Computer Law Commons^™

Spyware Vs. Spyware: Software Conflicts And User Autonomy, James Grimmelmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Overlapping Web Of Data, Territoriality And Sovereignty, Jennifer Daskal

Contributions to Books

Provides a framework to better understand Global Legal Pluralism and the current international state of law.

Equips practitioners, theorists, and students with deeper insights and analytical tools to describe the conflict among legal and quasi-legal systems.

Analyzes global legal pluralism in light of legal theory, constitutionalism, conflict of laws, international law, commercial transactions, and as it affects indigenous polities, religious orders, and citizenship.

Artificial Intelligence Inventions & Patent Disclosure, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial intelligence (“AI”) has attracted significant attention and has imposed challenges for society. Yet surprisingly, scholars have paid little attention to the impediments AI imposes on patent law’s disclosure function from the lenses of theory and policy. Patents are conditioned on inventors describing their inventions, but the inner workings and the use of AI in the inventive process are not properly understood or are largely unknown. The lack of transparency of the parameters of the AI inventive process or the use of AI makes it difficult to enable a future use of AI to achieve the same end state. While …

Nonexcludable Surgical Method Patents, Jonas Anderson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

A patent consists of only one right: the right to exclude others from practicing the patented invention. However, one class of patents statutorily lacks the right to exclude direct infringers: surgical method patents are not enforceable against medical practitioners or health care facilities, which are the only realistic potential direct infringers of such patents. Despite this, inventors regularly file for (and receive) surgical method patents. Why would anyone incur the expense (more than $20,000 on average) of acquiring a patent on a surgical method if that patent cannot be used to keep people from using the patent?

The traditional answer …

The Very Brief History Of Decentralized Blockchain Governance, Michael Abramowicz

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

A new form of blockchain governance involving the use of formal games that incentivize participants to identify focal resolutions to normative questions is emerging. This symposium contribution provides a brief survey of the literature proposing and critiquing the use of such mechanisms of decentralized decision-making, and it evaluates early laboratory and real-world experiments with this approach.

People V. Robots: A Roadmap For Enforcing California's New Online Bot Disclosure Act, Barry Stricke

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Bots are software applications that complete tasks automatically. A bot's communication is disembodied, so humans can mistake it for a real person, and their misbelief can be exploited by the bot owner to deploy malware or phish personal data. Bots also pose as consumers posting online product reviews or spread (often fake) news, and a bot owner can coordinate multiple social-network accounts to trick a network's "trending" algorithms, boosting the visibility of specific content, sowing and exacerbating controversy, or fabricating an impression of mass individual consensus. California's 2019 Bolstering Online Transparency Act (the "CA Bot Act') imposes conspicuous disclosure requirements …

Closed Adoption: An Illusory Promise To Birth Parents And The Changing Landscape Of Sealed Adoption Records, Bryn Baffer

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Imagine spitting into a tube and mailing your DNA off only to discover that you had a sibling who had been adopted by another family or that a parent’s affair had resulted in a half-sibling. For many individuals, these family secrets have been exposed due to direct-to-consumer DNA testing companies, such as 23andMe.

By the 1950s, most states had enacted statutes that sealed adoption record files in order to preserve the privacy of the birth parents, adoptees, and adoptive families. While some states have moved toward granting adoptees access to their adoption records, most states still have some type of …

Cyber Insurance Today: Saving It Before It Needs Saving, Angela Nieves

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Cyber insurance, which covers a company’s losses and costs stemming from a cyberattack, represents a nearly $5 billion global market. But have stakeholders shaped a sustainable model? This article analyzes contrasting claims about the viability of cyber insurance. It proposes measures to ensure the survival of the cyber insurance market, which should be immediately addressed given the current state of the world and the fact that even pre-COVID-19, businesses worldwide stood to lose over $5.2 trillion over the next five years due to cybercrimes. Unless action is taken to mitigate the fallout from cyber events, the cyber insurance market will …

Securing Technological Privacy: Modernizing The Texas Disciplinary Rules Of Professional Conduct To Protect Electronic Data, Ashley "Nikki" Vega

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

This comment explains how and why the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct (the “Texas Disciplinary Rules”) should be updated to reflect the modernization of technology. Lawyers must keep abreast of changes in the law and its practices; including those which are technological in nature. The American Bar Association (the “ABA”) recently amended the “technology provisions” of its Model Rules of Professional Conduct (the “Model Rules”); namely Rule 1.1 “Competence” and Rule 1.6 “Confidentiality of Information” in order to keep up with the benefits and risks associated with technology in the legal profession. Additionally, over half of all jurisdictions have …

Provisional Injunctive Relief Under The Utsa And The Dtsa In Federal Court New Product Cases, Richard F. Dole Jr.

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.

Smart Contracts And The Limits Of Computerized Commerce, Eric D. Chason

Faculty Publications

Smart contracts and cryptocurrencies have sparked considerable interest among legal scholars in recent years, and a growing body of scholarship focuses on whether smart contracts and cryptocurrencies can sidestep law and regulation altogether. Bitcoin is famously decentralized, without any central actor controlling the system. Its users remain largely anonymous, using alphanumeric addresses instead of legal names. Ethereum shares these traits and also supports smart contracts that can automate the transfer of the Ethereum cryptocurrency (known as ether). Ethereum also supports specialized "tokens" that can be tied to the ownership of assets, goods, and services that exist completely outside of the …

Politics Of Adversarial Machine Learning, Kendra Albert, Jonathon Penney, Bruce Schneier, Ram Shankar Siva Kumar

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In addition to their security properties, adversarial machine-learning attacks and defenses have political dimensions. They enable or foreclose certain options for both the subjects of the machine learning systems and for those who deploy them, creating risks for civil liberties and human rights. In this paper, we draw on insights from science and technology studies, anthropology, and human rights literature, to inform how defenses against adversarial attacks can be used to suppress dissent and limit attempts to investigate machine learning systems. To make this concrete, we use real-world examples of how attacks such as perturbation, model inversion, or membership inference …

Legal Risks Of Adversarial Machine Learning Research, Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, Jonathon Penney, Bruce Schneier, Kendra Albert

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Adversarial machine learning is the systematic study of how motivated adversaries can compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of machine learning (ML) systems through targeted or blanket attacks. The problem of attacking ML systems is so prevalent that CERT, the federally funded research and development center tasked with studying attacks, issued a broad vulnerability note on how most ML classifiers are vulnerable to adversarial manipulation. Google, IBM, Facebook, and Microsoft have committed to investing in securing machine learning systems. The US and EU are likewise putting security and safety of AI systems as a top priority.

Now, research on adversarial …

Ethical Testing In The Real World: Evaluating Physical Testing Of Adversarial Machine Learning, Kendra Albert, Maggie Delano, Jonathon Penney, Afsaneh Ragot, Ram Shankar Siva Kumar

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This paper critically assesses the adequacy and representativeness of physical domain testing for various adversarial machine learning (ML) attacks against computer vision systems involving human subjects. Many papers that deploy such attacks characterize themselves as “real world.” Despite this framing, however, we found the physical or real-world testing conducted was minimal, provided few details about testing subjects and was often conducted as an afterthought or demonstration. Adversarial ML research without representative trials or testing is an ethical, scientific, and health/safety issue that can cause real harms. We introduce the problem and our methodology, and then critique the physical domain testing …

Networks Of Empathy, Thomas E. Kadri

Scholarly Works

Digital abuse is on the rise. People increasingly use technology to perpetrate and exacerbate abusive conduct like stalking and harassment, manipulating digital tools to control and harm their victims. By some accounts, 95% of domestic-abuse cases involve technology, while a sizeable chunk of the U.S. population now admits to having suffered or perpetrated serious abuse online. To make matters worse, people often trivialize digital abuse or underestimate its prevalence. Even among those who do appreciate its severity, there remains ample disagreement about how to address it.

Although law can be a powerful tool to regulate digital abuse, legal responses are …

Speech, Innovation, And Competition, Greg Day

Scholarly Works

Critics contend that concentrated power in digital markets has generated threats to free speech. For a variety of reasons, market power is naturally thought to concentrate in digital markets. The consequence is that “big tech” is said to face little competition; Facebook controls 72 percent of the social media market while the parent of YouTube (72 percent of the video market) is Google (92 percent of the search market). This landscape has potentially vested private companies with unprecedented power over the flow of information. If Facebook, for example, decides to ban certain types of speech or ideas, it would potentially …

Front Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Implementing Ethics Into Artificial Intelligence: A Contribution, From A Legal Perspective, To The Development Of An Ai Governance Regime, Axel Walz, Kay Firth-Butterfield

Duke Law & Technology Review

The increasing use of AI and autonomous systems will have revolutionary impacts on society. Despite many benefits, AI and autonomous systems involve considerable risks that need to be managed. Minimizing these risks will emphasize the respective benefits while at the same time protecting the ethical values defined by fundamental rights and basic constitutional principles, thereby preserving a human centric society. This Article advocates for the need to conduct in-depth risk-benefit-assessments with regard to the use of AI and autonomous systems. This Article points out major concerns in relation to AI and autonomous systems such as likely job losses, causation of …

Featurization And The Myth Of Data Empowerment, Nur Lalji

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

Every day, we make a series of tradeoffs between privacy and convenience. We may check our email, post on social media, use the free Wi-Fi in public spaces, or take our cellphones with us wherever we go without a clear understanding of what information we are giving away when we do so. Increasingly, we are seeing products that claim to defy this opaqueness associated with big data and put users at the helm of their information. These "featurized" products wrap themselves in a data empowerment narrative, but ultimately erode individual privacy in new ways, sometimes even capitalizing on it. This …

A U.S. Dst? The Potential Impact Of The Cloud Regulations, Reuven Avi-Yonah, Karen Sam

Articles

In this article, the authors explain how the recently proposed U.S. cloud computing regulations would apply to U.S. and foreign providers, and consider the potential consequences if the rule for permanent establishments and U.S. trades or businesses changes in 2020.