled components— manifest in digital game play. Developers craft their foundational platforms and draw on those infrastructures to craft dynamic code that enables movements, appearances, and abilities. But those potentials call into question whether avatars are avatars until they are played—players click avatars into being, customize their bodies and attire, drive their actions and interactions, and sometimes bring them outside the game world through physical representations. So, given avatars’ joint reliance on developers and players, and given legal frameworks such as copyright law, who really “owns” a video …

Understanding The Human Element In Search Algorithms And Discovering How It Affects Search Results, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

When legal researchers search in online databases for the information they need to solve a legal problem, they need to remember that the algorithms that are returning results to them were designed by humans. The world of legal research is a human-constructed world, and the biases and assumptions the teams of humans that construct the online world bring to the task are imported into the systems we use for research. This article takes a look at what happens when six different teams of humans set out to solve the same problem: how to return results relevant to a searcher’s query …

The Gdpr’S Version Of Algorithmic Accountability, Margot Kaminski

Publications

No abstract provided.

That Was Close! Reward Reporting Of Cybersecurity “Near Misses”, Jonathan Bair, Steven M. Bellovin, Andrew Manley, Blake Reid, Adam Shostak

Publications

Building, deploying, and maintaining systems with sufficient cybersecurity is challenging. Faster improvement would be valuable to society as a whole. Are we doing as much as we can to improve? We examine robust and long-standing systems for learning from near misses in aviation, and propose the creation of a Cyber Safety Reporting System (CSRS).

To support this argument, we examine the liability concerns which inhibit learning, including both civil and regulatory liability. We look to the way in which cybersecurity engineering and science is done today, and propose that a small amount of ‘policy entrepreneurship’ could have substantial positive impact. …

Unbundling Employment Flexible Benefits For The Gig Economy, Seth C. Oranburg

Law Faculty Scholarship

Federal labor law requires employers to give employees a rigid bundle of benefits, including the right to unionize, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation insurance, health insurance, family medical leave, and more. These benefits are not free—benefits cost about one-third of wages—and someone must pay for them. Which of these benefits are worth their cost? This Article takes a theoretical approach to that problem and proposes a flexible benefits solution.

Labor law developed under a traditional model of work: long-term employees depended on a single employer to engage in goods-producing work. Few people work that way today. Instead, modern workers are increasingly …

Can Cyber Harassment Laws Encourage Online Speech?, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Do laws criminalizing online harassment and cyberbullying "chill" online speech? Critics often argue that they do. However, this article discusses findings from a new empirical legal study that suggests, counter-intuitively, that while such legal interventions likely have some dampening effect, they may also facilitate and encourage more speech, expression, and sharing by those who are most often the targets of online harassment: women. Relevant findings on this point from this first-of-its-kind study are set out and discussed along with their implications.

Bridges Ii: The Law--Stem Alliance & Next Generation Innovation, Harry Surden

Publications

Technological change recently has altered business models in the legal field, and these changes will continue to affect the practice of law itself. How can we, as educators, prepare law students to meet the challenges of new technology throughout their careers?

Results May Vary, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

No abstract provided.

Panel 1: Robotic Speech And The First Amendment, Bruce E. H. Johnson, Helen Norton, David Skover

Publications

Moderator: Professor Gregory Silverman.

Book discussed: Ronald L. Collins & David M. Skover, Robotica: Speech Rights and Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge Univ. Press 2018).

Regulating Robo Advice Across The Financial Services Industry, Tom Baker, Benedict G. C. Dellaert

All Faculty Scholarship

Automated financial product advisors – “robo advisors” – are emerging across the financial services industry, helping consumers choose investments, banking products, and insurance policies. Robo advisors have the potential to lower the cost and increase the quality and transparency of financial advice for consumers. But they also pose significant new challenges for regulators who are accustomed to assessing human intermediaries. A well-designed robo advisor will be honest and competent, and it will recommend only suitable products. Because humans design and implement robo advisors, however, honesty, competence, and suitability cannot simply be assumed. Moreover, robo advisors pose new scale risks that …

Is The License Still The Product?, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

Articles

The Supreme Court rejected the use of patent law to enforce conditional sales contracts in Impression Products v. Lexmark. The case appears to be just another step in the Supreme Court’s ongoing campaign to reset the Federal Circuit’s patent law jurisprudence. However, the decision casts a shadow on cases from all federal circuits that have enforced software licenses for more than 20 years and potentially imperils the business models on which software developers rely to create innovative products and to bring those products to market in a variety of useful ways.

For over two decades, we could say that …

Prolegomenon On Pornography, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

Debates about pornography have always included arguments about its “effects.” Now we can gauge the effects of specifically computerized pornography. These novel effects include scientific research showing that digitalized pornography affects the brain and nervous system in harmful ways that no centerfold ever could. Accessing pornography online makes interactive and directive engagement with it possible, so that the consumer is no longer limited to staring at a two-dimensional representation of a stranger in the nude. The action now is more adventurous. The consumer’s involvement is more intimate and directive. What he does lies somewhere between looking at a centerfold and …

Common Carriage’S Domain, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

The judicial decision invalidating the Federal Communications Commission's first Open Internet Order has led advocates to embrace common carriage as the legal basis for network neutrality. In so doing, network neutrality proponents have overlooked the academic literature on common carriage as well as lessons from its implementation history. This Essay distills these learnings into five factors that play a key role in promoting common carriage's success: (1) commodity products, (2) simple interfaces, (3) stability and uniformity in the transmission technology, (4) full deployment of the transmission network, and (5) stable demand and market shares. Applying this framework to the Internet …

Innovation And Tradition: A Survey Of Intellectual Property And Technology Legal Clinics, Cynthia L. Dahl, Victoria F. Phillips

All Faculty Scholarship

For artists, nonprofits, community organizations and small-business clients of limited means, securing intellectual property rights and getting counseling involving patent, copyright and trademark law are critical to their success and growth. These clients need expert IP and technology legal assistance, but very often cannot afford services in the legal marketplace. In addition, legal services and state bar pro bono programs have generally been ill-equipped to assist in these more specialized areas. An expanding community of IP and Technology clinics has emerged across the country to meet these needs. But while law review articles have described and examined other sectors of …

Twenty Years Of Web Scraping And The Computer Fraud And Abuse Act, Andrew Sellars

Faculty Scholarship

"Web scraping" is a ubiquitous technique for extracting data from the World Wide Web, done through a computer script that will send tailored queries to websites to retrieve specific pieces of content. The technique has proliferated under the ever-expanding shadow of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which, among other things, prohibits obtaining information from a computer by accessing the computer without authorization or exceeding one's authorized access.

Unsurprisingly, many litigants have now turned to the CFAA in attempt to police against unwanted web scraping. Yet despite the rise in both web scraping and lawsuits about web scraping, practical …