Internet Law Commons^™

New Frontiers In Technology: Can Traditional Intellectual Property Rights Laws Be Adapted And Applied To Nfts?, Mariyah S. Wakhariya

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

A decade ago, ‘NFTs’ were rarely heard of or known to anyone, unless they worked in or kept up with the tech world. However, they are not new - they have been around for almost two decades. Their popularity has grown over the past few years. ‘NFT’ stands for ‘non-fungible token’. An NFT is a digital file with a unique identity that is verified on a blockchain and is therefore not interchangeable - i.e., a kind of crypto asset, like an authentication certificate for digital artifacts. In theory, NFTs can represent almost any real or intangible property. These days, it …

Cyber Sit-Ins: Bringing Protest Online By Modernizing The Computer Fraud And Abuse Act, Blair V. Robinson

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Foreword: A Tipping Point For Antitrust Law, C. Paul Rogers Iii

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.

Antitrust Accountability Delayed: State Antitrust Enforcement And Multidistrict Litigation, Roger P. Alford

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

State Attorneys General play a crucial role in the enforcement of antitrust laws. Defendants have successfully delayed state enforcement proceedings by centralizing them with private lawsuits in multidistrict litigation. A new venue law has foreclosed that delay tactic, placing State Attorneys General on equal footing with federal antitrust enforcers in deciding where, when, and how to prosecute antitrust cases.

Houston Security Camera Ordinance: Reasonable Safety Measure Or Orwellian Surveillance, Clint Nuckolls

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

A new ordinance went into effect in Houston, Texas in July 2022, which looks to leverage technology and require certain businesses to install surveillance cameras at their own cost and turn footage over to the police on demand without a warrant. The ordinance specifically requires bars, nightclubs, convenience stores, sexually oriented businesses, and game rooms to install surveillance cameras, with accompanying lighting at all places where customers are permitted, keep the cameras running at all times, even when the business is closed, and store the footage for at least thirty days, all at the expense of the business owners. The …

Generative Ai Art: Copyright Infringement And Fair Use, Michael D. Murray

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

The discussion of AI copyright infringement or fair use often skips over all the required steps of the infringement analysis in order to focus on the most intriguing question, “Could a visual generative AI generate a work that potentially infringes a preexisting copyrighted work?” and then the discussion skips further ahead to, “Would the AI have a fair use defense, most likely under the transformative test?” These are relevant questions, but without considering the actual steps of the copyright infringement analysis, the discussion is misleading or even irrelevant. This neglecting of topics and stages of the infringement analysis fails to …

Texas’S Water Future: Legal, Business, Environmental, And Regulatory Concerns, Robert Royce

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

Around the world freshwater is increasingly scarce, and Texas is no different. Texas continuously operates at a shortage, where freshwater supply cannot meet demand. Projections show that this deficit will increase over the next decade, which would cause billions of dollars in losses for the Texas economy. But Texas is in a unique position to correct its water problems and take corrective measures to avoid such losses. Innovations around hydraulic fracturing in the oil and gas industry, namely recyclable “produced water” and the burgeoning “water midstream” sector will play an important role in remediating Texas’ freshwater scarcity concern. Furthermore, the …

Biotechnology Patent Law Top Ten Of 2022: Inducement, Clear Error, And Interferences Galore, Kevin E. Noonan, Andrew W. Torrance

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

Five-year anniversaries are symbolized by a product of natural biotechnology: wood. This article marks the wood anniversary of the “Top Ten Biotechnology Patent Cases” series that began in 2018. Imagining the world in 2018 is challenging, in part because it was, indeed, a different world. There had not been a major pandemic in one hundred years. Inflation was low. The economy hummed along. No individual war appeared to threaten more than regional stability. O tempora, o mores! The year 2022 was quite different. SARS-CoV-2 continued to stalk the land, having had a monumentally mortiferous effect for several years. High inflation …

Functional Tort Principles For Internet Platforms: Duty, Relationship, And Control, Edward Janger, Aaron Twerski

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Naïve Realism, Cognitive Bias, And The Benefits And Risks Of Ai, Harry Surden

Publications

In this short piece I comment on Orly Lobel's book on artificial intelligence (AI) and society "The Equality Machine." Here, I reflect on the complex topic of aI and its impact on society, and the importance of acknowledging both its positive and negative aspects. More broadly, I discuss the various cognitive biases, such as naïve realism, epistemic bubbles, negativity bias, extremity bias, and the availability heuristic, that influence individuals' perceptions of AI, often leading to polarized viewpoints. Technology can both exacerbate and ameliorate these biases, and I commend Lobel's balanced approach to AI analysis as an example to emulate.

Although …

The Server Test Quandary And Embedding Permission Culture, Michael P. Goodyear

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Corporate Governance And Gender Equality: A Study Of Comply-Or-Explain Disclosure Regulation, Aaron A. Dhir, Sarah Kaplan, Maria Arabella Robles

Seattle University Law Review

In 2020, the Nasdaq Stock Market filed a proposal with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission seeking permission to adopt a board diversity-related disclosure requirement for its listed companies. In 2021, the SEC approved the proposal, thus entrenching Nasdaq’s position as the most significant stock exchange to date to mandate listing rules that reflect the intention of diversifying corporate boardrooms. Nasdaq’s movement into the diversity space is not the first attempt to address homogeneous boards in the U.S. In 2009, the SEC adopted a rule requiring publicly traded firms to report on whether they consider diversity in identifying director nominees. …

Judicial Ethics And The Eradication Of Racism, Dontay Proctor-Mills

Seattle University Law Review

In 2020, the Washington Supreme Court entrusted the legal community with working to eradicate racism from its legal system. Soon after, Washington’s Commission on Judicial Conduct (hereinafter the Commission) received a complaint about a bus ad for North Seattle College featuring King County Superior Court Judge David Keenan. Along with a photo of Judge Keenan’s face, the ad included the following language: “A Superior Court Judge, David Keenan got into law in part to advocate for marginalized communities. David’s changing the world. He started at North.” The Commission admonished Judge Keenan for violating the Code of Judicial Conduct, in part …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Why Corporate Boards Should Include Lgbtq+ People, Jeremy Mcclane, Darren Rosenblum

Seattle University Law Review

Corporate boardrooms sit at the heart of most of society’s most consequential decisions but fall far short of the diversity of our society. The current movement toward board diversification aims to remedy the underrepresentation of marginalized groups on corporate boards. More recently, some efforts have included LGBTQ+ people, even though the basis for their inclusion on corporate boards remains largely unstated. This Article examines both the normative and instrumental bases for LGBTQ+ inclusion in board diversity initiatives, articulating unspoken assumptions and linking LGBTQ+ people to the broader inclusion effort. In so doing, it begins to surface the unique issues LGBTQ+ …

Fourth Amendment Notice In The Cloud, Neil M. Richards, Jesse Lieberfeld

Scholarship@WashULaw

The widespread storage of documents through the range of Internet technologies known as “the cloud” offers tremendous convenience but also creates significant risks of exposure to third parties. In particular, law enforcement investigators seeking access to potentially relevant evidence have aggressively and extensively used the Electronic Communications Act of 1986 (“ECPA”) to execute digital searches. But a relatively obscure provision of ECPA, § 2703, allows law enforcement to search a person’s Fourth Amendment “papers” without them ever learning that a warrant has allowed the exposure of their private, sensitive, and possibly incriminating documents. What is more, federal and state law …

Incomplete Contracts And Future Data Usage, Jens Frankenreiter, Talia B. Gillis, Dan Svirsky

Scholarship@WashULaw

Most major jurisdictions require websites to provide customers with privacy policies. For consumers, a privacy policy's most important function is to provide them with a description of the online service provider's current privacy practices. We argue that these policies also serve a second, often-overlooked function: they allocate residual data usage rights to online services or consumers, including the power to decide whether a service can modify its privacy practices and use consumer data in novel ways. We further argue that a central feature of the E.U.'s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), one of the most comprehensive and far-reaching privacy regulatory …

Expert Governance Of Online Speech, Brenda Dvoskin

Scholarship@WashULaw

In a world of fundamental disagreements about how social media companies should govern speech, it is striking that nearly everyone agrees that online speech governance should be based on human rights. The human rights project for content moderation proposes that social media platforms align their own internal speech policies with international human rights law (IHRL). It seeks, I argue, a system of expert governance: one in which a corporate technocracy applies a set of exogenous principles imagined as objective and global. Ultimately, this governance model shifts power to experts under the illusion of empowering the people.

To support these claims, …

Blockchain, The Superhero That The Healthcare Industry Needs, Victor Wang

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

The note argues that blockchain technology holds significant potential for transforming the healthcare industry by enhancing data security and efficiency. However, its integration faces legal challenges due to conflicts with existing healthcare laws, particularly the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the HITECH Act. The note contends that blockchain's decentralized and immutable nature violates key HIPAA requirements, such as data disposal and accountability standards. It advocates for updating these laws to accommodate blockchain technology and ensure compliance, emphasizing the need for legal frameworks to evolve alongside technological advancements.

Brokered Abuse, Thomas E. Kadri

Scholarly Works

Data brokers are abuse enablers. These companies, which traffic information about people for profit, facilitate interpersonal abuse by making it easier to find and contact people. By thwarting people’s obscurity, brokers expose them to physical, psychological, financial, and reputational harm. To date, there have been four common legal responses to this situation: prohibiting abusive acts, mandating broker transparency, limiting data collection, and restricting data disclosure. Though these measures each have some merit, none is adequate, and several recent privacy laws have even made matters worse. Put simply, the current legal landscape is neither effective nor empathetic.

This Essay explores the …

“Can I Post This?”: A Call For Nuanced Interpretation Of Dmca Enforcement In The Age Of Social Media, Erin E. Bronner

Fordham Law Review

This Note advances recent scholarship critiquing the notice-and-takedown procedures used by online service providers (OSPs) under the safe-harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)—specifically in the context of user-generated content (UGC) posted by end users on social media. Rights holders have increasingly put legal pressure on technology platforms to fortify their copyright protection mechanisms. Over the past decade, this imperative has manifested through an increased use of automated content recognition (ACR) technology to remove allegedly infringing UGC. ACR technology has gradually overtaken the manual, human review of UGC that the DMCA envisioned.

However, reliance on mass automated takedowns …

“Buy Now, Pay Later: No Fees. No Credit Check.”, Elaine Lee

Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental, & Innovation Law

Afterpay and Affirm, are financial technology (“fintech”) platforms that allow consumers to split their low-cost purchases into four installment payments–with seemingly no interest, fees, or hard credit inquiries. Similar to retailer fees on credit card transactions, these companies generate most of their profits as the intermediary between consumers and merchants. By flaunting celebrities like A$AP Rocky and Keke Palmer, the loan products are heavily advertised as the “cool” alternative to traditional credit cards and are particularly well-received among Millennials and Generation Z (“Gen Z”) consumers. Consequently, consumer advocates are duly concerned that lenders irresponsibly extend credit to a young generation, …

Mfns In Digital Distribution: Anticompetitive Effects Examined Through Modern Gaming Distribution, Ryan Wolff

Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental, & Innovation Law

Most Favored Nation clauses and their place within digital distribution agreements is a problem that seems yet to be resolved. The argument that entities with large enough market share in their respective market can utilize these provisions to ensure that they remain on top is a contested topic that is actively being challenged in the courts. The lawsuit against Valve, the video game publisher and distributor, provides a lens through which the potential harms and advantages of these provisions can be examined. In analyzing the finer points of this situation potential solutions can be designed to, in a perfect world, …

Data For Sale: Navigating The Role Of Data Brokers And Reproductive Health Information In A Post-Dobbs World, Heather Chong

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

Data privacy is a growing concern in our fast-paced society, as it has become increasingly necessary to relay and retain information digitally. However, the United States trails behind its counterparts in terms of the strength of existing data protection legislation. Unlike the European Union and its General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) law, the United States has no similar comprehensive data protection act. This lack of legislation has led to the exploitation of people’s private data and allowed companies to utilize loopholes in current laws to access sensitive health information. Data brokers have been collecting and reselling consumers’ personal information, including …

Europe's Digital Constitution, Anu Bradford

Faculty Scholarship

This Article uncovers the fundamental values underlying the European Union’s expansive set of digital regulations, which in aggregate can be viewed as Europe’s “digital constitution.” This constitution engrains Europe’s human-centric, rights-preserving, democracy-enhancing, and redistributive vision for the digital economy into binding law. This vision stands in stark contrast to the United States, which has traditionally placed its faith in markets and tech companies’ self-regulation. As a result, American tech companies today are regulated primarily by Brussels and not by Washington. By highlighting the distinctiveness and the global reach of the European digital constitution, this Article challenges the common narrative that …

The Knottiest Of Gordian Knots: Article 17 Of The Copyright Directive, Mark Hyland, Thomas Perry

Articles

This article analyses the much debated Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive (Directive 2019/790) in the light of last year’s comprehensive European Commission guidance. The aim of the guidance is to support a correct and coherent transposition of Article 17 across the EU27. Following the recent landmark judgment in Case C-401/19, Poland v European Parliament and Council of the EU, some commentators have now suggested that it might be timely for the European Commission to issue further guidance on Article 17.

Securing Patent Law, Charles Duan

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

A vigorous conversation about intellectual property rights and national security has largely focused on the defense role of those rights, as tools for responding to acts of foreign infringement. But intellectual property, and patents in particular, also play an arguably more important offense role. Foreign competitor nations can obtain and assert U.S. patents against U.S. firms and creators. Use of patents as an offense strategy can be strategically coordinated to stymie domestic innovation and technological progress. This Essay considers current and possible future practices of patent exploitation in this offense setting, with a particular focus on China given the nature …

Toward Stronger Data Protection Laws, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

No abstract provided.

The New Pornography Wars, Julie A. Dahlstrom

Faculty Scholarship

The world’s largest online pornography conglomerate, MindGeek, has come under fire for the publishing of “rape videos,” child pornography, and nonconsensual pornography on its website, Pornhub. As in the “pornography wars” of the 1970s and 1980s, lawyers and activists have now turned to civil remedies and filed creative anti-trafficking lawsuits against MindGeek and third parties, like payment processing company, Visa. These lawsuits seek not only to achieve legal accountability for online sex trafficking but also to reframe a broader array of online harms as sex trafficking.

This Article explores what these new trafficking lawsuits mean for the future regulation of …

Collective Data Rights And Their Possible Abuse, Asaf Lubin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.