Law Commons^™

Distillation Laundering: Regulatory Arbitrage And A Potential Beijing Effect In Ai, Laura Edelson, Filippo Lancieri

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay introduces distillation laundering, a new form of regulatory arbitrage. Distillation, a technique for training large language models based on the outputs of other models instead of from scratch, is generally prohibited by the terms of service of closed-weight frontier models. However, it is economically efficient and has been key to the success of the cheap, distilled (largely Chinese) open-weight models, which have reshaped the global political economy of AI regulation. US companies have now begun to re-import the effects of distillation through various means—a process we call distillation laundering. We also discuss how attempts to lobby these models …

Analysis Of Policies And Incentives For The Successful Implementation Of Hydrogen-Fueled Medium-Duty And Heavy-Duty Vehicles In Humboldt County, California, Alka Verma

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

The 21st century has seen a significant rise in global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with the transportation sector contributing 23% of these emissions. Medium-duty and heavy-duty vehicles (MD/HD) are particularly impactful, accounting for over a quarter of transport-related emissions. In Humboldt County, California, transportation represents 53% of total emissions, with MD/HD vehicles being a major contributor. As light-duty vehicles shift to zero-emission alternatives, the MD/HD sector faces unique challenges. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles offer a promising solution, providing longer range, higher energy density, and quicker refueling compared to battery electric vehicles (BEVs). These features make hydrogen an attractive option for …

Open Secrets, Robin C. Feldman, Vaughn Goehrig

Faculty Scholarship

Patents and trade secrets were never intended to meet, but in the world of biologic drugs, they've become as thick as thieves. Patent law's disclosure requirement has demanded far too little of biologics manufacturers-allowing them to keep vital manufacturing details under trade secret lock and key. This intellectual property patchwork has been devastating for drug affordability: Because the most critical manufacturing information remains hidden, makers of follow-on biologics (called biosimilars) are often stuck reinventing the wheel, even after the original patents have expired.

This Article makes two principal contributions to illuminating this problem. First, it presents, for the first time …