Science and Technology Law Commons^™

False Rubicons, Moral Panic & Conceptual Cul-De-Sacs: Critiquing & Reframing The Call To Ban Lethal Autonomous Weapons, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Casting into the indeterminate future and projecting visions of so-called killer robots, The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots (The Campaign) has incited moral panic in an attempt to stimulate a discussion and ultimately a ban on lethal autonomous weapons (LAWS). Their efforts have been superficially successful but come at a self-defeating substantive cost. In the hope of shifting the dialogue from the hyperbolic to a constructive dialogue on the interaction between human and machine abilities in both current and future weapon systems, this article explores the conceptual paradox implicit in The Campaign and proposes an alternative.

Having provoked the international …

Transfer Pricing Challenges In The Cloud, Orly Mazur

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Cloud computing - the provision of information technology resources in a virtual environment - has fundamentally changed how companies operate. Companies have quickly adapted by moving their businesses to the cloud, but international tax standards have failed to follow suit. As a result, taxpayers and tax administrations confront significant tax challenges in applying outdated tax principles to this new environment. One particular area that raises perplexing tax issues is the transfer pricing rules. The transfer pricing rules set forth the intercompany price a cloud service provider must charge an affiliate using its cloud services, which ultimately affects in which jurisdiction …

A Rose By Any Other Name: Regulating Law Enforcement Bulk Metadata Collection, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles

In Other People’s Papers, Jane Bambauer argues for careful reform of the Fourth Amendment’s third party doctrine, providing an important contribution to an increasingly rich field of scholarship, judicial opinion, statute, and law reform. Bambauer is especially concerned with access to bodies of third-party data that can be filtered and mined, as they can be privacy invasive but also effective and less subject to traditional investigative prejudices and limitations. Although her article provocatively overclaims in trying to set itself apart from existing proposals, by analyzing existing constitutional and statutory law—including what I have termed a “limited” third party doctrine—and comparing …

The Past, Present, And Future Of Predictive Coding, Matthew G. Kenney

Florida A & M University Law Review

Electronic discovery, or e-discovery, refers to the discovery of electronically stored documents and images.' Examples of e-discovery related documentation would include email, digital versions of paper documents (e.g. MS Word, PDF, Excel, and PowerPoint), social media postings, digital photos, Global Positioning System data, and content within computerized databases, etc. Digital data stored on computers, smartphones, tape drives, hard-drives, portable digital storage devices and the like would fall under the domain of e-discovery. Collecting and sorting massive amounts of electronically stored data presents both opportunities and challenges for lawyers.

For context: In 2015, electronic discovery was a $10.2 billion global industry. …

Technological Opacity, Predictability, And Self-Driving Cars, Harry Surden, Mary-Anne Williams

Publications

Autonomous or “self-driving” cars are vehicles that drive themselves without human supervision or input. Because of safety benefits that they are expected to bring, autonomous vehicles are likely to become more common. Notably, for the first time, people will share a physical environment with computer-controlled machines that can both direct their own activities and that have considerable range of movement. This represents a distinct change from our current context. Today people share physical spaces either with machines that have free range of movement, but are controlled by people (e.g. automobiles) or with machines that are controlled by computers, but highly …

Investment Accelerators, Brad Bernthal

Publications

This Article documents and explains the legal and extralegal dimensions of Investment Accelerator (IA) systems. Accelerators are a new class of institution that supports entrepreneurs and early stage startups. Investment Accelerators take an ownership stake in companies that participate in an intensive, time-limited program. Interviews reveal the surprising extent to which parties in many Investment Accelerators exchange economic value in the absence of formal agreement. Startups share proprietary information with highly accomplished mentors who, in turn, contribute their time and connections without direct compensation. This under-contracted and informal arrangement raises concerns about opportunism. Data from an original investigation presents a …

Make America Innovate Again: Construing Patent Box Proposals In View Of A Policy Mix Approach, Adam E. Szymanski

Cybaris®

No abstract provided.

Augmented Reality: A Technology And Policy Primer, Ryan Calo, Tamara Denning, Batya Friedman, Tadayoshi Kohno, Lassana Magassa, Emily Mcreynolds, Bryce Clayton Newell, Jesse Woo

Tech Policy Lab

The vision for AR dates back at least until the 1960s with the work of Ivan Sutherland. In a way, AR represents a natural evolution of information communication technology. Our phones, cars, and other devices are increasingly reactive to the world around us. But AR also represents a serious departure from the way people have perceived data for most of human history: a Neolithic cave painting or book operates like a laptop insofar as each presents information to the user in a way that is external to her and separate from her present reality. By contrast, AR begins to collapse …

Masthead, Volume7 Issue 1

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

No abstract provided.

What's In Your Wallet? Addressing The Regulatory Grey Area Surrounding Mobile Payments, Stephen Congdon

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

"Mobile payment applications are poised to replace traditional checks, credit, and debit cards at cash registers around the country. Largely seen as the next step forward for increased convenience in shopping, mobile payments are making it easier for American consumers to make payments simply by having their phone on them at all times. However, until recently, many of the applications that consumers use to make their mobile payments may fall out of the American regulatory system already in place for banks and bank payment sources. The recently formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed regulatory changes in 2014 that include mobile …

Regulation 2.0: The Marriage Of New Governance And "Lex Informatica", Abbey Stemler

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Throughout history, disruptive technologies have transformed industry and signaled the destruction or creation of regulatory structures. When crafting regulations, governments often utilize Regulation 1.0 approaches, characterized by top-down design standards that dictate exactly how the regulated must act in order to prevent market failures. Regulation 1.0 increases barriers to entry and decreases the room for business experimentation. Regulation 2.0, by contrast, is a theoretical approach for regulating companies that rely on platform-mediated networks. It marries New Governance theory and the concept of lex informatica. This marriage allows for the collaborative creation of design standards that are then enforced through mediating …

Crowdwork, Corporate Social Responsibility, And Fair Labor Practices, Miriam A. Cherry, Winifred R. Poster

Faculty Publications

Crowdwork, in which large numbers of workers find and perform paid tasks through online platforms, is a paradox. It can make job-matching and production processes more efficient, but it can also lead to a decline in labor standards. We seek to link ethical labor practices in virtual work with well-established notions of corporate social responsibility, that include concerns for worker well-being and fair treatment. We present a typology of trends in labour, and argue that the new phase of ‘crowdwork’ is distinct from previous eras of ‘industrial’ and ‘digital’ employment. The chapter then outlines three best practices for crowdwork. First …

The Road To Artificial Super-Intelligence: Has International Law A Role To Play?, J.-G. Castel, Matthew E. Castel

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Part I of this article deals with the road to artificial general super-intelligence.

Part II addresses the controls, if any, that should be exercised over the production and use of partially or fully autonomous machines of artificial intelligence before and after they become super-intelligent. More particularly, should there be legal and ethical limits to their use and to what extent should international law play a role in this connection?

Flying Robots And Privacy In Canada, Paul D.M. Holden

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Drones have been a hot topic in recent years particularly when used in war and in domestic police operations. Drones have also attracted attention because of highprofile plans to use them for package delivery, among other things. While the glamourous and future uses of drones catch media attention, drones are already being used in the private sector for more mundane purposes including surveying, infrastructure inspection and real estate sales promotion. While the privacy threats of military and police drones are widely discussed, privacy concerns of private drones have attracted much less consideration.

This paper looks at the privacy risks of …

Book Review: Jonathan Clough, Principles Of Cybercrime, 2nd Ed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), Christopher D. Ram

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

The past decade has seen an enormous explosion of scholarship on the subject of cybercrime, as technologies and offenders pose new challenges and law enforcement, government and academic experts struggle to keep up. The new, second edition of Professor Jonathan Clough’s book occupies a fairly substantial, but specific niche in this increasingly diverse and complex landscape. Principles of Cybercrime contains only a cursory review of the history and criminology of cybercrime, it does not deal at all with IT security, investigative or enforcement matters, and discussion of cybercrime as a global issue is limited to brief discussions of the 2001 …

Minding The Gap: Why Or How Nova Scotia Should Enact A New Cyber-Safety Act - Case Comment On Crouch V. Snell, Jennifer Taylor

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Nova Scotia’s Cyber-safety Act was meant to fill a gap in the law. Where criminal charges and civil claims like defamation were unavailable or undesirable, the Act, it was hoped, would contain a substantive definition of cyberbullying, set out when it was actionable, and provide procedures for victims to obtain remedies. But the statute that was ultimately passed was too blunt a tool to address the problem, from both a substantive and a procedural perspective.

That helps explain why Justice McDougall of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia struck down the entire statute as unconstitutional, in the recent case of …

Protecting The Privacy Of Canadians' Health Information In The Cloud, Adrian Thorogood, Howard Simkevitz, Mark Phillips, Edward S. Dove, Yann Joly

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

This article presents results from a year-long research project reviewing health privacy issues in the cloud, funded by the Contributions Program of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC). Section I provides a brief primer on cloud computing and its applications in data-centric health research and health care. Section II reviews Canadian privacy and health privacy laws and how they apply to CSPs. Section III identifies privacy risks arising from the technological, organizational, and jurisdictional complexity of cloud computing. Section IV argues that Canadian health privacy laws fail to address difficulties custodians face in balancing responsibilities with CSPs, …

Corporate Criminal Liability For Algorithmic Price Fixing In Canada, Theodore Milosevic

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

The use of computerized algorithms is increasingly common in the modern business environment. An algorithm can be defined as ‘‘a set of mathematical instructions or rules that, especially if given to a computer, will help to calculate an answer to a problem.” As noted in this definition, algorithms are particularly powerful tools when combined with computing power. The proliferation of computerized algorithms in business settings has occasionally led to unintended and injurious outcomes. This is perhaps most notable in relation to the algorithmic trading of securities. The 2010 ‘‘Flash Crash” of the United States (U.S.) financial markets, during which key …

Digital Evidence And The Adversarial System, Colton Fehr

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Scholars have observed that the adversarial system tends to provide courts with only a ‘‘small snapshot of the technological whole,” which in turn forms the record upon which broader legal pronouncements occur. As a result, they contend that legislatures should be more proactive in making rules governing complex and rapidly advancing technologies, and that courts must show deference to these rules. Other scholars retort that, in practice, legislatures often fail to update obviously flawed and outdated privacy provisions. Whether due to special interest influence, majoritarian dislike of criminal suspects, or other institutional constraints, legislative responses have been wanting. As such, …

Protecting Products Versus Platforms, Jacob S. Sherkow

Articles & Chapters

Patents have long been the most important legal assets of biotech companies. Increasingly, however, biotech firms find themselves on one side of a divide: as either traditional product companies or platform companies. Given the differences between these two types of business models, the merits of intellectual property (IP) protection vary between them. This article explores how those differences relate to biotech startups and entrepreneurs seeking to protect their inventions.