Law Commons^™

Toward A Patent Exhaustion Regime For Sustainable Development, 32 Berkeley J. Int'l Law. 330 (2014), Benjamin Liu

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

This Article argues that the current exhaustion doctrine, when applied to the refurbishing industry, fails to balance its mandate of promoting technological progress with the broader program of sustainable development and is therefore unsuitable for countries on the modernization path. First, what constitutes an infringing “making” remains underdetermined. Second, the evidentiary hurdle for proving legal refurbishment is too onerous for the low margin and under-resourced refurbishing industry. Finally, the all-or-nothing approach to judging infringement fails to account for the nuanced cost-benefit nexus that exists between patentees, refurbishers, and society at large and discourages private ordering. To recalibrate the balance between …

Self, Privacy, And Power: Is It All Over?, Richard Warner, Robert H. Sloan

All Faculty Scholarship

The realization of a multifaceted self is an ideal one strives to realize. One realizes such a self in large part through interaction with others in various social roles. Such realization requires a significant degree of informational privacy. Informational privacy is the ability to determine for yourself when others may collect and how they may use your information. The realization of multifaceted selves requires informational privacy in public. There is no contradiction here: informational privacy is a matter of control, and you can have such control in public. Current information processing practices greatly reduce privacy in public thereby threatening the …

Email, Metadata, And Clouds, Oh My! Recent Changes To The Model Rules Of Professional Conduct, Joyce Manna Janto

Law Faculty Publications

A discussion of how the 2012 revisions to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct affect the attorney's duties in handling email: encryption, storage, metadata, and confidentiality.

Systematic Ict Surveillance By Employers: Are Your Personal Activities Private?, Arlene J. Nicholas

Faculty and Staff - Articles & Papers

This paper reviews the various methods of information and communications technology (ICT) that is used by employers to peer into the work lives and, in some cases, private lives of employees. Some of the most common methods – such as computer and Internet monitoring, video surveillance, and global positioning systems (GPS) – have resulted in employee disciplines that have been challenged in courts. This paper provides background information on United States (U.S.) laws and court cases which, in this age of easily accessible information, mostly support the employer. Assessments regarding regulations and policies, which will need to be continually updated …

Drones, Henry H. Perritt Jr., Eliot O. Sprague

All Faculty Scholarship

Abstract

Drone technology is evolving rapidly. Microdrones—what the FAA calls “sUAS”—already on the market at the $1,000 level, have the capability to supplement manned helicopters in support of public safety operations, news reporting, and powerline and pipeline patrol, when manned helicopter support is infeasible, untimely, or unsafe.

Larger drones–"machodrones”–are not yet available outside battlefield and counterterrorism spaces. Approximating the size of manned helicopters, but without pilots, or with human pilots being optional, their design is still in its infancy as designers await greater clarity in the regulatory requirements that will drive airworthiness certification.

This article evaluates drone technology and design …

Ip Law Book Review: Configuring The Networked Self: Law, Code, And The Play Of Every Day Practice, Frank A. Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

Julie Cohen's Configuring the Networked Self is an extraordinarily insightful book. Cohen not only applies extant theory to law; she also distills it into her own distinctive social theory of the information age. Thus, even relatively short sections of chapters of her book often merit article-length close readings. I here offer a brief for the practical importance of Cohen’s theory, and ways it should influence intellectual property policy and scholarship.

Brief Of Amici Curiae Law, Business, And Economics Scholars In Alice Corp. V. Cls Bank, No. 13-298, Jason Schultz, Brian Love, James Bessen, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

The Federal Circuit’s expansion of patentable subject matter in the 1990s led to a threefold increase in software patents, many of which contain abstract ideas merely tethered to a general-purpose computer. There is little evidence, however, to suggest this expansion has produced an increase in software innovation. The software industry was highly innovative in the decade immediately prior to this expansion, when the viability of software patentability was unclear and software patents were few. When surveyed, most software developers oppose software patenting, and, in practice, software innovators tend to rely on other tools to capture market share such as first-mover …

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us: Defining The Line Between Personal And Professional Context On Social Media, 35 Pace L. Rev. 398 (2014), Raizel Liebler, Keidra Chaney

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram allow individuals and companies to connect directly and regularly with an audience of peers or with the public at large. These websites combine the audience-building platforms of mass media with the personal data and relationships of in-person social networks. Due to a combination of evolving user activity and frequent updates to functionality and user features, social media tools blur the line of whether a speaker is perceived as speaking to a specific and presumed private audience, a public expression of one’s own personal views, or a representative viewpoint of an entire …

More Than The Sum Of All Parts: Taking On Ip And It Theft Through A Global Partnership, Andrew F. Popper

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The core of this Article describes some of the efforts, both within and outside the United States, to control the epidemic of intellectual property and information technology (IP and IT) theft. Those engaged in the battle include prosecutors and judges, individuals and trade associations, and politicians and policymakers from all points on the political spectrum. And yet, even with so many forces working to stem the tide, the losses are staggering.

An innovator with the potential to change his or her future as well as the prosperity of the surrounding economy, whether in Kentucky or Kinshasa, will be dissuaded from …

Code Is Law, But Law Is Increasingly Determining The Ethics Of Code: A Comment, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

“Code is Law”, the aphorism Larry Lessig popularized, spoke to the importance of computer code as a central regulating force in the Internet age. That remains true, but today, overreaching laws are also increasingly subjugating important social and ethics questions raised by code to the domain of law. Those laws — like the CFAA and DMCA — need to be curtailed or their zealous enforcement reigned; they deter not only legitimate research but also important related social and ethics questions. But researchers must act too: to re-assert control over the social, legal, and ethical direction of their fields. Otherwise, law …

New Hacktivists And The Old Concept Of Levée En Masse, Christopher Waters

Law Publications

English Abstract: The purpose of this article is to contribute to the continuing debate over the relevance of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) to cyberwar. It does so by taking what is often said to be a particularly archaic aspect of IHL, the French Revolutionary notion of levée en masse, and asking whether the concept could have relevance in the cyber context. The article treats levée en masse as a litmus test for the law’s relevance; if this IHL “relic” could have relevance in the cyber context, then the continued relevance of the larger body of rules should also be less …

Aaron Swartz’S Fbi Files

United States Department of Justice: Publications and Materials

Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet Hacktivist.

Swartz was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS, the organization Creative Commons, the website framework web.py and the social news site, Reddit, in which he became a partner after its merger with his company, Infogami. Swartz's later work focused on sociology, civic awareness and activism.

He helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in 2009 to learn more about effective online activism. In 2010 he became a research fellow at Harvard University's Safra Research Lab …

Aaron Swartz’S Secret Service Files

United States Department of Justice: Publications and Materials

These documents concern the indictment in Massachusetts for downloading JSTOR content from MIT library network.

Parts 1 & 2 are included in the main document.

Additional files are linked below, as follows:

Part 3 (3 files) -- 379 pages, 4067 pages (spreadsheet), & 190 pages (photos)

Part 4 -- 1 page

Part 5 -- 1 page

Part 6 -- 1 page

Part 7 -- 7 pages

Part 8 -- 237,397 pages (yes)

Part 9 -- 90 pages

Part 10 -- 259 pages

Part 11 -- 17 pages

Part 12 -- (not released as of 9/29/2014)

Part 13 -- 254 pages …

The Territoriality Referendum, Marketa Trimble

Scholarly Works

Many Internet users have encountered geoblocking tools – tools that prevent users from accessing certain content on the Internet based on the location from which the users are connecting to the Internet. Because at least some users want to access such content, they turn to tools that enable them to evade geoblocking, to appear on the Internet as if they were located in another location, and to access the content that is available in this other location. So far these activities appear to be under the radar of intellectual property (“IP”) owners, perhaps because geoblocking evasion by users for the …

Rethinking Online Privacy In Canada: Commentary On Voltage Pictures V. John And Jane Doe, Ngozi Okidegbe

Faculty Scholarship

This article problematizes the use of the bona fide case standard as the legal standard for a court to order a third party Internet Service Provider ("ISP") to disclose subscriber information to a copyright owner in online piracy cases. It argues that ISP account holders have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their subscriber information. It contends that the current bona fide case standard affords a relatively low threshold of protection for Internet users’ subscriber information. The reason for which the article takes this position is that the bona fide case standard can be met solely by IP address evidence, …

Secondary Liability, Isp Immunity, And Incumbent Entrenchment, Marketa Trimble, Salil K. Mehra

Scholarly Works

More than fifteen years have passed since the two major U.S. statutes concerning the secondary liability of Internet service providers were adopted--the Communications Decency Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The statutes have been criticized; however, very little of the criticism has come from Internet service providers, who have enjoyed the benefits of generous safe harbors and immunity from suit guaranteed by these statutes. This Article raises the question of whether these statutes contribute to incumbent entrenchment--solidifying the position of the existing Internet service providers to the detriment of potential new entrants. The current laws and industry self-regulation may …

Wickard For The Internet? Network Neutrality After Verizon V. Fcc, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

The D.C. Circuit’s January 2014 decision in Verizon v. FCC represented a major milestone in the debate over network neutrality that has dominated communications policy for the past decade. This article analyzes the implications of the D.C. Circuit’s ruling, beginning with a critique of the court’s ruling that section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 gave the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the authority to mandate some form of network neutrality. Examination of the statute’s text, application of canons of construction such as ejusdem generis and noscitur a sociis, and a perusal of the statute’s legislative history all raise questions …

Meatspace, The Internet, And The Cloud: How Changes In Document Storage And Transfer Can Affect Ip Rights, Sharon Sandeen

Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses the intellectual property issues from "meatspace" to online services and the Internet. It further explores intellectual property issues from the Internet to the Cloud. Finally, it discusses the implications of cloud computing for trade secret protection.

A Brief Overview Of The Nebula Future Internet Architecture, Tom Anderson, Ken Birman, Robert Broberg, Matthew Caesar, Douglas Comer, Chase Cotton, Michael J. Freedman, Andreas Haeberlen, Zachary G. Ives, Arvind Krishnamurthy, William Lehr, Boon Thau Loo, David Mazieres, Antonio Nicolosi, Jonathan M. Smith, Ion Stoica, Robbert Van Renesse, Michael Walfish, Hakim Weatherspoon, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

NEBULA is a proposal for a Future Internet Architecture. It is based on the assumptions that: (1) cloud computing will comprise an increasing fraction of the application workload offered to an Internet, and (2) that access to cloud computing resources will demand new architectural features from a network. Features that we have identified include dependability, security, flexibility and extensibility, the entirety of which constitute resilience.

NEBULA provides resilient networking services using ultrareliable routers, an extensible control plane and use of multiple paths upon which arbitrary policies may be enforced. We report on a prototype system, Zodiac, that incorporates these latter …

Possible Paradigm Shifts In Broadband Policy, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Debates over Internet policy tend to be framed by the way the Internet existed in the mid-1990s, when the Internet first became a mass-market phenomenon. At the risk of oversimplifying, the Internet was initially used by academics and tech-savvy early adopters to send email and browse the web over a personal computer connected to a telephone line via networks interconnected through in a limited way. Since then, the Internet has become much larger and more diverse in terms of users, applications, technologies, and business relationships. More recently, Internet growth has begun to slow both in terms of the number of …

Toward A Closer Integration Of Law And Computer Science, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Legal issues increasingly arise in increasingly complex technological contexts. Prominent recent examples include the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), network neutrality, the increasing availability of location information, and the NSA’s surveillance program. Other emerging issues include data privacy, online video distribution, patent policy, and spectrum policy. In short, the rapid rate of technological change has increasingly shown that law and engineering can no longer remain compartmentalized into separate spheres. The logical response would be to embed the interaction between law and policy deeper into the fabric of both fields. An essential step would …

Machine Learning And Law, Harry Surden

Publications

This Article explores the application of machine learning techniques within the practice of law. Broadly speaking “machine learning” refers to computer algorithms that have the ability to “learn” or improve in performance over time on some task. In general, machine learning algorithms are designed to detect patterns in data and then apply these patterns going forward to new data in order to automate particular tasks. Outside of law, machine learning techniques have been successfully applied to automate tasks that were once thought to necessitate human intelligence — for example language translation, fraud-detection, driving automobiles, facial recognition, and data-mining. If performing …

Cybersecurity And The Administrative National Security State: Framing The Issues For Federal Legislation, David G. Delaney

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In the digital age, every part of federal government has critical cybersecurity interests. Many of those issues are brought into sharp focus by Edward Snowden's disclosure of sensitive government cyber intelligence programs conducted by the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Courts are reviewing various constitutional and statutory challenges to those programs, two government review groups have reported on related legal and policy issues, and Congress is considering cyber intelligence reform proposals. All of this action comes on the heels of significant efforts by successive administrations to restructure government and pass comprehensive cybersecurity …

Le Cyberspace, C'Est Moi?: Authoritarian Leaders, The Internet, And International Politics, David P. Fidler

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Surveillance At The Source, David Thaw

Articles

Contemporary discussion concerning surveillance focuses predominantly on government activity. These discussions are important for a variety of reasons, but generally ignore a critical aspect of the surveillance-harm calculus – the source from which government entities derive the information they use. The source of surveillance data is the information "gathering" activity itself, which is where harms like "chilling" of speech and behavior begin.

Unlike the days where satellite imaging, communications intercepts, and other forms of information gathering were limited to advanced law enforcement, military, and intelligence activities, private corporations now play a dominant role in the collection of information about individuals' …

The Efficacy Of Cybersecurity Regulation, David Thaw

Articles

Cybersecurity regulation presents an interesting quandary where, because private entities possess the best information about threats and defenses, legislatures do – and should – deliberately encode regulatory capture into the rulemaking process. This relatively uncommon approach to administrative law, which I describe as Management-Based Regulatory Delegation, involves the combination of two legislative approaches to engaging private entities' expertise. This Article explores the wisdom of those choices by comparing the efficacy of such private sector engaged regulation with that of a more traditional, directive mode of regulating cybersecurity adopted by the state legislatures. My analysis suggests that a blend of these …

Enlightened Regulatory Capture, David Thaw

Articles

Regulatory capture generally evokes negative images of private interests exerting excessive influence on government action to advance their own agendas at the expense of the public interest. There are some cases, however, where this conventional wisdom is exactly backwards. This Article explores the first verifiable case, taken from healthcare cybersecurity, where regulatory capture enabled regulators to harness private expertise to advance exclusively public goals. Comparing this example to other attempts at harnessing industry expertise reveals a set of characteristics under which regulatory capture can be used in the public interest. These include: 1) legislatively-mandated adoption of recommendations by an advisory …

Governing, Exchanging, Securing: Big Data And The Production Of Digital Knowledge, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The emergence of Big Data challenges the conventional boundaries between governing, exchange, and security. It ambiguates the lines between commerce and surveillance, between governing and exchanging, between democracy and the police state. The new digital knowledge reproduces consuming subjects who wittingly or unwittingly allow themselves to be watched, tracked, linked and predicted in a blurred amalgam of commercial and governmental projects. Linking back and forth from consumer data to government information to social media, these new webs of information become available to anyone who can purchase the information. How is it that governmental, commercial and security interests have converged, coincided, …