Computer Law Commons^™

The Legal Fate Of Internet Ad-Blocking, Russell A. Miller

Scholarly Articles

Ad-blocking services allow individual users to avoid the obtrusive advertising that both clutters and finances most Internet publishing. Ad-blocking's immense - and growing - popularity suggests the depth of Internet users' frustration with Internet advertising. But its potential to disrupt publishers' traditional Internet revenue model makes ad-blocking one of the most significant recent Internet phenomena. Unsurprisingly, publishers are not inclined to accept ad-blocking without a legal fight. While publishers are threatening suits in the United States, the issues presented by ad-blocking have been extensively litigated in German courts where ad-blocking consistently has triumphed over claims that it represents a form …

Unbundling Employment Flexible Benefits For The Gig Economy, Seth C. Oranburg

Law Faculty Scholarship

Federal labor law requires employers to give employees a rigid bundle of benefits, including the right to unionize, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation insurance, health insurance, family medical leave, and more. These benefits are not free—benefits cost about one-third of wages—and someone must pay for them. Which of these benefits are worth their cost? This Article takes a theoretical approach to that problem and proposes a flexible benefits solution.

Labor law developed under a traditional model of work: long-term employees depended on a single employer to engage in goods-producing work. Few people work that way today. Instead, modern workers are increasingly …

Symbols, Systems, And Software As Intellectual Property: Time For Contu, Part Ii?, Timothy K. Armstrong

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The functional nature of computer software underlies two propositions that were, until recently, fairly well settled in intellectual property law: first, that software, like other utilitarian articles, may qualify for patent protection; and second, that the scope of copyright protection for software is comparatively limited. Both propositions have become considerably shakier as a result of recent court decisions. Following Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int’l, 134 S. Ct. 2347 (2014), the lower courts have invalidated many software patents as unprotectable subject matter. Meanwhile, Oracle America v. Google Inc., 750 F.3d 1339 (Fed. Cir. 2014) extended far more expansive copyright protection …

Bulk Biometric Metadata Collection, Margaret Hu

Scholarly Articles

Smart police body cameras and smart glasses worn by law enforcement increasingly reflect state-of-the-art surveillance technology, such as the integration of live-streaming video with facial recognition and artificial intelligence tools, including automated analytics. This Article explores how these emerging cybersurveillance technologies risk the potential for bulk biometric metadata collection. Such collection is likely to fall outside the scope of the types of bulk metadata collection protections regulated by the USA FREEDOM Act of 2015. The USA FREEDOM Act was intended to bring the practice of bulk telephony metadata collection conducted by the National Security Agency (“NSA”) under tighter regulation. In …

Oversharenting: Is It Really Your Story To Tell?, 33 J. Marshall J. Info. Tech. & Privacy L. 121 (2018), Holly Kathleen Hall

UIC John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law

Social media is about sharing information. If you are a parent, often the tendency is to relate every aspect of your children’s lives. Most of the time, children do not consent to postings about them and will have a permanent digital shadow created by their parents that follows them the rest of their lives. The purpose of this article is to analyze the current status and potential future of children’s online privacy from a comparative legal approach, highlighting recent case law in the United Kingdom, which is trending toward carving out special privacy rights for children. This contrasts with the …

Are “Evan’S Law” And The Textalyzer Immediate Solutions To Today’S Rapid Changes In Technology Or Encroachments On Drivers’ Privacy Rights?, 33 J. Marshall J. Info. Tech. & Privacy L. 143 (2018), Aggie Baumert

UIC John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law

No abstract provided.

Nothing Personal, It’S Just Business: How Google’S Course Of Business Operates At The Expense Of Consumer Privacy, 33 J. Marshall J. Info. Tech. & Privacy L. 187 (2018), Kayla Mckinnon

UIC John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law

No abstract provided.

The Bot Legal Code: Developing A Legally Compliant Artificial Intelligence, Edmund Mokhtarian

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The advent of sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) agents, or bots, raises the question: How do we ensure that these bots act appropriately? Within a decade, AI will be ubiquitous, with billions of active bots influencing nearly every industry and daily activity. Given the extensiveness of AI activity, it will be nearly impossible to explicitly program bots with detailed instructions on permitted and prohibited actions, particularly as they face unpredictable, novel situations. Rather, if risks to humans are to be mitigated, bots must have some overriding moral or legal compass--a set of "AI Laws"--to allow them to adapt to whatever scenarios …

The Tipping Point – Reevaluating The Asnef-Equifax Separation Of Competition Of Data Privacy Law In The Wake Of The 2017 Equifax Data Breach, Olivia Altmayer

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Contrary to the Court of Justice for the European Union’s decision in the Asnef-Equifax case, in a world of big data, it is inefficient and ineffective to treat EU competition law and EU data protection law as entirely separate legal considerations. Reevaluating this stance is critical in sectors where customer data is highly sensitive, and therefore highly valuable to those who steal it, particularly for the financial and healthcare sectors. Looking forward, companies that store and use biometric data will have to be similarly scrutinized. To correct this problem, the EU has numerous paths it can take: (a) continue as …

Is The License Still The Product?, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

Articles

The Supreme Court rejected the use of patent law to enforce conditional sales contracts in Impression Products v. Lexmark. The case appears to be just another step in the Supreme Court’s ongoing campaign to reset the Federal Circuit’s patent law jurisprudence. However, the decision casts a shadow on cases from all federal circuits that have enforced software licenses for more than 20 years and potentially imperils the business models on which software developers rely to create innovative products and to bring those products to market in a variety of useful ways.

For over two decades, we could say that …

Fintech: Antidote To Rent-Seeking?, Jeremy Kidd

Articles

Fintech is a reality of our modern society, and will likely become even more so in the future. Peer-to-peer lending, cybercurrencies, smart contracts, algorithmic lending, and more, have required adaptation by consumers and producers of financial services. Our modes of doing business will continue to be challenged and changed by these and other Fintech innovations, almost certainly expanding beyond merely “promot[ing] financial inclusion, expand[ing] access to capital for individuals and small businesses, and more broadly reshap[ing] how society interacts with financial services.” By reducing transaction costs, advancing technology opens the doors to innovations the likes of which we might not …

Online Businesses Beware: Ada Lawsuits Demand Website Accessibility For Blind Plaintiffs, Ricardo Alvarado

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.

Social Media And The Government: Why It May Be Unconstitutional For Government Officials To Moderate Their Social Media, Alex Hadjian

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

No abstract provided.

Can Cyber Harassment Laws Encourage Online Speech?, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Do laws criminalizing online harassment and cyberbullying "chill" online speech? Critics often argue that they do. However, this article discusses findings from a new empirical legal study that suggests, counter-intuitively, that while such legal interventions likely have some dampening effect, they may also facilitate and encourage more speech, expression, and sharing by those who are most often the targets of online harassment: women. Relevant findings on this point from this first-of-its-kind study are set out and discussed along with their implications.

Licensing & Law Who Owns An Avatar?, Tyler T. Ochoa, Jaime Banks

Faculty Publications

Both players and game developers have great influence over how avatars—via their assembled components— manifest in digital game play. Developers craft their foundational platforms and draw on those infrastructures to craft dynamic code that enables movements, appearances, and abilities. But those potentials call into question whether avatars are avatars until they are played—players click avatars into being, customize their bodies and attire, drive their actions and interactions, and sometimes bring them outside the game world through physical representations. So, given avatars’ joint reliance on developers and players, and given legal frameworks such as copyright law, who really “owns” a video …

Differential Privacy: A Primer For A Non-Technical Audience, Alexandra Wood, Micah Altman, Aaron Bembenek, Mark Bun, Marco Gaboardi, James Honaker, Kobbi Nissim, David R. O'Brien, Thomas Steinke, Salil Vadhan

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Differential privacy is a formal mathematical framework for quantifying and managing privacy risks. It provides provable privacy protection against a wide range of potential attacks, including those currently unforeseen. Differential privacy is primarily studied in the context of the collection, analysis, and release of aggregate statistics. These range from simple statistical estimations, such as averages, to machine learning. Tools for differentially private analysis are now in early stages of implementation and use across a variety of academic,industry, and government settings. Interest in the concept is growing among potential users of the tools, as well as within legal and policy communities, …

Back To The Future: Reviving The Use Of Video Link Evidence In Canadian Criminal Courts, Helena Gluzman

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Section 714.1 of the Criminal Code of Canada allows for witnesses and victims to testify remotely via video link, within Canada. The legal test embedded within this provision — “appropriate in all the circumstances” — has led to inconsistent application across the country. Some jurists have embraced the flexibility provided by the video link process. Others have expressed reluctance, articulating the position that in-court testimony is to be preferred and permitting the use of video link evidence only in exceptional circumstances. R. v. S.D.L. is the first treatment of s. 714.1 by an appellate court. The Nova Scotia Court of …

A Few Criminal Justice Big Data Rules, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles

As with most new things, the big data revolution in criminal justice has historic antecedents—indeed, a 1965 Presidential Commission called for some of the same data analysis that police departments and courts are today developing and implementing. But there is no doubt we are on the precipice of a criminal justice data revolution, and it is a good time to take stock and to begin developing guidelines so that, as much as possible, criminal justice systems might reap the benefits and avoid the pitfalls of this newly data-centric world. In that spirit, I propose ten high-level rules to guide criminal …

Front Matter

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.

Promoting International Cybersecurity Cooperation: Lessons From The Proliferation Security Initiative, Duncan B. Hollis, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

Global efforts by states to cooperate through international rules in combating cyber threats have generated mixed results, at best. In this paper, we examine the architecture of the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) as a possible model for future cybersecurity cooperation among interested states. We identify several features of PSI’s architecture (rather than its substantive focus on non-proliferation) for further analysis, including PSI’s low entry costs, tiered structure, and flexibility, as well as its leveraging of both territorial jurisdiction and state consent. We conclude that, despite several hurdles visible in the scope of its membership and its legal framework, PSI still …