Internet Law Commons^™

Hub-And-Spoke Conspiracies: Can Big Data And Pricing Algorithms Form The Rim?, Bradley C. Weber

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

A hub-and-spoke conspiracy is a metaphor used to describe an antitrust cartel that includes a firm at one level of a supply chain—such as a buyer or supplier—who acts like the “hub” of a wheel. Vertical agreements up or down the supply chain act as the “spokes,” and a horizontal agreement among the spokes acts as the “rim” of the wheel. Courts have considered hub-and-spoke conspiracies for more than eighty years, and there is large body of case law that pertains to the evidence that is necessary for proving this type of antitrust conspiracy.

With the rise of modern digital …

Front Matter

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.

Employee Monitoring: As Technology Advances Yet The Electronic Communications Privacy Act Stays In The Past, Isabela Possino

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

Since the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 was enacted, the United States has endured an evolution of technology. While progressive at its inception, the ECPA has since been met with a tumultuous response from scholars, courts, and others trying to understand its purpose and application regarding privacy rights and the monitoring of communications. Specifically, since the COVID-19 pandemic, the ECPA has remained at the forefront of debate with respect to employee monitoring and surveillance practices. This article provides an overview of the ECPA and explains why today’s technological advancements have surpassed the protections afforded by the Act, leaving employees …

Preventing Intimate Image Abuse Via Privacy-Preserving Credentials, Janet Zhang, Steven M. Bellovin

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

The problem of non-consensual pornography (“NCP”), sometimes known as intimate image abuse or revenge porn, is well known. Despite its distribution being illegal in most states, it remains a serious problem, if only because it is often difficult to prove who uploaded the pictures. Furthermore, the Federal statute commonly known as Section 230 generally protects Internet sites, such as PornHub, from liability for content created by their users; only the users are liable, not the sites.

One obvious countermeasure would be to require Internet sites to strongly authenticate their users, but this is not an easy problem to solve. Furthermore, …

Revolutionizing Justice: Unleashing The Power Of Artificial Intelligence, Samuel D. Hodge Jr.

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

The practice of law is changing, and most lawyers are unprepared for this metamorphosis. This statement is not an exaggeration but the acknowledgment that artificial intelligence (“AI”) has altered the way lawyers do business. Instead of having a “battle of forms,” attorneys will now be confronted with the “battle of computers.” Linking artificial intelligence and the law, however, is a natural progression. Both operate in similar fashions: each examines and applies “historical examples in order to infer rules to apply to new situations.”

While many attorneys are unsure how to integrate this new technology into their practices, they already use …

Front Matter

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.

Cryptocurrency’S Clash With Bankruptcy: Insolvent Crypto Exchange Companies Create Difficulties For Courts & Customers, Mary Taylor Stanberry

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

This comment explores the novelty of cryptocurrency, its legal ambiguity in the realms of securities, property, and tax law, and the difficulties arising from insolvent crypto-exchange company’s estates within the context of the United States Bankruptcy Code. For the purposes of this comment, individuals who invested in crypto-exchange platforms will be referred to as “customers” rather than “investors” to avoid potential confusion in the context of 11 U.S.C. § 507 of the Bankruptcy Code. Customers who invested with insolvent crypto-exchange companies are concerned about being last in line for repayment of their investments based on traditional bankruptcy creditor priority. These …

Antitrust Accountability Delayed: State Antitrust Enforcement And Multidistrict Litigation, Roger P. Alford

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

State Attorneys General play a crucial role in the enforcement of antitrust laws. Defendants have successfully delayed state enforcement proceedings by centralizing them with private lawsuits in multidistrict litigation. A new venue law has foreclosed that delay tactic, placing State Attorneys General on equal footing with federal antitrust enforcers in deciding where, when, and how to prosecute antitrust cases.

Tiktok’S Fall From Grace: How Growing Security Concerns In Chinese Technology Affect U.S. Courts And Presidential Successors, Madeline Cartwright

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

In recent years, the United States government has warned that China may use Chinese companies as a vehicle for infiltrating American data security. The U.S. first acted on this warning in 2017 when it effectively banned Huawei—one of the world’s largest telecom companies—from the U.S. market. Then-president Donald Trump subsequently turned the controversy to the popular social media app, TikTok, in an attempted ban over alleged privacy issues. Personal data collection and the legal implications behind trying to ban China-linked apps is an increasingly controversial topic in American politics. This article assesses the lawsuits following these groundbreaking governmental movements, including …

Cheap Speech And The Gordian Knot Of Defamation Reform, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article addresses the complex past and uncertain future of defamation law in order to evaluate complaints lodged against it by critics, including—most notably—U.S. Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. The article describes how statutory and constitutional reforms have altered the legal landscape of defamation law over the past half-century and explains why the common law has played a less prominent role. The article then assesses the criticisms of Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, finding them to rest on flawed understandings of how today’s defamation law operates. After identifying barriers to reform, the article offers a prescription to modernize …

Authorbots, Derek E. Bambauer, Mihai Surdeanu

UF Law Faculty Publications

ChatGPT has exploded into the popular consciousness in recent months, and the hype and concerns about the program have only grown louder with the release of GPT-4, a more powerful version of the software. Its deployment, including with applications such as Microsoft Office, has raised questions about whether the developers or distributors of code that includes ChatGPT, or similar generative pre-trained transformers, could face liability for tort claims such as defamation or false light. One important potential barrier to these claims is the immunity con-ferred by 47 U.S.C. § 230, popularly known as “Section 230.” In this Essay, we make …

Background And Implications Of China's Central Bank Digital Currency: E-Cny, Jiaying Jiang, Karman Lucero

UF Law Faculty Publications

The People’s Republic of China is a leading experimenter in central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). This Article explores the current background, deployment, features, potential impacts, challenges, and legal concerns of China’s CBDC: the electronic yuan, or E-CNY. This Article explains the potential significance of what is known and not known about E-CNY with a particular focus on how E-CNY might fit into existing legal and economic systems, both within China and internationally. On the surface, E-CNY looks transformative. When you dig a little deeper, however, most of the potential changes or transformations turn on broader institutional, political, and legal changes …

Privacy Implications Of Central Bank Digital Currencies, Jiaying Jiang

UF Law Faculty Publications

One hundred thirty-one countries, representing over 98 percent of the global gross domestic product (GDP), are currently exploring central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), a new form of digital money that is different from privately issued cryptocurrencies and stablecoins. As central banks worldwide grapple with CBDC design options, privacy has become a critical feature and concern. Many central banks, government agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), think tanks, and even the general public have underscored the importance of privacy in CBDC systems. Moreover, a diverse group of economists, computer scientists, engineers, and legal scholars have embarked on crafting privacy-preserving CBDC designs.

But two …

Exploring Parents' Knowledge Of Dark Design And Its Impact On Children's Digital Well-Being, Claire Bessant, Luei Lin Ong, Laurel Aynne Cook, Mariea Grubbs Hoy, Beatriz Pereira, Alexa Fox, Emma Nottingham, Stacey Steinberg, Pingping Gan

UF Law Faculty Publications

Dark design (also known as deceptive design; Colin et al., 2018 and dark patterns; Mathur et al., 2019) is evidenced by “a user interface carefully crafted to trick users into doing things they might not otherwise do” (Brignull, 2022; page 1). Much dark design is constructed with monetization as the primary goal- even in spaces without ecommerce design (e.g., free-to-play apps representing >95% of all mobile apps; Fitton et al. 2021). Many recent dark design strategies are also oriented towards collecting user information. Concerns about children’s vulnerability to inappropriate online marketing and economic fraud, and the impact of organisational data …

Negligent Ai Speech: Some Thoughts About Duty, Jane R. Bambauer

UF Law Faculty Publications

Careless speech has always existed on a very large scale. When people talk, they often give bad advice or wrong information, and occasionally this leads the listener to act in a way that causes physical harm. The scale was made more visible by the public Internet as the musings and conversations of billions of participants became accessible and searchable to all. This dynamic produced a set of tort and free speech principles that we have debated and adjusted to over the last three decades.

AI speech systems bring a new dynamic. Unlike the disaggregated production of misinformation in the Internet …

Introduction: The Risk Of Digitalization: Transforming Government Into A Digital Leviathan, Jose Vida Fernandez

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This paper provides an overview of the threats posed by digitalization, particularly with regard to the public sector. It starts by describing digital risks as true global risks and argues that their scope and severity have not been recognized until now. The most well-known challenges come from the transformation of the private sector (economy, society, and individuals) and the emergence of large private powers that dominate the digital environment (digital feudal lord). However, there are even greater challenges coming from the digitization of government, creating almighty public bodies detached from laws that kept them locked until now.

Reckless Associations, Jane R. Bambauer, Saura Masconale, Simone M. Sepe

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article provides a theoretical foundation and practical guide for a new form of liability that has proven necessary in the Internet era: the tort of Reckless Association. This tort would hold de facto leaders of informal networks responsible when radicalized members of the network cause physical harm to others. Recent prosecutions of the leaders of the Oath Keepers and other white supremacists who organized the Charlottesville protest, and rumblings of a similar prosecution against Donald Trump, demonstrate that there is a public appetite for this form of legal responsibility. To date, these prosecutions proceed on theories of incitement or …

Collective Data Rights And Their Possible Abuse, Asaf Lubin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Ai Regulation In Health Care: How Washington State Can Conquer The New Territory Of Ai Regulation, Natalie Shen

Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental, & Innovation Law

1. The use of artificial intelligence both generally and in the health care field has exploded over the last decade. AI is now used in the health care field in areas like disease diagnostics, patient engagement, and administrative tasks. In disease diagnostics specifically, AI is being used to make life-altering diagnoses. This technology, however, does not come without its risks. Specifically, inherent bias is deeply rooted in the AI algorithms. This is because humans are inherently bias, and humans are the people creating the AI algorithms. The problem is, however, is that there are no federal regulations to mitigate the risks …

Universal Forms Of Influence: Support For Women On Boards, Cindy A. Schipani, Paula J. Caproni

Seattle University Law Review

There are various efforts underway to increase gender diversity on corporate boards, including legislation in California, a recent SEC approved comply or explain rule for companies listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, and efforts by institutional investors such as State Street and BlackRock to recognize the value diversity brings to corporate decisionmaking. Although some of these efforts are being contested in the courts, many companies have begun to comply with these initiatives.

This Article is organized as follows. Part I provides an overview of several efforts to increase gender diversity on boards along with numerous research studies showcasing the benefits …