Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The “Green Patent Paradox” And Fair Use: The Intellectual Property Solution To Fight Climate Change, Samuel Cayton

Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental & Innovation Law

As the climate crisis consistently worsens, the United States’ response to the crisis has proven inconsistent. Even with the United States likely to recommit to the Paris Climate Agreement, political tensions will likely further delay a climate response. The polarized characterization of the Green New Deal, the inaction of scientifically misguided conservatives, and the incessant proposal for middle ground approaches lacking the urgency needed to change course all contribute to this delay. While swift action from the federal government is needed, looking to the private sector to transition to sustainability is equally important. Specifically, patent protection is a strong intellectual …

Law Enforcement’S Use Of Facial Recognition Software In United States Cities, Samantha Jean Wunschel

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Facial recognition software is something we use every day, whether it’s a suggested tag on our Facebook post or a faster way to unlock our phones. As technology becomes increasingly pervasive in our lives, law enforcement has adapted to utilize the new tools available in accessory to their investigations and the legal process.

Network Effects In Action, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

This Chapter begins by examining and exploring the theoretical and empirical limits of the possible bases of network effects, paying particular attention to the most commonly cited framework known as Metcalfe’s Law. It continues by exploring the concept of network externalities, defined as the positive external consumption benefits that the decision to join a network creates for the other members of the network, which is more ambiguous than commonly realized. It then reviews the structural factors needed for models based on network effects to have anticompetitive effects and identifies other factors that can dissipate those effects. Finally, it identifies alternative …

Law Library Blog (November 2020): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

The Internet Never Forgets: Image-Based Sexual Abuse And The Workplace, John Schriner, Melody Lee Rood

Publications and Research

Image-based sexual abuse (IBSA), commonly known as revenge pornography, is a type of cyberharassment that often results in detrimental effects to an individual's career and livelihood. Although there exists valuable research concerning cyberharassment in the workplace generally, there is little written about specifically IBSA and the workplace. This chapter examines current academic research on IBSA, the issues with defining this type of abuse, victim blaming, workplace policy, and challenges to victim-survivors' redress. The authors explore monetary motivation for websites that host revenge pornography and unpack how the dark web presents new challenges to seeking justice. Additionally, this chapter presents recommendations …

The Law And Policy Of Client-Side Scanning (Originally Published By Lawfare), Paul Rosenzweig

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Tech Policy And Legal Theory Syllabus, Yafit Lev-Aretz, Nizan Packin

Open Educational Resources

Technology has changed dramatically over the last couple of decades. Currently, virtually all business industries are powered by large quantities of data. The potential as well as actual uses of business data, which oftentimes includes personal user data, raise complex issues of informed consent and data protection. This course will explore many of these complex issues, with the goal of guiding students into thinking about tech policy from a broad ethical perspective as well as preparing students to responsibly conduct themselves in different areas and industries in a world growingly dominated by technology.

From The Tree Of Knowledge And The Golem Of Prague To Kosher Autonomous Cars: The Ethics Of Artificial Intelligence Through Jewish Eyes, Nachshon Goltz, John Zeleznikow, Tracey Dowdeswell

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This article discusses the regulation of artificial intelligence from a Jewish perspective, with an emphasis on the regulation of machine learning and its application to autonomous vehicles and machine learning. Through the Biblical story of Adam and Eve as well as Golem legends from Jewish folklore, we derive several basic principles that underlie a Jewish perspective on the moral and legal personhood of robots and other artificially intelligent agents. We argue that religious ethics in general, and Jewish ethics in particular, show us that the dangers of granting moral personhood to robots and in particular to autonomous vehicles lie not …

Made In The Usa: Technological Corporatism, Infrastructure Regulation, And Dupont 1902-1917, Roman Y. Shemakov

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

The turn of the twentieth century radically renewed industrial organization across the United States. Early American corporations -- centralized manufacturing hubs with journeymen and apprentices laboring under one roof -- were seldom prepared for the transformations that scientific management and structural reorganization would bring to social relations. At the helm of World War 1, DuPont became the epitome of broader national restructuring. Through a close relationship with American military industries and legislatures, the DuPont brothers came to represent Business as an inseparable component of the State. While labor historiography has primarily focused on organizers’ relationship with regulators, important segments of …

Literature Review: How U.S. Government Documents Are Addressing The Increasing National Security Implications Of Artificial Intelligence, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

This article emphasizes the increasing importance of artificial intelligence (AI) in military and national security policy making. It seeks to inform interested individuals about the proliferation of publicly accessible U.S. government and military literature on this multifaceted topic. An additional objective of this endeavor is encouraging greater public awareness of and participation in emerging public policy debate on AI's moral and national security implications..

Congressional Committee Resources On Space Policy During The 115th Congress (2017-2018): Providing Context And Insight Into Us Government Space Policy, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Article 1 of the US Constitution assigns the US Congress numerous responsibilities. These include creating new laws, revising existing laws, funding government programs, and conducting oversight of these programs' performance. Oversight of US Government agency space policy programs is executed by various congressional space policy committees including the House and Senate Science Committees, Armed Services, and Appropriations Committees. These committees conduct many public hearings on space policy, which invite expert witnesses to testify on US space policy programs and feature debate on the strengths and weaknesses of these programs. Documentation produced by these committees is widely available to the public, …

The Use Of Digital Millenium Copyright Act To Stifle Speech Through Non-Copyright Related Takedowns, Miller Freeman

Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental & Innovation Law

In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This law provided new methods of protecting copyright in online media. These protections shift the normal judicial process that would stop the publication of infringing materials to private actors: the online platforms. As a result, online platforms receive notices of infringement and issue takedowns of allegedly copyrighted works without the judicial process which normally considers the purpose of the original notice of infringement. In at least one case, discussed in detail below, this has resulted in a notice and takedown against an individual for reasons not related to the purpose of …

Shifting Public Perception: Climate Change Means Living With Fire And Smoke, Robert Froembling

Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental & Innovation Law

The urgency to prepare for the climate crisis has never been greater. We are currently living in the sixth mass extinction and the effects are only going to accelerate. We will inherit more wildfires, larger wildfires, and more frequent wildfires.

This piece is not meant to stoke fear in its readers or be depressing, but to shift public perception on what our future holds by evaluating the laws and science presented to us. This piece will look at regional and federal regulations and assess the increased rate of forest fires and the grave public health concerns from stagnant smoke specifically …

Ethics, Ai, Mass Data And Pandemic Challenges: Responsible Data Use And Infrastructure Application For Surveillance And Pre-Emptive Tracing Post-Crisis, Mark Findlay, Jia Yuan Loke, Nydia Remolina Leon, Yum Yin, Benjamin (Tan Renyan) Tham

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

As the COVID-19 health pandemic rages governments and private companies across the globe are utilising AI-assisted surveillance, reporting, mapping and tracing technologies with the intention of slowing the spread of the virus. These technologies have the capacity to amass personal data and share for community control and citizen safety motivations that empower state agencies and inveigle citizen co-operation which could only be imagined outside such times of real and present danger. While not cavilling with the short-term necessity for these technologies and the data they control, process and share in the health regulation mission, this paper argues that this infrastructure …

An Essay On Pluralism In Financial Market Infrastructure Design: The Case Of Securities Holding In The United States, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay will appear as a chapter in a forthcoming edited volume published by Oxford University Press. It builds on the earlier article, Beyond Intermediation: A New (FinTech) Model for Securities Holding Infrastructures, 22 U. Pa. J. Bus. L. 386 (2020), which argues that serious consideration should be given to modifications of the deeply intermediated securities holding systems in the United States and elsewhere. Many of the costs and risks imposed by the intermediated holding systems fall within the domain of the regulation of securities markets (internal costs), such as impairments of shareholder voting and bondholder claims against issuers. …

Congressional Committee Resources On Space Policy During The 115th Congress (2017-2018): Providing Context And Insight Into U.S. Government Space Policy, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Article 1 of the US Constitution assigns the US Congress numerous responsibilities. These include creating new laws, revising existing laws, funding government programs, and conducting oversight of these programs' performance. Oversight of US Government agency space policy programs is executed by various congressional space policy committees, including the House and Senate Science Committees, Armed Services, and Appropriations Committees. These committees conduct many public hearings on space policy which invite witnesses to testify on US space policy programs and feature debate on the strengths and weaknesses of these programs. Documentation produced by these committees is widely available to the public, except …

The Color Of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, And The Making Of Americans (Introduction), Anjali Vats

Book Chapters

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW, the body of legal doctrine and practice that governs the ownership of information, is animated by a dichotomy of creatorship and infringement. In the most often repeated narratives of creatorship/infringement in the United States, the former produces a social and economic good while the latter works against the production of that social and economic good. Creators, those individuals whose work is deemed protectable under copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, and unfair competition law, create valuable products that contribute to economic growth and public knowledge. Infringers, those individuals who use the work of creators without their permission, steal …

Antitrust In Times Of Information Technology: An Analysis Of Big Tech Monopoly Cases, Shamayeta Rahman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The information technology industry is one of the most rapidly growing yet concentrated markets existing today. Big Tech monopolies and their increasingly anticompetitive behavior posits risks for competition, technological innovation and consumer welfare. This ranges from price discrimination, limiting consumer choices to the unethical use of data. The particular nature of information technology, with its network effects and negligible marginal costs, incentivizes and facilitates predatory market practices making antitrust analysis in this industry extremely complex. Certain schools of antitrust thought are more sensitive (namely the post-Chicago school) to these implications than others, though antitrust application is still lacking in both …

Law, Artificial Intelligence, And Natural Language Processing: A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To My Search Results, Paul D. Callister

Faculty Works

Renowned legal educator Roscoe Pound stated, “Law must be stable and yet it cannot stand still.” Yet, as Susan Nevelow Mart has demonstrated in a seminal article that the different online research services (Westlaw, Lexis Advance, Fastcase, Google Scholar, Ravel and Casetext) produce significantly different results when researching case law. Furthermore, a recent study of 325 federal courts of appeals decisions, revealed that only 16% of the cases cited in appellate briefs make it into the courts’ opinions. This does not exactly inspire confidence in legal research or its tools to maintain stability of the law. As Robert Berring foresaw, …

Frand And Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper considers when a patentee’s violation of a FRAND commitment also violates the antitrust laws. It warns against two extremes. First, is thinking that any violation of a FRAND obligation is an antitrust violation as well. FRAND obligations are contractual, and most breaches of contract do not violate antitrust law. The other extreme is thinking that, because a FRAND violation is a breach of contract, it cannot also be an antitrust violation.

Every antitrust case must consider the market environment in which conduct is to be evaluated. SSOs operated by multiple firms are joint ventures. Antitrust’s role is to …

Germany’S Digital Health Reforms In The Covid-19 Era: Lessons And Opportunities For Other Countries, Sara Gerke, Ariel D. Stern, Timo Minssen

Faculty Scholarly Works

Reimbursement is a key challenge for many new digital health solutions, whose importance and value have been highlighted and expanded by the current COVID-19 pandemic. Germany’s new Digital Healthcare Act (Digitale–Versorgung–Gesetz or DVG) entitles all individuals covered by statutory health insurance to reimbursement for certain digital health applications (i.e., insurers will pay for their use). Since Germany, like the United States (US), is a multi-payer health care system, the new Act provides a particularly interesting case study for US policymakers. We first provide an overview of the new German DVG and outline the landscape for reimbursement of digital health solutions …

Beyond Intermediation: A New (Fintech) Model For Securities Holding Infrastructures, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

Publicly traded securities generally are held by investors in securities accounts with intermediaries such as stockbrokers and central securities depositories—intermediated securities. For many investors this is the only practical means of holding and dealing with securities. These intermediated holding systems (IHSs) impose a variety of risks and costs. Investors are exposed to intermediary risk (default or insolvency of an intermediary holding securities) as well as impediments to the exercise of rights such as voting and asserting claims against securities issuers. The nontransparency of IHSs imposes other social costs, such as obstacles to anti-money laundering enforcement. The emergence of FinTech and …

Regulation Of Algorithmic Tools In The United States, Christopher S. Yoo, Alicia Lai

All Faculty Scholarship

Policymakers in the United States have just begun to address regulation of artificial intelligence technologies in recent years, gaining momentum through calls for additional research funding, piece-meal guidance, proposals, and legislation at all levels of government. This Article provides an overview of high-level federal initiatives for general artificial intelligence (AI) applications set forth by the U.S. president and responding agencies, early indications from the incoming Biden Administration, targeted federal initiatives for sector-specific AI applications, pending federal legislative proposals, and state and local initiatives. The regulation of the algorithmic ecosystem will continue to evolve as the United States continues to search …

The Future Of Law Schools: Covid-19, Technology, And Social Justice, Christian Sundquist

Articles

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare not only the social and racial inequities in society, but also the pedagogical and access to justice inequities embedded in the traditional legal curriculum. The need to re-envision the future of legal education existed well before the current pandemic, spurred by the shifting nature of legal practice as well as demographic and technological change. This article examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on legal education, and posits that the combined forces of the pandemic, social justice awareness and technological disruption will forever transform the future of both legal education and practice.