Science and Technology Law Commons^™

Asteroid Mining: International And National Legal Aspects, Frans G. Von Der Dunk

Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law Program: Faculty Publications

1. Introduction; Asteroid Mining and the Law … 2. The International Legal Context for Asteroid Mining—The Outer Space Treaty … 3. The International Legal Context for Asteroid Mining—The Moon Agreement … 4. Back to the Outer Space Treaty: Interpreting the Nonappropriation Prohibition … 5. Unilateral Action: Title IV, U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act … 6. Concluding Remarks

Asteroid mining is one of the hot topics today not only within the space arena at large but also in the more specific domain of space law, comprising “every legal or regulatory regime having a significant impact, even if implicitly or indirectly, …

Some Remarks Further To "Outer Space And International Geography: Article Ii And The Shape Of Global Order" By P. J. Blount, Frans Von Der Dunk

Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law Program: Faculty Publications

Introduction ... The Key Role of Article II of the Outer Space Treaty ... Article II of the Outer Space Treaty and the Commercialization of Outer Space ... Space Mining: The Need for an Update of the Legal Framework ... Updating the Existing Legal Framework: Some Further Thoughts ... Concluding Remarks

The European Union And Space—Space For Competition?, Frans G. Von Der Dunk

Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law Program: Faculty Publications

From the inception of European integration, a regime trying to regulate and arrange competition as much as considered necessary for the benefit of society at large has been one of the core elements of the European Union’s legal order. While the European Union has over the past few decades become more and more involved in the European space effort, this has so far hardly given rise to fundamental application of this competition regime to space activities, even if space also in Europe increasingly has become commercialized and privatized. The current paper investigates the reasons and rationale for this special situation, …

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Their Use Of Satellite Services And (Space) Law, Frans Von Der Dunk

Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law Program: Faculty Publications

This chapter represents an effort to identify the components of international space law that apply to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). It argues that, while other national and international regimes of law apply to UAV activities, international space law is implicated only to the extent that UAV technology relies on satellite services for control and guidance purposes.

Smart Machines And Smarter Policy: Foreign Investment Regulation, National Security, And Technology Transfer In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence, 51 J. Marshall L. Rev. 279 (2018), Justin Shields

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Statutory Patent Reversion Period May End The Debate On Employee Inventions, 51 J. Marshall L. Rev. 675 (2018), Yucheng Wang

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is Tricking A Robot Hacking?, Ryan Calo, Ivan Evtimov, Earlence Fernandes, Tadayoshi Kohno, David O'Hair

Tech Policy Lab

The authors of this essay represent an interdisciplinary team of experts in machine learning, computer security, and law. Our aim is to introduce the law and policy community within and beyond academia to the ways adversarial machine learning (ML) alter the nature of hacking and with it the cybersecurity landscape. Using the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986—the paradigmatic federal anti-hacking law—as a case study, we mean to evidence the burgeoning disconnect between law and technical practice. And we hope to explain what is at stake should we fail to address the uncertainty that flows from the prospect that …

Differential Privacy: A Primer For A Non-Technical Audience, Alexandra Wood, Micah Altman, Aaron Bembenek, Mark Bun, Marco Gaboardi, James Honaker, Kobbi Nissim, David R. O'Brien, Thomas Steinke, Salil Vadhan

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Differential privacy is a formal mathematical framework for quantifying and managing privacy risks. It provides provable privacy protection against a wide range of potential attacks, including those currently unforeseen. Differential privacy is primarily studied in the context of the collection, analysis, and release of aggregate statistics. These range from simple statistical estimations, such as averages, to machine learning. Tools for differentially private analysis are now in early stages of implementation and use across a variety of academic,industry, and government settings. Interest in the concept is growing among potential users of the tools, as well as within legal and policy communities, …

Scientific Trials--In The Laboratories, Not The Courts, Nicholas Bagley, Aaron E. Carroll, Pieter A. Cohen

Articles

In 2015, one of us published a peer-reviewed study, together with colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, replicating prior research from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) detecting a designer stimulant, β-methylphenylethylamine, in sports, weight loss, and “cognitive function” supplements sold in the United States. The confirmatory study prompted the FDA to take enforcement action against companies selling the stimulant as a dietary ingredient. One of the companies that received an FDA warning letter sued the study’s authors for $200 million in damages for libel, claiming, without supporting scientific evidence, that multiple statements in the article were …

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.

The Disruptive Neuroscience Of Judicial Choice, Anna Spain Bradley

Publications

Scholars of judicial behavior overwhelmingly substantiate the historical presumption that most judges act impartially and independent most of the time. The reality of human behavior, however, says otherwise. Drawing upon untapped evidence from neuroscience, this Article provides a comprehensive evaluation of how bias, emotion, and empathy—all central to human decision-making—are inevitable in judicial choice. The Article offers three novel neuroscientific insights that explain why this inevitability is so. First, because human cognition associated with decision-making involves multiple, and often intersecting, neural regions and circuits, logic and reason are not separate from bias and emotion in the brain. Second, bias, emotion, …

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. …

Proximate Vs. Geographic Limits On Patent Damages, Stephen Yelderman

Journal Articles

The exclusive rights of a U.S. patent are limited in two important ways. First, a patent has a technical scope—only the products and methods set out in the patent’s claims may constitute infringement. Second, a patent has a geographic scope—making, using, or selling the products or methods described in the patent’s claims will only constitute infringement if that activity takes place in the United States. These boundaries are foundational features of the patent system: there can be no liability for U.S. patent infringement without an act that falls within both the technical and geographic scope of the patent.

Evil Nudges, Michal Lavi

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The seminal book Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein demonstrates that policy makers can prod behavioral changes. A nudge is "any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives." This type of strategy, and the notion of libertarian paternalism at its base, prompted discussions and objections. Academic literature tends to focus on the positive potential of nudges and neglects to address libertarian paternalism that does not promote the welfare of individuals and third parties, but rather infringes on it-a concept this Article refers to …

The Bot Legal Code: Developing A Legally Compliant Artificial Intelligence, Edmund Mokhtarian

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The advent of sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) agents, or bots, raises the question: How do we ensure that these bots act appropriately? Within a decade, AI will be ubiquitous, with billions of active bots influencing nearly every industry and daily activity. Given the extensiveness of AI activity, it will be nearly impossible to explicitly program bots with detailed instructions on permitted and prohibited actions, particularly as they face unpredictable, novel situations. Rather, if risks to humans are to be mitigated, bots must have some overriding moral or legal compass--a set of "AI Laws"--to allow them to adapt to whatever scenarios …

Fintech: Antidote To Rent-Seeking?, Jeremy Kidd

Articles

Fintech is a reality of our modern society, and will likely become even more so in the future. Peer-to-peer lending, cybercurrencies, smart contracts, algorithmic lending, and more, have required adaptation by consumers and producers of financial services. Our modes of doing business will continue to be challenged and changed by these and other Fintech innovations, almost certainly expanding beyond merely “promot[ing] financial inclusion, expand[ing] access to capital for individuals and small businesses, and more broadly reshap[ing] how society interacts with financial services.” By reducing transaction costs, advancing technology opens the doors to innovations the likes of which we might not …

Predatory Innovation: The Definite Need For Legal Recognition, Thibault Schrepel

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.

Germline Editing: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back?, Kristina Smith

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.

Copyrightability Of Artworks Produced By Creative Robots And Originality: The Formality-Objective Model, Shlomit Yanisky-Ravid, Luis Antonio Velez- Hernandez

Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology

No abstract provided.