Computer Law Commons^™

Covid-19: Legal Framework For Vaccine Distributions And Mandates, Dana B. Taschner, Ashley Atwood

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

The COVID-19 pandemic has created heightened turmoil for at-risk populations, solidified laws allowing the use of mask mandates, raised legal issues surrounding vaccine mandates, and presented the new issue of a vaccine passport. As a nation, we have failed to implement vaccination schemes that properly protect vulnerable populations. Specifically, the homeless population has been overlooked, creating an additional layer of hardship, and contributing to greater community spread. This article contemplates the various methods by which an equitable vaccination scheme could have been achieved and the division of powers that created complications.

Additionally, the legality of vaccine mandates is discussed, and …

The Art Of Dodging Bullets: How Covid-19 Drug Manufacturers And Providers Plan To Escape Tort Liability, Ruan Meintjes

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.

Signed, Sealed, Patented?: A Look At The United States Postal Service’S Patent Application For Implementing Blockchain Technology In Mobile Voting Systems, Ethan Todd

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Communitarian Deficit In The Usa: Three Telling Cases, Amitai Etzioni

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

Liberal communitarianism suggests that the balance between individual rights and the common good must be adjusted as historical conditions change. Much attention has been paid to violations of rights, e.g., by the police, for good reasons. This Article examines three new technologies that undermine public safety, a key common good, and asks whether they should be banned. The 2020 pandemic revealed that scores of millions of Americans objected, not merely to government mandates to take measures that are likely to spare fellow Americans a severe disease or death, but even to respond to moral calls, especially wearing a mask. This …

Copyright, Pandemics, And Emergencies: When Desperate Times Dictate Contextual Responses, Caroline L. Osborne

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

This article explores fair use, the library exception, the first sale doctrine, and controlled digital lending as responses to copyright in the context of permitting libraries to digitize materials existing exclusively in print in their collection for use in teaching, research, and scholarship by students, faculty, and other patrons. Also included is a decision matrix to be employed as a tool for analysis in making the decisions as to digitization of print resources in response to instances of emergencies.

Abolishing The Communications Decency Act Might Sanitize “Politically Biased,” “Digitally Polluted” And “Dangerously Toxic” Social Media? ― Judicial And Statistical Guidance From Federal-Preemption, Safe-Harbor And Rights-Preservation Decisions, Willy E. Rice

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

Sitting and former U.S. Presidents as well as members of the general public, financial, political and educational institutions use social media. Yet, an overwhelming majority of users, content creators, parents, “conservatives,” “progressives,” Democrats and Republicans distrust social-media owners. Some critics allege that owners “digitally pollute” platforms by encouraging users to post “corrosive, dangerous, toxic and illegal content.” Other critics assert that service providers’ purportedly objective content-moderation algorithms are biased ― discriminating irrationally on the basis of users’ political association, ideology, socioeconomic status, gender and ethnicity. Republicans and Democrats have crafted roughly twenty bills. In theory, the enacted proposals would “sanitize” …

Uncovering The “Realness” Of Cgi Influencers, Samantha Favela

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.

Q: Can Booking.Com Be Trademarked? A: Booking.Yeah, Samantha Favela

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

By choosing a generic Internet domain as a brand name, that brand can hit the Internet jackpot. But the popularity and use of a generic domain name creates tension with trademark law. While companies want to be easily found on the Internet, they also want to protect themselves from competitors. This Case Note argues that the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States Patent & Trademark Office v. Booking.com B.V. is the best possible outcome in protecting brand’s rights and balancing trademark law principles. Through the analysis of past cases, the Supreme Court decision in Booking.com itself, and trademark law principles, …

The Fifth Circuit, Fourth Amendment, And The Third-Party Doctrine: Two Takeaways From The Court’S First Ruling On Bitcoin Privacy, Daniel Penn

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.

Privacy Asymmetries: Access To Data In Criminal Defense Investigations, Rebecca Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

This Article introduces the phenomenon of “privacy asymmetries,” which are privacy statutes that permit courts to order disclosures of sensitive information when requested by law enforcement but not when requested by criminal defense counsel. In the U.S. adversarial criminal legal system, defense counsel are the sole actors tasked with investigating evidence of innocence. Law enforcement has no constitutional, statutory, or formal ethical duty to seek out evidence of innocence. Therefore, statutes that selectively suppress defense investigations selectively suppress evidence of innocence. Privacy asymmetries form a recurring, albeit previously unrecognized, pattern in privacy statutes. They likely arise from legislative oversight and …

Privacy As Privilege: The Stored Communications Act And Internet Evidence, Rebecca Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

This Article exposes a profound and growing injustice that major technology companies have propagated through every level of the judiciary under the guise of protecting data privacy. The Supreme Court has repeatedly proclaimed: “In our judicial system, the public has a right to every [person’s] evidence.” Yet, for over a decade, Facebook, GitHub, Google, Instagram, Microsoft, and Twitter have leveraged the Stored Communications Act (SCA) — a key data privacy law for the internet — to bar criminal defendants from subpoenaing the contents of another’s online communications, even when those communications could exonerate the wrongfully accused. Every appellate court to …

Access Denied? Unauthorized Access After Hiq Labs V. Linkedin, Dalton Sjong

Marquette Intellectual Property & Innovation Law Review

None

Artificial Intelligence And The Challenges Of Workplace Discrimination And Privacy, Pauline Kim, Matthew T. Bodie

Scholarship@WashULaw

Employers are increasingly relying on artificially intelligent (AI) systems to recruit, select, and manage their workforces, raising fears that these systems may subject workers to discriminatory, invasive, or otherwise unfair treatment. This article reviews those concerns and provides an overview of how current laws may apply, focusing on two particular problems: discrimination on the basis of protected characteristics like race, sex, or disability, and the invasion of workers’ privacy engendered by workplace AI systems. It discusses the ways in which relying on AI to make personnel decisions can produce discriminatory outcomes and how current law might apply. It then explores …

Submission To Canadian Government Consultation On A Modern Copyright Framework For Ai And The Internet Of Things, Sean Flynn, Lucie Guibault, Christian Handke, Joan-Josep Vallbé, Michael Palmedo, Carys Craig, Michael Geist, Joao Pedro Quintais

Reports & Public Policy Documents

We are grateful for the opportunity to participate in the Canadian Government’s consultation on a modern copyright framework for AI and the Internet of Things. Below, we present some of our research findings relating to the importance of flexibility in copyright law to permit text and data mining (“TDM”). As the consultation paper recognizes, TDM is a critical element of artificial intelligence. Our research supports the adoption of a specific exception for uses of works in TDM to supplement Canada’s existing general fair dealing exception.

Empirical research shows that more publication of citable research takes place in countries with “open” …

A New Common Law Of Web Scraping, Benjamin L.W. Sobel

Lewis & Clark Law Review

The Clearview AI facial recognition scandal is a monumental breach of privacy that arrived at a particularly inopportune time. A shadowy company reportedly scraped billions of publicly-available images from social media platforms and compiled them into a facial recognition database that it made available to law enforcement and private industry. To make matters worse, the scandal came to light just months after the Ninth Circuit’s decision in hiQ v. LinkedIn, which held that scraping the public web probably does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Before hiQ, the CFAA would have seemed like the surest route to …

Self-Defense To Cyber Force: Combatting The Notion Of 'Scale And Effect', Thomas Eaton

Scholarly Works

The ability to reach out, with a few keystrokes or a couple lines of code, through the interconnected world of cyberspace and create militarily advantageous effects 10,000 miles away has changed warfare as previously conceived, perhaps more than any other advancement in any other domain of war. Cyber weapons are weapons, and whatever law applies to conventional weapons equally applies to cyber weapons. Long before cyber operations were even science fiction, there was much debate over what constituted a use of force that would justify force in response. In many ways, the debate over what constitutes cyber-attacks has been pasted …

Artificial Intelligence And Trade, Anupam Chander

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Artificial Intelligence is already powering trade today. It is crossing borders, learning, making decisions, and operating cyber-physical systems. It underlies many of the services that are offered today – from customer service chatbots to customer relations software to business processes. The chapter considers AI regulation from the perspective of international trade law. It argues that foreign AI should be regulated by governments – indeed that AI must be ‘locally responsible’. The chapter refutes arguments that trade law should not apply to AI and shows how the WTO agreements might apply to AI using two hypothetical cases . The analysis reveals …

Sovereignty 2.0, Anupam Chander, Haochen Sun

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Digital sovereignty—the exercise of control over the internet—is the ambition of the world’s leaders, from Australia to Zimbabwe, a bulwark against both foreign state and foreign corporation. Governments have resoundingly answered first-generation internet law questions of who if anyone should regulate the internet—they all will. We now confront second generation questions—not whether, but how to regulate the internet. We argue that digital sovereignty is simultaneously a necessary incident of democratic governance and democracy’s dreaded antagonist. As international law scholar Louis Henkin taught us, sovereignty can insulate a government’s worst ills from foreign intrusion. Assertions of digital sovereignty, in particular, …