Computer Law Commons^™

Delineating The Legal Framework For Data Protection: A Fundamental Rights Approach Or Data Propertization?, Efe Lawrence Ogbeide

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, like other key legal instruments around the globe, grants citizens the right to privacy in Article 7. The Charter, however, further provides for the right to data protection in Article 8. Simply put, the implication of Article 8 of the Charter is that the right to data protection is a fundamental right. The central question in this article is whether data protection indeed qualifies to be categorized as a fundamental right. If not, what other approach(es) to data protection may be implemented?

From Nyan Cat To Nfts: Determining How Canada’S Cultural Property Export And Import Act Applies To Digital Works, Mitchel Fleming

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

One of Canada’s principal pieces of legislation enacted to protect its cultural patrimony is not well equipped to deal with the rise of digital content creation. Digital works, particularly NFTs, pose a unique challenge to the established regime. This paper seeks to understand how these artistic developments fit within the current legislative framework and whether legislative action is needed to bring these revolutionary mediums within the scope of the Cultural Property Export and Import Act. Ultimately, the author concludes that while digital works may be captured by the Act under specific circumstances, the protectionist policies of the past are …

Officially Obsolete? A Critical Examination Of The Canadian Official Marks Regime And Its Waning Relevancy In Trademark Law, Maddison Tebbutt

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

When the Trademark Act (‘‘TMA”) came about in 1985, a unique aspect of Canadian trademark law was created: the official marks regime under section 9(1)(n). The official marks regime is available to public authorities and universities as a means of sidestepping the lengthy and expensive process of trademark registration and providing special protection for official marks. Once public authorities and universities obtain an official mark through this system, they are entitled to an expansive monopoly that allows them to use their mark for commercial use, while simultaneously keeping the official mark out of the public domain. Moreover, while …

A Compulsory Solution To The Machine Problem, Cole G. Merritt

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already disrupting and will likely continue to disrupt many industries. Despite the role AI already plays, AI systems are becoming increasingly powerful. Ultimately, these systems may become a powerful tool that can lead to the discovery of important inventions or significantly reduce the time required to discover these inventions. Even now, AI systems are independently inventing. However, the resulting AI-generated inventions are unable to receive patent protection under current US patent law. This unpatentability may lead to inefficient results and ineffectively serves the goals of patent law.

To embrace the development and power of AI, Congress …

The New Bailments, Danielle D'Onfro

Scholarship@WashULaw

The rise of cloud computing has dramatically changed how consumers and firms store their belongings. Property that owners once managed directly now exists primarily on infrastructure maintained by intermediaries. Consumers entrust their photos to Apple instead of scrapbooks; businesses put their documents on Amazon’s servers instead of in file cabinets; seemingly everything runs in the cloud. Were these belongings tangible, the relationship between owner and intermediary would be governed by the common-law doctrine of bailment. Bailments are mandatory relationships formed when one party entrusts their property to another. Within this relationship, the bailees owe the bailors a duty of care …

The Rise And Fall Of Cryptocurrency: The Three Paths Forward, Joel Seligman

Scholarship@WashULaw

In a crash reminiscent of the 1929-1933 Stock Market crash in which prices on the New York Stock Exchange fell 83 percent between September 1929 and July 1932 or the 2007-2009 Financial Debacle in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 54 percent between October 9, 2007 and March 9, 2009, crypto market capitalization fell 61 percent between November 2021 and May 2022, collapsing from an aggregate value of $2.9 trillion to $1.24 trillion. Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency which in late 2021 traded near $68,000 in November 2021 traded as low as $25,402 on May 10, 2022 (a decline of …

Security In The Digital Age, Michael Gentithes

Akron Law Faculty Publications

Rapidly evolving technology allows governments and businesses to elevate our collective well-being in ways we could not have imagined just decades ago. Data is now a resource that governments and businesses alike can mine to address the world’s needs with greater efficiency, accuracy, and flexibility. But evolving technology and advanced data analytics also come with risk. New digital capabilities also create new means for nefarious actors to infiltrate the complex technological systems at the heart of nearly all of our daily activities. Just as new digital tools emerge to offer unique goods and services, new tools allow wrongdoers to invade …

Digital Forensics For Mobility As A Service Platform: Analysis Of Uber Application On Iphone And Cloud, Nina Matulis, Umit Karabiyik

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Uber is a ride-hailing smartphone application (app) that allows users to order a ride in a highly efficient manner. The Uber app provides Mobility as a Service and allows users to easily order a ride in a private car with just a few clicks. Uber stores large amounts of data on both the mobile device the app is being used on, and in the cloud. Examples of this data include geolocation data, date/time, origin/destination addresses, departure/arrival times, and distance. Uber geolocation data has been previously researched to investigate the privacy of the Uber app; however, there is minimal research relating …

Smart Home Forensics: Identifying Ddos Attack Patterns On Iot Devices, Samuel Ho, Hope Greeson, Umit Karabiyik

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Smart homes are becoming more common as more people integrate IoT devices into their home environment. As such, these devices have access to personal data on their homeowners’ networks. One of the advantages of IoT devices is that they are compact. However, this limits the incorporation of security measures in their hardware. Misconfigured IoT devices are commonly the target of malicious attacks. Additionally, distributed denial-of-service attacks are becoming more common due to applications and software that provides users with easy-to-use user interfaces. Since one vulnerable device is all an attacker needs to launch an attack on a network, in regards …

Microsoft Defender Will Be Defended: Memoryranger Prevents Blinding Windows Av, Denis Pogonin, Igor Korkin, Phd

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Windows OS is facing a huge rise in kernel attacks. An overview of popular techniques that result in loading kernel drivers will be presented. One of the key targets of modern threats is disabling and blinding Microsoft Defender, a default Windows AV. The analysis of recent driver-based attacks will be given, the challenge is to block them. The survey of user- and kernel-level attacks on Microsoft Defender will be given. One of the recently published attackers’ techniques abuses Mandatory Integrity Control (MIC) and Security Reference Monitor (SRM) by modifying Integrity Level and Debug Privileges for the Microsoft Defender via syscalls. …

Adversarial Scrutiny Of Evidentiary Statistical Software, Rediet Abebe, Moritz Hardt, Angela Jin, John Miller, Ludwig Schmidt, Rebecca Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. criminal legal system increasingly relies on software output to convict and incarcerate people. In a large number of cases each year, the government makes these consequential decisions based on evidence from statistical software — such as probabilistic genotyping, environmental audio detection and toolmark analysis tools — that the defense counsel cannot fully cross-examine or scrutinize. This undermines the commitments of the adversarial criminal legal system, which relies on the defense’s ability to probe and test the prosecution’s case to safeguard individual rights.

Responding to this need to adversarially scrutinize output from such software, we propose robust adversarial testing …

Submission To The Province Of Nova Scotia On Its Review Of The Intimate Images And Cyber-Protection Act - Leaf, Suzie Dunn, Rosel Kim

Reports & Public Policy Documents

The Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) commends the Nova Scotia government for reviewing its Intimate Images and Cyber-protection Act (the Act) and seeking public input for this review. Nova Scotia has been, and continues to be, a leader in Canada for its role in advancing innovative laws and supports for people targeted by technology-facilitated violence (TFV), digital abuse, and the non-consensual distribution of intimate images (NCDII). As these forms of harmful behaviour evolve and become better understood, it is important to revisit this legislation to assess whether it is providing meaningful and accessible responses to such serious social …

Blockchain Disruption: Digital Assets Are Changing How We Do Business, Nick Curley

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

Digital assets are changing the way businesses think about equity, labor, business models, and business organization. Digital assets, like Bitcoin or Ethereum, provide incredible opportunities to further align shareholders with the objectives of the entity.

Each time humanity advances its technology for ledgers, markets explode, and we witness immense wealth creation. Digital assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum are the next great step forward for ledger technology. While there are incredible opportunities to leverage this new technology, there are also incredible risks. There are many public examples of “hacks” of prominent blockchains like Ethereum and Solana. Blockchain technology has captured the …

Platforms, Encryption, And The Cfaa: The Case Of Whatsapp V Nso Group, Jonathon Penney, Bruce Schneier

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

End-to-end encryption technology has gone mainstream. But this wider use has led hackers, cybercriminals, foreign governments, and other threat actors to employ creative and novel attacks to compromise or workaround these protections, raising important questions as to how the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the primary federal anti-hacking statute, is best applied to these new encryption implementations. Now, after the Supreme Court recently narrowed the CFAA’s scope in Van Buren and suggested it favors a code-based approach to liability under the statute, understanding how best to theorize sophisticated code-based access barriers like end-to-end encryption, and their circumvention, is now …

Detection Of Overlapping Passive Manipulation Techniques In Image Forensics, Gianna S. Lint, Umit Karabiyik

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

With a growing number of images uploaded daily to social media sites, it is essential to understand if an image can be used to trace its origin. Forensic investigations are focusing on analyzing images that are uploaded to social media sites resulting in an emphasis on building and validating tools. There has been a strong focus on understanding active manipulation or tampering techniques and building tools for analysis. However, research on manipulation is often studied in a vacuum, involving only one technique at a time. Additionally, less focus has been placed on passive manipulation, which can occur by simply uploading …

Legislating Data Loyalty, Woodrow Hartzog, Neil Richards

Faculty Scholarship

Lawmakers looking to embolden privacy law have begun to consider imposing duties of loyalty on organizations trusted with people’s data and online experiences. The idea behind loyalty is simple: organizations should not process data or design technologies that conflict with the best interests of trusting parties. But the logistics and implementation of data loyalty need to be developed if the concept is going to be capable of moving privacy law beyond its “notice and consent” roots to confront people’s vulnerabilities in their relationship with powerful data collectors.

In this short Essay, we propose a model for legislating data loyalty. Our …

Death Of The Limited License To Data: United States V. Van Buren, Nick Curley

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

The United States Supreme Court has normally viewed data as property. Yet in United States v. Van Buren, the Court abandoned the property law angle. Van Buren included examination of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act’s applicability to a police officer who accepted a bribe from undercover agents to look up a phony license plate. The Court held that under the CFAA someone only “exceeds authorized access” when they properly access a computer and then improperly access files “that are off limits to [them].”

This Case Note explores why the Supreme Court should not have abandoned the property analogy …

The Deficiencies Of Oregon Ballot Measure 110, Jacob Towles

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

In 1970, the Federal Government enacted the Controlled Substance Act (CSA), which made certain drugs and substances illegal absent a medical prescription. The control of drugs through the CSA exists to prevent harm to the public. Nonetheless, some cities and states have enacted laws that allow for the benefit of selling or pleasure of using illegal drugs to outweigh the legal ramifications.

In November 2020, The Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act, also known as Oregon Ballot Measure 110 (Measure 110), made Oregon the first state in the country to decriminalize all drugs. Measure 110 was enacted with the overarching …

Hunting And Gathering On The Legal Information Savannah, Susan Nevelow Mart, Adam Litzler, David Gunderman

Publications

This article asks, what is it like for novice researchers to research real-world legal problems using four platforms: Bloomberg Law, Fastcase, Lexis Advance, and Westlaw? The study findings produced some surprises, as well as some clear implications for teaching legal research.

Modeling Through, Ryan Calo

Articles

Theorists of justice have long imagined a decision-maker capable of acting wisely in every circumstance. Policymakers seldom live up to this ideal. They face well-understood limits, including an inability to anticipate the societal impacts of state intervention along a range of dimensions and values. Policymakers cannot see around corners or address societal problems at their roots. When it comes to regulation and policy-setting, policymakers are often forced, in the memorable words of political economist Charles Lindblom, to “muddle through” as best they can.

Powerful new affordances, from supercomputing to artificial intelligence, have arisen in the decades since Lindblom’s 1959 article …