Internet Law Commons^™

From Cigarettes To Cereal: Analyzing The Rise, Peak, And Fall Of Ultra-Processed Foods And The Legal Battle Against Industry Food Deception, Charlotte F. Baird

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

This Comment explores the legal, regulatory, and public health dimensions of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) in the United States and abroad, revealing the urgent need for comprehensive reform. It traces the historical evolution of UPFs, exposing how Big Tobacco strategically pivoted into the food industry after facing public backlash and regulatory crackdowns with cigarettes and tobacco products. Using the same research tactics, behavioral manipulation, and aggressive marketing practices once employed to sell cigarettes, Big Tobacco companies repurposed their corporate expertise to engineer food designed for potential addiction, overconsumption, and profit, while often targeting children and marginalized communities. This Comment critically examines …

Incremental Innovation, George Horvath

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

Transformative innovations—the ones that use new technologies to disrupt the world—command our attention. But most new products are the result of a more mundane process of incremental iterative innovation, evolving through a long series of small modifications of existing technologies. Although both kinds of innovation can result in improved safety and utility, both can also create new dangers. We tend to be more aware of this in trans- formative innovations (as current worries over artificial intelligence show); by contrast, dangers created by incremental iterative innovation often go unrecognized, because the process itself is easy to overlook. Policymakers and regulators need …

Shutting Down The Supply Chain Pipeline Of Counterfeit Goods Running From Alibaba To Amazon, Daniel C. Chow

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

An immense supply chain pipeline constantly funnels millions of counterfeit goods from Alibaba’s e-commerce sites in China to third party sellers who sell these goods on Amazon to U.S. consumers. Amazon has acknowledged that it has a problem with counterfeits on its e-commerce sites, but its current responses to counterfeiting are primarily performative and intended to pacify disgruntled brand owners and frustrated consumers. Amazon’s responses will likely have little or no effect on counterfeits on its websites. This Article sets forth a direct and straightforward method for shutting down or seriously disrupting this pipeline based on using China’s existing laws. …

Disenchanting Consent, Ruifeng Song

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

Despite being criticized as a flawed mechanism for data protection, con- sent has witnessed a revival in the recent wave of state privacy statutes. One factor that contributed to the revival may be the widely held belief that con- sent constitutes the “cornerstone” of data privacy laws. This Article conducts a comparative historical survey to examine the validity of this belief. The findings are twofold. First, contrary to what many believe, consent has been playing a limited role in global data privacy laws. Second, consent is an inherently defective mechanism for data protection. Some of its problems have existed since …

It Is Our Flaws That Make Us Humane: How Technology Ruined Judicial Craft, Shai Dothan, Gregor Maučec

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

There is ample evidence that people are not completely rational. They suffer from a series of biases that limit their abilities to make the best decisions and to stick to them. Judges are a unique group of people. They go through many years of training that counter some of these biases, but not all of them. In fact, there is a whole field of research dedicated to predicting how judges, with their human flaws, are going to behave. But today, judges can use an increasing number of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to assist with their craft, particularly with research and …

Regulation To Reinforce The Evidentiary-Science Base Of U.S. Medicine In The Age Of "Omics", Michael J. Malinowski

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

United States’ technology transfer law and policy (TTLP) integrates government, academia, and industry—a “triple-threat” research and development (R&D) methodology—and harnesses commercial incentives to stimulate market application of federal government-funded invention. TTLP, which has proven a potent catalyst for remarkably prolific biomedical R&D since Congress enacted its cornerstone legislation in 1980, is transforming U.S. medicine to molecular medicine—to personal genome medicine (PGM)—in real time. A genomics (gene function in the context of an organism’s entire genome, meaning its full set of genetic instructions) complement to the Human Genome Project (HGP) emerged in the 1990s. Genomics has given rise to a portfolio …

Top Ten Biotechnology Patent Cases Of 2024: Loper Bright, Federal Circuit Turmoil, Patent Term Adjustment, And Naturally Occurring Nucleic Acids, Kevin E. Noonan, Andrew W. Torrance

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

A pivotal year for biotechnology patent law, 2024 was marked by consequential court rulings and evolving legal frameworks. This article surveys the ten most significant judicial decisions impacting biotech patents, highlighting major themes and trends in policy, litigation, and regulation. Courts at all levels grappled with core patentability requirements in the life sciences, from the Supreme Court’s continued laissez-faire stance on subject-matter eligibility to the Federal Circuit’s stringent enforcement of disclosure sufficiency rules.

Lipstick On A Slaughtered Piggybank: Civil Rico Against “Pig Butchering” Cryptocurrency Investment Schemes, Samantha B. Larkin

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Fair-Enough Ai, Jane R. Bambauer, Tal Z. Zarsky

UF Law Faculty Publications

AI is unfair. It can be inaccurate (in several ways), biased (in several ways, and to several groups), disproportionate, exploitable, and opaque. The policy world is awash in AI-governance frameworks, ethical guidelines, and other policy documents, but these lack concrete standards and provide little guidance on how to select between competing versions of (un)fairness. In other words, they abdicate the responsibility of setting priorities among values. At the same time, many of the policy documents harshly criticize AI and algorithmic tools for deficiencies in some particular aspect of fairness without considering whether alternative designs that fix the problem would make …

The Second Life Of Information, Thomas D. Haley

UF Law Faculty Publications

Information permeates every aspect of modern life. It is the price we pay for access to online services and the form in which we embody creative works. Law and policymaking tend to focus on first-order uses and transactions; information for access serves as the paradigmatic example. But information enjoys a robust second life—one that constitutes the true value and power that drives firms’ decisionmaking—as assets. Once aggregated and assetized, the power and risk associated with information increases exponentially.

To explore the implications of information’s second life, this Article introduces the concept of “untethered information.” Assetization depends on severing the connections …

The Expressive Power Of Protecting Intimate Privacy: A Comparative Study Of Legal And Platform Measures, Danielle Keats Citron, Jonathon W. Penney, Alexis Shore Ingber

Articles & Book Chapters

Intimate privacy violations exact profound costs to freedom, including chilling victims into silence; denying them sexual agency; and eroding trust critical to intimate expression and sharing. Effective intimate privacy protections could mitigate these harms via law’s expressive function—sending a message or “signal” that victims of intimate privacy invasions are valued, and their expressions worthy of protection. However, without proof, skepticism is warranted about potential expressive functions as there has been an absence of proof to back up these claims. This Article aims to help fill this void, making a theoretical and empirical case for a positive expressive impact of both …

The Best Disinfectant: The Value Of Transparency In Information Operations, Major Ian W. Stamme

American University National Security Law Brief

America is in a state of persistent competition with nation-state adversaries, including Russia and China, which seek to subvert the post-WWII rules-based international order and undermine American legitimacy abroad. Some of this competition takes place through traditional statecraft and across each of the instruments of national power: diplomatic, informational, military, and economic. However, much of this competition also takes place in the gray zone, defined as a spectrum between the higher threshold of armed conflict and the lower threshold of ordinary statecraft. In other words, while all relations between nations involve degrees of leverage and relative advantage, gray zone conflict …

Everything New Is Old Again: The Coming Metaverse, Platforms As Premises, And Addressing Harms That Occur Behind The Veil Of Scale, Lara Putnam, Jena Martin

Faculty Articles

Increasingly, social media companies have engaged in the creation, development, and deployment of "worlds" within a virtual reality setting, leading to significant interactions among users within these engineered spaces. However, this expansion has also been accompanied by harms. While some harms are unique to immersive reality technology, many mirror harms that occur in the analog environment, including fraud, theft, verbal abuse, and child sexual exploitation. Others replicate harms that have already exploded in non-immersive online spaces, including image-based sexual exploitation, cyberstalking, and invasion of privacy. Unfortunately, the architecture and infrastructure of these spaces has created what we coin here to …

Web Of Exploitation: The Psychological Need For Comprehensive Federal Law To Combat Cyber Sexual Abuse, Sarah E. Bahrenburg

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

Cyber sexual abuse inflicts deep and lasting psychological harm on victims, often exacerbating the trauma of traditional sexual abuse due to the permanence and reach of digital content. Survivors may experience depression, anxiety, PTSD, and suicidal ideation as intimate images, videos, or messages resurface indefinitely online. Despite the severity of its impact, current state and federal legal protections are limited and inconsistent, leaving many victims without adequate criminal or civil remedies. This article argues for the creation of comprehensive federal legislation specifically targeting cyber sexual abuse. Such laws would not only provide clearer paths to justice and accountability but also …

Developing Human-Centric Informational Security, Jonathon W. Penney

Articles & Book Chapters

Disinformation and information manipulation are widely seen as an urgent threat to democracy, but less often as a cybersecurity threat. Historically, disinformation has rarely been included in lists of recognized threats in cybersecurity manuals and appendices of global standards organizations and only recently has disinformation been approached as a cybersecurity threat, with only a handful of works offering a more focused and systematic discussion on this point. This chapter aims to help fill this void by arguing not only that disinformation and information manipulation is a cybersecurity threat, but that the present predominant cybersecurity paradigm is largely inadequate to address …

Boden Lecture: Taxation Of Autonomous Artificial Intelligence, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Lucas Brasil Salama, Herbert Snitz, W. Robert Thomas

Articles

This Article proposes that tax can be a useful supplement to other measures to regulate Autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AAI) and limit its potential harmful effects. This proposal differs from command-and-control regulation of AAI along the lines of European Union legislation that may unduly limit the development of AAI. It also differs from existing proposals to tax AAI to generate revenue to help workers displaced by AAI programs, or to tax the data used by AAI The proposal is based on granting AAI programs like ChatGPT separate legal personhood, like corporate personhood, while incentivizing or requiring their corporate owner to place …

Social Data's Role In Law And Political Economy, Salome Viljoen

Book Chapters

Over the past several years, the digital economy has been a notable uptick in interest from scholars across areas of law. This should come as no surprise. The digital economy encompasses some of the largest companies in the world, whose business models pioneer and spread new strategies to concentrate private power across the political economy more broadly. Digital companies have transformed commercial and social life, and they raise problems of concentrated private power. They are also charged with a slew of downstream disruptions resulting from collective pursuit of that power: global, social, and interpersonal forms of dislocation, oppression, impoverishment, alienation, …

Internet Search Engines’ Privacy Violations And The Lack Of Federal Regulation To Protect Consumers Rights, Elsa M. G. Rodriguez Ogando

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

The United States’ current legal framework regarding internet search engines is disadvantageous to consumers. Federal privacy laws (although not encompassing search engines) grant businesses a strong legal basis in privacy claims and alibies for arbitrary behavior; these laws favor businesses over consumers. Moreover, state privacy laws empower nonspecific agencies to oversee privacy matters and enforce consumers’ rights. Thus, the U.S. privacy legal framework is in need of a new federal law that establishes consumers’ rights, as well as a federal agency dedicated solely to privacy matters. This Article proposes a federal law recommendation based on the standards of the California …

Chronically Online: Apportioning Liability In Social Media Litigation Based On User Engagement, Rebecca Vangelos

Fordham Law Review

The average American teenager spends nearly five hours on social media every day. This result is by design: social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok deploy persuasive technologies—including infinite scroll, personalized content recommendation feeds, and dark patterns—to capture and retain teen attention. These intentional design features exploit adolescent vulnerabilities to foster social media dependency. Accordingly, a growing body of scientific evidence links the extensive use of social media to the teen mental health crisis in the United States.

Despite these negative effects, social media companies have largely evaded accountability for the harm they have caused to teens. Recent lawsuits …

Front Matter

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.