Digital Commons Network^™

Legal And Ethical Challenges Raised By Advances In Brain-Computer Interface Technology, Colin Conrad, Carla Heggie

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) consist of hardware and software that allow humans to control computers with their brain signals alone. Though these technologies are not new, existing approaches to BCI are either very limited in their capabilities or require highly invasive surgery. However, BCI has recently received increased attention due to advances that enable enhanced usability with less invasive approaches. Such advances could radically change the acceptance of the technology and BCI might become commonplace in the coming decades. In this article, we provide a technology scholar’s perspective on how these recent advances in BCI present new legal and ethical considerations. …

A Degree Of Pro-Ip Preference: An Empirical Study Of The Relationship Between Federal Judges' Undergraduate Programs And Their Trade Secret Decisions, Christopher P. Dinkel

West Virginia Law Review

While the previous literature has found that certain background characteristics of federal judges, such as their race, gender, and ideology, statistically correlate with case outcomes, little prior scholarship has examined the connection between judges’ educational backgrounds and their judicial decision-making. The empirical study that this Article presents fills a critical gap in the literature by statistically analyzing the relationship between federal judges’ undergraduate degrees and their rulings in cases related to trade secrets, a highly valuable form of intellectual property (IP) for many companies. Notably, it finds that if a trade secret case is assigned to a judge who possesses …

Pest Or Guest, Friend Or Foe? Reframing The "Hard Look" Doctrine's Role In Environmental Pesticide Policy, James J. Burke

Villanova Environmental Law Journal (1991 - )

No abstract provided.

No Need To Reinvent The Wheel: The Positive Relationship Between Green Technology And Patent Enforcement, Addison S. Fowler

Villanova Environmental Law Journal (1991 - )

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Property Rights And Copyright Laws In The Regime Of Artificial Intelligence (Ai) In India, Hemavathy C

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been developing for two decades. The application of AI is budding quickly in business dealings, corporate communication and legal services. AI and Law Forms are increasingly important in the legal arena as they play a significant role in the economy and society. Scientists and policymakers together are facing some of the hardest problems with the advancement of machine learning, cryptology and data protection. This paper is very helpful for policymakers, economists, lawyers and technocrats in the aspect of the ethical use of AI in data protection, privacy, security and social corners turns into very relevant issues …

A Codified Liabilty Regime To Stimulate Greater Investment In Subpatentable Innovation, Ana Santos Rutschman, Jerome H. Reichman

Faculty Publications

The global intellectual property system rests on a distinction between exclusive property rights and free competition. Exclusive rights vary in strength and intensity, but the opposite of protection is almost always free competition. Distinctions of intensity are drawn in terms of the length of protection given to different subject matters plus variable lists of exceptions and limitations to exclusive rights. But the bottom line is that, when protection is not available under the existing system, free competition prevails, and vice-versa (i.e., where there is exclusivity, free competition is deferred for a specified period of time).

This Article departs from a …

Press Play To Presume: The Policy Benefits Behind The Trademark Modernization Act's Resurrection Of The Irreparable Harm Presumption In False Advertising Cases, Daniel Stephen

William & Mary Law Review

Part I of this Note provides background information on the history and principles surrounding injunctions generally, the Supreme Court’s rulings in eBay and Winter, federal courts’ rulings after these decisions, and the Trademark Modernization Act of 2020. Part II presents anti-presumption advocates’ arguments against the presumption due to longstanding equitable concerns and because, in their view, requiring a showing of irreparable harm is not too difficult. Lastly, Part III discusses why the irreparable harm presumption in the TMA serves as beneficial policy by presenting counterarguments to anti-presumption reasoning and additional benefits of the presumption.

This abstract has been taken …

War And Ip, Peter K. Yu

BYU Law Review

This Article examines wartime and postwar protection of intellectual property rights, with a focus on the Russo-Ukrainian War that broke out in February 2022. It begins by showing that armed conflicts are not new to the international intellectual property regime and that this regime already contains robust structural features and carefully drafted safeguards, limitations, and flexibilities to protect intellectual property rights holders during wartime. The Article then explores the international intellectual property obligations of countries that are parties to an armed conflict as well as those that are not directly involved but have imposed sanctions on belligerent states. This Article …

The Ideas Of Journalistic Ethics Based On Pancasila For Multicultural Society, Sugeng Sugeng, Fristian Hadinata

International Review of Humanities Studies

This paper aims to show that journalistic code of ethics based on Pancasila is strongly related to multiculturalism morality as both emphasize inclusive ideas, respect for diversity, and the awareness of unity in diversity. The writers use descriptive qualitative library research in the field of philosophy to show meaning and objectively reveal philosophical essence. This method includes collecting and analyzing criticism of relevant literature related to multiculturalism, philosophy, journalistic ethics, and cyber media reporting. The result shows that the development of the internet technology has changed the way society live, and it has affected their preferences towards the elements of …

Debating Migrants In Korean Multiculturalism, Amelia Burhan, Ph.D

International Review of Humanities Studies

The concept of multiculturalism has become a keyword of contemporary Korean society. The influx of migrants has made Korea could not escape becoming an ethnically diverse nation and a multicultural society. This study aims to understand the concept of Korean multiculturalism through migrant workers and marriage migrants by examining their life in Korea including what kind of issues the migrants have been encountered and how was the effort of Korean government in tackling those issues. It found that the government occupied an important position in leading multiculturalism in Korea as it was the one who promoted Korea's moving towards multiculturalism …

The Impact Of Regional Tourism Development On The Food Tourism Industry: Case Study Of Tourism Village Assistance Policy In Indonesia And The Influence Of Regional Disparity On Its Effectiveness, Uliannisa Rozdianda, Yohanna M. L. Gultom

International Review of Humanities Studies

This study aims to identify the impact of the development of tourist areas on culinary businesses by taking the case of the program for the construction of facilities and infrastructure supporting tourism villages which was implemented starting in 2017 and looking at the influence of regional disparities on the effectiveness of assistance which is then compared between the regions of Java-Bali and outside Java-Bali. Using the Difference-In-Differences (DID), the study analyzed the impact of the support program on 115 tourism villages, comparing them to other tourism villages in the same sub-district that did not receive support. The results show that, …

The Manifestation Of Misogyny In The Pick Me Boy Trend On Tiktok Indonesia, Ying Wang, Mina Elfira

International Review of Humanities Studies

Misogyny is hatred, contempt, or prejudice against women or girls. It is a form of sexism used to keep women in a lower social status than men, thereby maintaining patriarchal social roles. Hegemonic masculinity is the most exalted configuration of gender practices that legitimizes patriarchy. This article draws on the framework of Raewyn Connell's theory of masculinity and Kate Manne's concept of misogyny to discuss the phenomenon of Indonesian TikTok videos with the hashtag “Pick Me Boy” or #Pick Me Boy. Pick Me Boy challenge traditional masculinity to gain women's attention, and then demean women if rejected. This article uses …

Counter-Discourse And Power In Ahmed Yerimah’S Hard Ground And Uwemedimo Atakpo’S Watering The Hard Ground, Anietie Francis Udofia

International Review of Humanities Studies

Niger Delta uprising always evokes controversial positions viewed from a single perspective from the pages of print to electronic media with which many dramas and films on their themes clone some intertextual discourses as the absolute voice on the Niger Deltans’ problem. The major concern is usually the violence caused by the people of the Niger Delta to disrupt the peace of the Nigerian society without giving a second thought to the people’s complaint about the political which worsens the situations of the region. Using qualitative research methodology, framed on Mikhail Bakhtins’ theory of Dialogism as a suitable theoretical framework …

Copyright And Covid, Sean Flynn

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

During the COVID-19 pandemic it became widely recognized that speedier access to patent rights should be enabled to speed global scale-up of vaccine production. This understanding was expressed in a proposal by India and South Africa that the World Trade Organization suspend multilateral intellectual property rules on COVID vaccines, treatment and containment. The original waiver proposal proposed a suspension of WTO rules on all forms of intellectual property needed for a broad range of COVID-19 response measures, including “vaccination,” “treatment,” and “containment.” The final “TRIPS Waiver,” however, was ultimately limited to a minor provision of TRIPS permitting greater use of …

The Right To Research As Guarantor For Sustainability, Innovation And Justice In Eu Copyright Law, Christophe Geiger, Bernd Justin Jütte

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

Research is essential for scientific, cultural, and social advancement and will be crucial for the economic and societal recovery in a post-pandemic world. Restrictions to access and use of information contained in copyright-protected expression however can constitute significant hindrances to conducting research efficiently, especially since modern research methods rely on accessing, storing and processing large amounts of digitized data. Over the last decade, copyright in the European Union (EU) has undergone a process of constitutionalization, which saw a growing importance of fundamental rights arguments in policy- and law-making, as well as in the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of …

Robots As Pirates, Henry H. Perritt Jr.

Catholic University Law Review

Generative AI has created much excitement over its potential to create new works of authorship in the literary and graphical realms. Its underling machine-learning technology works by analyzing the relations among elements of preexisting material in enormous databases assembled from publicly available and licensed sources. Its algorithms “learn” to predict “what comes next” in different types of expression. A complete system thus can become glib in creating new factual summaries, essays, fictional stories and images.

A number of authors of the raw material used by Generative AI engines claim that the machine learning process infringes their copyrights. Careful evaluation of …

The Second Digital Transformation Of Scholarly Publishing: Strategic Context And Shared Infrastructure, Tracy Bergstrom, Oya Y. Rieger, Roger C. Schonfeld

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Today, the scholarly publishing sector is undergoing its second digital transformation. The first digital transformation saw a massive shift from paper to digital, but otherwise publishing retained many of the structures, workflows, incentives, and outputs that characterized the print era. A variety of shared infrastructure was developed to serve the needs of this first digital transformation. In this current second digital transformation, many of the structures, workflows, incentives, and outputs that characterized the print era are being revamped in favor of new approaches that bring tremendous opportunities, and also non-trivial risks, to scholarly communication. The second digital transformation requires shared …

Narrative Of Nationalism In Mise-En-Scene Of Biopic Soekarno: Indonesia Merdeka, Eric Gunawan, Bambang Wibawarta

International Review of Humanities Studies

This paper examines the national narrative presented in the biographical film Soekarno: Indonesia Merdeka (2014). The analysis employs a film studies approach to explore the interplay between visual and narrative strategies within the framework of Eisenstein's theoretical perspectives. Christian Metz's semiotic theory is utilized to decode the signs embedded throughout the film. The study focuses on the visual and narrative strategies employed in the biopic to elucidate the national narrative, particularly through the portrayal of the character Soekarno and his interactions with other key figures. Visual strategies, encompassing cinematography and mise-en-scene techniques, bring to light signs that are intricately linked …

The Angel Wears Prada, The Devil Buys It On The Realreal: Expanding Trademark Rights Beyond The First Sale Doctrine, Junajoy Vinoya Frianeza

Pepperdine Law Review

Luxury brands derive their goodwill from the high-class exclusivity and first-rate quality signified in their trademarks. The Trademark Act of 1946, commonly known as the Lanham Act, grants trademark holders the right to control use of their mark. However, under common law, the first sale doctrine restricts trademark protection after holders authorize the initial sale of their trademarked product. Such limitation particularly jeopardizes the luxury industry as trademark holders ultimately bear the loss of goodwill when counterfeit luxury goods enter the market due to the negligence of resellers. This Comment illustrates how blockchain authentication offers all luxury industry participants—the brands, …

Give Or Take—Is The Droit De Suite A Taking Without Just Compensation?, Jeremy Cohen

Pepperdine Law Review

The Constitution mandates Congress to protect the arts and sciences directly by creating an exclusive right called copyright. However, visual artists such as painters, sculptors, and photographers in the United States still cannot participate in the significant profits from the secondary sales of their copyrighted works at public and private auctions. In over eighty countries worldwide, the droit de suite, also known as the Artist Resale Royalty (ARR), grants visual artists such royalties. Unfortunately, the United States currently lacks such a royalty, despite multiple unsuccessful attempts by Congress to pass federal legislation. Although California enacted its own version of the …

Privacy’S Next Act, Erik Lampmann-Shaver

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

This Article identifies and describes three data privacy policy developments from recent legislative sessions that may seem unrelated, but which I contend together offer clues about privacy law’s future over the short-to-medium term.

The first is the proliferation, worldwide and in U.S. states, of legislative proposals and statutes referred to as “age-appropriate design codes.” Originating in the United Kingdom, age-appropriate design codes typically apply to online services “directed to children” and subject such services to transparency, default settings, and other requirements. Chief among them is an implied obligation to conduct ongoing assessments of whether a service could be deemed “directed …

Limits Of Algorithmic Fair Use, Jacob Alhadeff, Cooper Cuene, Max Del Real

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

In this article, we apply historical copyright principles to the evolving state of text-to-image generation and explore the implications of emerging technological constructs for copyright’s fair use doctrine. Artificial intelligence (“AI”) is frequently trained on copyrighted works, which usually involves extensive copying without owners’ authorization. Such copying could constitute prima facie copyright infringement, but existing guidance suggests fair use should apply to most machine learning contexts. Mark Lemley and Bryan Casey argue that training machine learning (“ML”) models on copyrighted material should generally be permitted under fair use when the model’s outputs transcends the purpose of its inputs. Their arguments …

Coded Social Control: China’S Normalization Of Biometric Surveillance In The Post Covid-19 Era, Michelle Miao

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

This article investigates the longevity of health QR codes, a digital instrument of pandemic surveillance, in post-COVID China. From 2020 to 2022, China widely used this tri-color tool to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. A commonly held assumption is that health QR codes have become obsolete in post-pandemic China. This study challenges such an assumption. It reveals their persistence and integration - through mobile apps and online platforms - beyond the COVID-19 public health emergency. A prolonged, expanded and normalized use of tools which were originally intended for contact tracing and pandemic surveillance raises critical legal and ethical concerns. Moreover, their …

Quantifying Civil Recovery In Hybrid Antitrust-Data Protection Harms, Jose Maria Marella

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

If digital platforms are found liable on hybrid antitrust-data protection violations, by how much should individual users be compensated? While traditional antitrust literature offers some estimation techniques, these methods were developed mostly around the idea that anti-competitive conduct manifests in supra-competitive prices, lost profits, or lost customers, all of which are easily quantifiable using commercially available evidence.

In digital markets, where antitrust violations are often intertwined with data protection issues, several complications arise. First, unlike transactions covered by traditional treble damage estimation techniques, “data-for-services” dealings are not evidenced by receipts. Second, personal data valuation is highly contextual and prone to …

Crypto-Counterfeiting, Joshua Fairfield

Scholarly Articles

The current crypto winter has given rise to a range of legal challenges. One of the most important sets of legal challenges goes to the heart of cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency was intended to be non-duplicatable at will, that is, not to be counterfeitable. Blockchain technology is supposed to prevent token counterfeiting through a combination of game theory and cryptography that prevents normal users from simply ordering the system to generate more tokens for their benefit.

The difficulty is that blockchain software is still software. People in charge can order and program the software to generate many more tokens for those individuals’ …

Beyond Trade Secrecy: Confidentiality Agreements That Act Like Noncompetes, Camilla A. Hrdy, Christopher B. Seaman

Scholarly Articles

There is a substantial literature on noncompete agreements and their adverse impact on employee mobility and innovation. But a far more common restraint in employment contracts has been underexplored: confidentiality agreements, sometimes called nondisclosure agreements (NDAs). A confidentiality agreement is not a blanket prohibition on competition. Rather, it is simply a promise not to use or disclose specific information. Confidentiality agreements encompass trade secrets, as defined by state and federal laws, but confidentiality agreements almost always go beyond trade secrecy, encompassing any information the employer imparted to the employee in confidence.

Despite widespread use, confidentiality agreements have received little attention. …

Confusion Over Trademark Extraterritoriality…And Beyond, Timothy R. Holbrook, Anshu Garg

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court had afforded the Lanham Act extraterritorial reach over seventy years ago in Steele v. Bulova, but its recent extraterritoriality jurisprudence called that decision into question.

This Article explains the history of trademark extraterritoriality and the splits that emerged among the circuit courts of appeals. It then canvases all of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions on the presumption against extraterritoriality and their effort to reinvigorate and standardize the law in that regard.

We then provide a detailed exploration of the Abitron decision. Next, we critique the decision and explore its implications not only for trademark law but also …

Relative And Absolute Patentability, Timothy R. Holbrook, Mark D. Janis

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, we define and interrogate a new typology for patentability rules. In our typology, some such rules are predominantly relative inquiries—meaning that they entail the use of discrete comparators—whereas others are predominantly absolute in that they lack this core comparative methodology. Selected patentability rules blend the characteristics of both relative and absolute inquiries in complex ways.

We leverage our relative/absolute typology in this Article to make two sets of contributions to the literature. First, we use our typology to craft a new descriptive account of the patentability doctrines. We show that the requirements of novelty and nonobviousness are …

Holograms Are Taking Over The World! An Analysis On Legal Implications Holograms Pose In Right Of Publicity And Copyright Law, Marie A. Kessel

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

An Information Theory Of Intentional Trademark Infringement, Jake Linford

Scholarly Publications

Critiques of the intent inquiry in trademark likelihood of confusion cases are somewhat misguided in light of theories about how information is transmitted in communication systems. Properly calibrated legal systems can incentivize better information flow and appropriate behavior by commercial actors using information forcing default rules. This Article considers trademark law's information transmission function in light of legal theories about the efficiencies captured through information forcing rules, as well as Claude Shannon's information theory, which provides a model for information transmission and important insights for how to optimize the signal-to-noise ratio in the commercial market. Defendants who run afoul of …