Science and Technology Law Commons^™

From Cartier To Codification: Website-Blocking Injunctions And Third-Party Internet Service Provider Respondents, Dan Mackwood

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

In recent years, the proliferation of commercial-scale copyright infringement through unauthorized online content streaming has created persisting legal hurdles for Canadian rights holders seeking redress. John Doe defendants in online copyright disputes can easily preserve their anonymity and operate their infringing enterprises from unknown locations, undeterred by injunctions issued against them directly. These anonymized administrators of illicit streaming platforms offer users unauthorized access to content for a lower cost than or as a free alternative to the access provided by the legitimate rights holder. This form of copyright infringement has reportedly resulted in up to hundreds of thousands of lost …

Regulating Uncertain States: A Risk-Based Policy Agenda For Quantum Technologies, Tina Dekker, Florian Martin-Bariteau

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Many countries are taking a national approach to developing quantum strategies with a strong focus on innovation. However, societal, ethical, legal, and policy considerations should not be an afterthought that is pushed aside by the drive for innovation. A responsible, global approach to quantum technologies that considers the legal, ethical, and societal dimensions of quantum technologies is necessary to avoid exacerbating existing global inequalities. Quantum technologies are expected to disrupt other transformative technologies whose legal landscape is still under development (e.g., artificial intelligence [‘‘AI”], blockchain, etc.). The shortcomings of global policies regarding AI and the digital context teach lessons that …

Crowdsourcing Justice, Matthew Dylag

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Social media has become ubiquitous in the daily lives of Canadians. Beyond connecting with friends and family, people also turn to social media to find information and seek advice on any number of topics, be it home cooking, workout routines, or automobile purchases. Indeed, social media is a flexible vehicle that can be leveraged for communication on almost any topic. It is not surprising, therefore, that individuals are also turning to social media to help resolve their legal problems. Even a cursory examination of social media will reveal that it is not uncommon for individuals who are experiencing legal difficulties …

Comment: The United Nations And Robot Rights, Heather Alexander

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

This comment predicts that robot rights under the law are likely to become a reality in the next fifty years, possibly in multiple countries, as governments pass laws granting rights to robots, including civil rights like voting. This comment calls on the United Nations (‘‘UN”) to be pro-active in guiding the emergence of robot rights by convening a working group on robot rights to better guide member states through what will be a time of momentous change.

Why are robots likely to soon gain rights in some UN member states? There have been huge advances in AI that can pass …

The Art World Of Digital Assets: How Non-Fungible Tokens Create A Loophole In Anti-Money Laundering Regulations, Sofia Aizenman

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Disembodied First Amendment, Nathan Cortez, William M. Sage

Faculty Scholarship

First Amendment doctrine is becoming disembodied—increasingly detached from human speakers and listeners. Corporations claim that their speech rights limit government regulation of everything from product labeling to marketing to ordinary business licensing. Courts extend protections to commercial speech that ordinarily extended only to core political and religious speech. And now, we are told, automated information generated for cryptocurrencies, robocalling, and social media bots are also protected speech under the Constitution. Where does it end? It begins, no doubt, with corporate and commercial speech. We show, however, that heightened protection for corporate and commercial speech is built on several “artifices” - …

Legal Dispositionism And Artificially-Intelligent Attributions, Jerrold Soh

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

It is conventionally argued that because an artificially-intelligent (AI) system acts autonomously, its makers cannot easily be held liable should the system's actions harm. Since the system cannot be liable on its own account either, existing laws expose victims to accountability gaps and need to be reformed. Recent legal instruments have nonetheless established obligations against AI developers and providers. Drawing on attribution theory, this paper examines how these seemingly opposing positions are shaped by the ways in which AI systems are conceptualised. Specifically, folk dispositionism underpins conventional legal discourse on AI liability, personality, publications, and inventions and leads us towards …

Gamesmanship In Modern Discovery Tech, Neel Guha, Peter Henderson, Diego A. Zambrano

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter explores the potential for gamesmanship in technology-assisted discovery. Attorneys have long embraced gamesmanship strategies in analog discovery, producing reams of irrelevant documents, delaying depositions, or interpreting requests in a hyper-technical manner. The new question, however, is whether machine learning technologies can transform gaming strategies. By now it is well known that technologies have reinvented the practice of civil litigation and, specifically, the extensive search for relevant documents in complex cases. Many sophisticated litigants use machine learning algorithms – under the umbrella of “Technology Assisted Review” (TAR) – to simplify the identification and production of relevant documents in discovery. …

Perceiving Critical Infrastructure With A New Awareness Of Cyber Risk, Duncad Card

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

North America’s critical infrastructure has been the subject of cyber-attack, in various cycles of activity, for many years. In March of 2017, a cyber-attack caused periodic ‘‘blind-spots” for electricity distribution grid operators in the Western US for about 10 dangerous hours. In May of this year, there was panic at the gas pumps across many States in southeastern United States, which has been attributed to a cyber-attack on a major US pipeline that disrupted fuel supplies to the US East coast. US Commerce Secretary Raimondo soon after that attack announced that those sorts of attacks are becoming more frequent and …

Copyright Throughout A Creative Ai Pipeline, Sancho Mccann

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Consider the following fact pattern.

Alex paints some original works on canvas and posts photos of them online. Becca downloads those images and uses them to train an AI (training configures the AI’s model parameters to useful values). Becca posts the resulting trained parameter values on her website under a license that reserves to Becca the right to use the parameters commercially. Cory uses those parameter values in a program that is designed to produce artwork. Cory clicks create and the program produces a work. This work is new to Cory, but it looks a lot like one of Alex’s …

Crispr, Like Any Other Technology: Shedding Determinism & Reviving Athens, Jon Khan

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

This article examines current narratives surrounding CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) and the current Canadian treatment of this novel biotechnology. It argues that Canada’s current approach to genetic research and CRISPR appear to have succumbed to the false narrative of technological determinism. It argues that Canada must buck the narrative and alter the current status quo in two principal ways: Canada should pursue more somatic CRISPR clinical trials in humans and permit pre-clinical germline editing. To design a regulatory regime for clinical germline editing and better guidance on somatic CRISPR clinical trials, Canada should engage Deliberative Polling to …

Book Review Rethinking The Jurisprudence Of Cyberspace, David Cowan

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

It is a common claim that law is always catching up with technology. This is not entirely fair. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation1 (GDPR) could be viewed as a case of technology having to catch up to the law. That said, clearly there are challenges in law and in the legal profession, both in terms of how the law can adapt to changes in the digital world and the disruption of the legal profession. On the former point, there are perhaps three broad schools of thought: existing law is sufficient for adapting to new technological challenges, as it …

Digital Surveillance Of Covid-19: Privacy And Equity Considerations, Elaine Gibson, Cal Dewolfe, Ilana Luther

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

In this paper, we examine the potentially deleterious effects of surveillance on vulnerable Canadians. A wide range of digital surveillance technologies have either been deployed or considered for deployment both in Canada and around the world in response to the international emergency created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of these technologies are highly effective in predicting or identifying individual cases and/or outbreaks; others assist in tracing contacts or enforcing compliance with quarantine and isolation measures. However, there are necessarily risks associated with their deployment. First are the infringements on privacy rights of citizens and groups. Second, these technologies run the …

Harmful Speech And The Covid-19 Penumbra, Kenneth Grad, Amanda Turnbull

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

We make two central claims in this essay. First, the themes of malinformation have remained remarkably consistent across pandemics. What has changed is only the manner of their spread through evolving technologies and globalization. Thus, as with pandemic preparedness more generally, our failure to take proactive measures reflects a failure to heed the lessons of the past. Second, we argue that the COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to tackle online falsehoods and mitigate their impact in the future.

We proceed in three parts. Part one addresses the harmful speech that inevitably follows in pandemic’s wake. We illustrate this through …

The Adverse Human Rights Impacts Of Canadian Technology Companies: Reforming Export Control With The Introduction Of Mandatory Human Rights Due Diligence, Siena Anstis, Rj Reid

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Netsweeper, a Canadian company, has produced and sold Internet-filtering technology to authoritarian regimes abroad. According to public research from the Citizen Lab, this technology has been used to censor religious content in Bahrain, information on Rohingya refugees in Myanmar and India, political campaign content in United Arab Emirates, and information on HIV/AIDS in Kuwait. This article considers how Canadian export control law deals with technologies that negatively impact human rights abroad and identifies a gap in the existing export control scheme. We suggest this gap could be closed by adopting a proactive human rights due diligence requirement on companies seeking …

Recognizing Operators’ Duties To Properly Select And Supervise Ai Agents – A (Better?) Tool For Algorithmic Accountability, Richard Zuroff

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

In November of 2020, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada proposed creating GDPR-inspired rights for decision subjects and allowing financial penalties for violations of those rights. Shortly afterward, the proposal to create a right to an explanation for algorithmic decisions was incorporated into Bill C-11, the Digital Charter Implementation Act. This commentary proposes that creating duties for operators to properly select and supervise artificial agents would be a complementary, and potentially more effective, accountability mechanism than creating a right to an explanation. These duties would be a natural extension of employers’ duties to properly select and retain human employees. Allowing victims …

If A Machine Could Talk, We Would Not Understand It: Canadian Innovation And The Copyright Act’S Tpm Interoperability Framework, Anthony D. Rosborough

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

This analysis examines the legal implications of technological protection measures (‘‘TPMs”) under Canada’s Copyright Act. Through embedded computing systems and proprietary interfaces, TPMs are being used by original equipment manufacturers (‘‘OEMs”) of agricultural equipment to preclude reverse engineering and follow-on innovation. This has anti-competitive effects on Canada’s ‘‘shortline” agricultural equipment industry, which produces add-on or peripheral equipment used with OEM machinery. This requires interoperability between the interfaces, data formats, and physical connectors, which are often the subject of TPM control. Exceptions under the Act have provided little assistance to the shortline industry. The research question posed by this analysis is: …

Indiana Law Fertility Fraud Expert Participates In Washington, Dc Roundtable, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

Professor Jody Madeira, an internationally recognized expert in fertility fraud, bioethics, and law and medicine, participated this morning (January 26) in a bipartisan roundtable discussion with victims of fertility fraud. The event was facilitated by U.S. Representatives Stephanie Bice (R-OK), Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), Julia Letlow (R-LA), and Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) following the January 23 introduction of their Protecting Families From Fertility Fraud Act, which would—for the first time—make it a federal crime to knowingly misrepresent the source of DNA used in any procedure that involves assisted reproduction.

Making Virtual Things, Joshua A.T. Fairfield

Scholarly Articles

People value virtual things—such as NFTs—because such assets trigger and satisfy deep-seated narratives of property and ownership. The cause of the recent series of failures to regulate virtual assets, and the resulting crashes, has been a failure to take seriously the ways people perceive and use the assets. Current legal frameworks fail to support buyers’ and users’ expectations of ownership in virtual things they purchase.

Making virtual things is a matter of social construction of value. Virtual things, like real-world things, have value because a community values them for a purpose. It therefore makes no sense to discount how and …

National Space Law, Frans Von Der Dunk

Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law Program: Faculty Publications

This chapter addresses national space law. While often slightly different terms such as national space legislation or national space regulation are used, the term national space law initially should be interpreted in the broadest possible sense. National law would thus refer to the totality of all relevant legal documents at the national level, whether entitled law, statute, act, decree, directive, or regulation, plus customary law, implementation by way of government authorization and jurisprudence, as relevant further explained through the writings of recognized experts.

Then, as space law encompasses “every legal or regulatory regime having …