Computer Law Commons^™

It Is Our Flaws That Make Us Humane: How Technology Ruined Judicial Craft, Shai Dothan, Gregor Maučec

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

There is ample evidence that people are not completely rational. They suffer from a series of biases that limit their abilities to make the best decisions and to stick to them. Judges are a unique group of people. They go through many years of training that counter some of these biases, but not all of them. In fact, there is a whole field of research dedicated to predicting how judges, with their human flaws, are going to behave. But today, judges can use an increasing number of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to assist with their craft, particularly with research and …

Regulation To Reinforce The Evidentiary-Science Base Of U.S. Medicine In The Age Of "Omics", Michael J. Malinowski

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

United States’ technology transfer law and policy (TTLP) integrates government, academia, and industry—a “triple-threat” research and development (R&D) methodology—and harnesses commercial incentives to stimulate market application of federal government-funded invention. TTLP, which has proven a potent catalyst for remarkably prolific biomedical R&D since Congress enacted its cornerstone legislation in 1980, is transforming U.S. medicine to molecular medicine—to personal genome medicine (PGM)—in real time. A genomics (gene function in the context of an organism’s entire genome, meaning its full set of genetic instructions) complement to the Human Genome Project (HGP) emerged in the 1990s. Genomics has given rise to a portfolio …

The Artificial Intelligence Trolley Problem: Governance In The Post-Chevron World, James M. Cooper, Kashyap Kompella

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

This Essay addresses a growing Constitutional challenge in public governance: the increasing delegation of consequential decisions to algorithmic systems that encode value trade-offs between liberty and security, equity and efficiency, and expression and control, without visibility, legal justification, or institutional oversight. We view this hidden normative choice an example of the “Artificial Intelligence (AI) Trolley Problem.” Like the classic moral dilemma, it involves unavoidable sacrifices among competing goods. Unlike its philosophical counterpart, however, algorithmic trade-offs occur silently. They are embedded in data proxies, optimization logic, and model design, and insulated from scrutiny by claims of technical neutrality. This Essay argues …

Top Ten Biotechnology Patent Cases Of 2024: Loper Bright, Federal Circuit Turmoil, Patent Term Adjustment, And Naturally Occurring Nucleic Acids, Kevin E. Noonan, Andrew W. Torrance

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

A pivotal year for biotechnology patent law, 2024 was marked by consequential court rulings and evolving legal frameworks. This article surveys the ten most significant judicial decisions impacting biotech patents, highlighting major themes and trends in policy, litigation, and regulation. Courts at all levels grappled with core patentability requirements in the life sciences, from the Supreme Court’s continued laissez-faire stance on subject-matter eligibility to the Federal Circuit’s stringent enforcement of disclosure sufficiency rules.

Lipstick On A Slaughtered Piggybank: Civil Rico Against “Pig Butchering” Cryptocurrency Investment Schemes, Samantha B. Larkin

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.

Faking It: A Proposed Solution To Counter Nonconsensual Pornographic Deepfakes, Rena Song

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

2024 Louise A. Halper Award Winner for Best Student Note.

Deepfakes have become popular due to their user-friendly nature and accessibility, allowing anyone to create one by installing deepfake software programs on their phones or laptops. Deepfake software programs allow creators to create hyper-realistic multimedia featuring anyone whose image they can find. Some industries have drawn positive uses from deepfakes; however, deepfakes also create harms that can have detrimental effects on people’s mental health, employment, and reputation. Women and children, including those without a large online presence, have become the target for nonconsensual pornographic deepfakes. Congress has yet to pass …

Fair-Enough Ai, Jane R. Bambauer, Tal Z. Zarsky

UF Law Faculty Publications

AI is unfair. It can be inaccurate (in several ways), biased (in several ways, and to several groups), disproportionate, exploitable, and opaque. The policy world is awash in AI-governance frameworks, ethical guidelines, and other policy documents, but these lack concrete standards and provide little guidance on how to select between competing versions of (un)fairness. In other words, they abdicate the responsibility of setting priorities among values. At the same time, many of the policy documents harshly criticize AI and algorithmic tools for deficiencies in some particular aspect of fairness without considering whether alternative designs that fix the problem would make …

Inevitable Errors: Defamation By Hallucination In Ai Reasoning Models, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky, Andrew Daves

UF Law Faculty Publications

Over the last millennium, defamation law has adapted to many new information technologies, including the printing press, the telegraph, and the internet. Now, defamation law must adapt to the challenges presented by generative artificial intelligence, and specifically the propensity of Large Language Models to produce defamatory hallucinations. In this article, we unite the lessons of legal history with cutting-edge computer science research in developing a legal framework for addressing defamatory hallucinations produced by AI reasoning models. This article breaks new ground by recognizing both the inevitability and even desirability (in some instances) of AI hallucinations. We argue that defamation law …

Artificial Intelligence And Intellectual Property, Part Iii: Ip Protection For Ai-Assisted Inventions And Creative Works, Joshua Landau

American University Business Law Review

Chairman Darrell Issa, Ranking Member Hank Johnson, distinguished members of the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet ("Subcommittee") of the Committee on the Judiciary ("Judiciary Committee"), on behalf of the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and its members, thank you for this opportunity to share our views on intellectual property (IP) protection for artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted works and inventions.

Confronting The Challenges Of Regulating Artificial Intelligence, Amy B. Cyphert

FIU Law Review

Public opinion polls conclude that the American public is in favor of regulating artificial intelligence (“AI”), and many technology companies publicly claim that they would welcome regulation. And yet the United States has struggled to enact federal comprehensive AI regulations beyond a short-lived Executive Order. Why? Part I of this Article explains why regulating AI is so difficult, focusing on six key reasons: AI is a global issue; AI is not one discrete issue; AI is developing at a speed that is unprecedented; lawmakers largely lack the technical expertise effective AI regulation requires; the stakes of getting the regulation wrong …

Facial Recognition Technology And The First Amendment, Joseph A. Tomain

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The growing ubiquity of facial recognition technology (FRT) is a problem. While much has been written on harmful government use of FRT, little has been written regarding harmful private actor use. This Article helps fill a gap in the literature by providing a detailed analysis of the First Amendment interests at stake when private actors use FRT. Specifically, this Article analyzes whether laws that limit the use of publicly available photographs to create faceprints for inclusion in FRT databases violate the First Amendment rights of private actors.

In May 2025, a multidistrict litigation against Clearview AI, an FRT company, offered …

Unto The (Data) Breach, Charlotte A. Tschider

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Since the early 2000s, U.S. courts have begun hearing “data breach” liability cases, the inevitable result of a growing internet-connected technology infrastructure. The relatively recent development of case law signals a body of law in development, stunted by significant limiting factors that prevent the coalescence of legal principles. To date, no holistic empirical exploration of data breach cases has offered sufficient detail to explore these factors. This descriptive empirical study analyzes, in detail, 225 data breach cases from 2005–2022, reviewing these cases over an extended period to descriptively identify key trends and changes within a bona fide data breach case’s …

Internet Search Engines’ Privacy Violations And The Lack Of Federal Regulation To Protect Consumers Rights, Elsa M. G. Rodriguez Ogando

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

The United States’ current legal framework regarding internet search engines is disadvantageous to consumers. Federal privacy laws (although not encompassing search engines) grant businesses a strong legal basis in privacy claims and alibies for arbitrary behavior; these laws favor businesses over consumers. Moreover, state privacy laws empower nonspecific agencies to oversee privacy matters and enforce consumers’ rights. Thus, the U.S. privacy legal framework is in need of a new federal law that establishes consumers’ rights, as well as a federal agency dedicated solely to privacy matters. This Article proposes a federal law recommendation based on the standards of the California …

Chronically Online: Apportioning Liability In Social Media Litigation Based On User Engagement, Rebecca Vangelos

Fordham Law Review

The average American teenager spends nearly five hours on social media every day. This result is by design: social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok deploy persuasive technologies—including infinite scroll, personalized content recommendation feeds, and dark patterns—to capture and retain teen attention. These intentional design features exploit adolescent vulnerabilities to foster social media dependency. Accordingly, a growing body of scientific evidence links the extensive use of social media to the teen mental health crisis in the United States.

Despite these negative effects, social media companies have largely evaded accountability for the harm they have caused to teens. Recent lawsuits …

Fighting The Hypothetical: Why Law Firms Should Rethink The Billable Hour In The Generative Ai Era, Nancy B. Rapoport, Joseph R. Tiano Jr.

Scholarly Works

“Fighting the Hypothetical: Why Law Firms Should Rethink the Billable Hour in the Generative AI Era” analyzes how the emergence and adoption of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) will fundamentally disrupt the traditional billable hour model that has dominated the industry since the 1960s. Professor Rapoport and Mr. Tiano contend that GenAI’s ability to perform routine legal tasks quickly and accurately will force law firms to shift away from billing structures based primarily on time spent (or inputs) and toward models that better reflect client value (or outputs).

The authors interviewed law firm leaders to gain an “in the trenches” view …

Front Matter

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.

Patching The Cfaa So Researchers No Longer Pay, Joshua Baker

Cybaris®

No abstract provided.

Agents In A Tangled Bank: An Ecosystem Approach To Ai Regulation, Andrew W. Torrance, Bill Tomlinson

FIU Law Review

As autonomous artificial intelligence agents ("Agents") become increasingly prevalent in society, legal frameworks must evolve to govern their behavior effectively. This article argues that autonomous AI agents must be understood as operating within complex ecosystems of other agents, humans, institutions, and actual biological ecosystems-similar to how biological organisms exist within broader ecosystems. Drawing on established research in multi-agent systems and environmental law, we propose that effective governance of AI agents requires moving beyond just regulation on individual agents to include system-level approaches. We examine how existing legal frameworks handle heterogeneous autonomous entities (humans, corporations, and animals) and explore how these …

Regenerating Justice: Chatgpt And The Legal Minefield Of Generative Ai, Katie Szilagyi

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

This paper adopts an automation bias lens to cast doubt on the growing claims that GenAI is a transformational tool for legal industry. In this context, automation bias refers to the well-known psychological phenomenon in which human decision-makers unwittingly defer to automated processes, flowing from overreliance on the accuracy of the automation. Even well-meaning individuals aiming to keep a “human-in-the-loop” of any automated decision can fall prey to this well-documented phenomenon, trusting the technology more than it deserves to be trusted. Champions for current GenAI technologies often do acknowledge limitations within the existing landscape of tools, like GenAI’s tendency to …

Inventions Without Inventors: The Need To Recognize Ai Systems As Inventors, Niloufer Selvadurai

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

As AI systems increasingly generate innovative products and processes, a critical issue to address is the nature and extent of the patent protection that is conferred upon such outputs. The overarching objective of patent law is the support of innovation and progress. In determining applications, the clear focus of patent judgments is whether the claimed invention satisfies the required standards of inventiveness, novelty, and non-obviousness. It is hence curious that incidental references to “individuals” and “persons,” variously scattered through patent statutes, operate to deny recognition of AI inventors. This is the result of the global test litigation instigated by Dr. …

Unveiling The Environmental Impact Of Large Language Models On Indigenous Communities: A Call For Action And Liability, Nina-Simone Edwards

Library Scholarship

Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly gained popularity for their language generation and comprehension capabilities, promising increased efficiency in various sectors. However, while celebrated for their transformative potential, LLMs exacerbate current climate issues. This Article highlights the detrimental environmental footprint of LLMs, with a focus on their role in escalating climate change and their disproportionate effects on Indigenous communities. These communities, closely tied to their land, bear the brunt of environmental degradation, further aggravated by LLM-induced emissions.

This Article first dissects the interplay between environmental justice and technological innovation, advocating for a reevaluation of the trust relationship between tribal nations …

Gig Work At What Cost? Exploring Privacy Risks Of Gig Work Platform Participation In The U.S., Amogh Pradeep, Johanna Gunawan, Álvaro Feal, Woodrow Hartzog, David Choffnes

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, "gig work" platforms have gained popularity as a way for individuals to earn money; as of 2021, 16% of Americans have at some point earned money from such platforms. Despite their popularity and their history of unfair data collection practices and worker safety, little is known about the data collected from workers (and users) by gig platforms and about the privacy dark pattern designs present in their apps.

This paper presents an empirical measurement of 16 gig work platforms' data practices in the U.S. We analyze what data is collected by these platforms, and how it is …

Normalizing Facial Recognition Technology And The End Of Obscurity, Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger, Judy Hyojoo Rhee

Faculty Scholarship

This article argues that facial recognition technology is the most dangerous surveillance tool ever invented. Given the unique threats this morally suspect tool poses to privacy, civil liberties, human flourishing, and democracy, the only appropriate response is a ban. To justify our position, we explain why facial recognition is distinctive among biometrics, clarify how even seemingly benign and positive uses of the technology can trigger dangerous normalization dynamics, and pinpoint why current United States laws (with reverberations in the EU’s AI Act) are designed to accelerate a slippery slope that makes mass surveillance nearly inevitable. Our most fundamental contribution lies …

Shoot The Messenger: Why Section 230 Does Not Shield Suggestive Content Delivery, Alexander Heinkele

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Internet companies have frequently relied on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 to avoid liability for third-party content hosted on their platforms. However, over time, companies began to take advantage of the broad cover of Section 230 in circumstances outside the statute’s original scope. This Note advocates for a more nuanced interpretation of the statute as it applies to suggestive algorithms and offers a proposal for amending Section 230 to better reflect the modern digital landscape.

Funkcjonowanie Doręczeń Elektronicznych W Ujęciu Technicznym, Michał Tabor

internetowy Kwartalnik Antymonopolowy i Regulacyjny (internet Quarterly on Antitrust and Regulation)

The article provides a legal-technical and market analysis of electronic delivery in Poland, concluding that while the system complies with the basic requirements of the eIDAS Regulation, it needs significant organizational and technical improvements. The author reviews the National Electronic Delivery System, the role of the designated operator and qualified trust service providers, and highlights issues with interoperability, address registration and portability, delivery mailboxes, and the hybrid delivery service. Recommended legal reforms include granting the public delivery service qualified status, enabling multiple delivery addresses for public and complex organizations, partly opening the market to commercial qualified providers, and moving supervision …

What Is Copywritable In Software?, Charles Duan

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Law-Following Ai: Designing Ai Agents To Obey Human Laws, Cullen O'Keefe, Ketan Ramakrishnan, Janna Tay, Christoph Winter

Fordham Law Review

Artificial intelligence (AI) companies are working to develop a new type of actor: “AI agents,” which we define as AI systems that can perform computer-based tasks as competently as human experts. Expert-level AI agents will likely create enormous economic value but also pose significant risks. Humans use computers to commit crimes, torts, and other violations of the law. As AI agents progress, therefore, they will be increasingly capable of performing actions that would be illegal if performed by humans. Such lawless AI agents could pose a severe risk to human life, liberty, and the rule of law.

Designing public policy …

The Globalization Of Copyright Exceptions For Ai Training, Matthew Sag, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

Generative AI, machine learning and other computational uses of copyrighted works pose profound questions for copyright law. This article conducts of global survey of how different countries have attempted to answer these questions in relation to the unauthorized use of copyrighted works for training. Although the world has yet to achieve international consensus on this issue, an international equilibrium is emerging. Jurisdictions with common law and civil law traditions, and with varying economic conditions, technological capabilities, political systems, and cultural backgrounds, have found ways to reconcile copyright law and AI training. In this equilibrium, countries recognize that text data mining, …

Ai Ethics, Law, And Policy, Pauline Kim, Ryan Durrie

Scholarship@WashULaw

AI technologies promise many benefits, but they can also have significant negative impacts on human health, safety, well-being, and fundamental rights. This chapter explores the different governance tools that have been considered for guiding developments in AI in socially beneficial ways, examining the relevance of ethics, law, and policy. Each of these approaches offer tools to address these concerns; however, each has limitations, and none provides a complete solution in itself. Statements of ethical principles can articulate high-level values and goals to guide behavior but are usually quite vague and difficult to operationalize. They also lack any enforcement mechanism. In …