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Explore the future of technology law with key insights and developments shaping the digital landscape. Stay ahead in this evolving legal dom
Explore the future of technology law with key insights and developments shaping the digital landscape. Stay ahead in this evolving legal domain.
Gain insights into navigating complex technology laws to safeguard your business, while leaving no stone unturned in ensuring legal complian
Gain insights into navigating complex technology laws to safeguard your business, while leaving no stone unturned in ensuring legal compliance.
Is Big Data Safe?
People keep talking about big data and how important it is. They talk about how useful it is in making predictions and infographics, or how much it can be worth. But how does big data affect individuals like you and me?
Big Data: Data sets containing much larger amounts of data than what would normally be processed. It can be in the terabytes or up to zettabytes of information gathered from many sources and about many things. It is usually defined by the volume, velocity and variety of the data.
Big data has many uses. It can be used by companies like Netflix to anticipate trends based on user activity. They look at things like how people have acted in the past, what affected how they acted and what is happening now. It's also used to find flaws in things by seeing where people struggle with them and where they tend to fail. Big data is used to train Artificial Intelligence (AI), and to maximise internal operational efficiency. According to the UN Environment Programme, big data can help assess environmental risks and minimise the harm done to it.
According to IBM, Artificial intelligence leverages computers and machines to mimic the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human mind. That means that essentially all it has to be is an algorithm that makes decisions to qualify as AI. AI can then be "weak" or "strong", where weak ones have a single or narrow purpose. For an example, consider Deep Blue, the chess computer.
Like every other seemingly perfect solution, big data isn't without its risks. First we have to as ourselves how exactly they are getting this big data. Such huge amounts of information have to come from somewhere, and that place is usually from us. Most things you do can be and often are tracked. If you go to websites, not only will they, Google and often Facebook see that you are there and everything you do there, but often they will have additional cookies track you across the internet afterwards. If you use the Wi-Fi at a café you visit, or ask Alexa about the weather in Paris, that may be saved. These reams of data can then be used to try to answer any questions companies may have about you, like how you would respond to specific adverts or if you are likely to buy something.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a fairly recent EU regulation that controls data use, has as some of its core principles Data Minimisation and Purpose Limitation. The former is the idea that companies should only have the information they absolutely need to do their job. It clashes quite directly with big data, which necessitates having as much data as possible. The latter also clashes because it is to only use data for a set, closed purpose whereas big data gathers the data first and uses it to answer questions later.
Things get even more complicated when you start thinking about the kind of AI that learns on its own. They use big data to change themselves, and then make more decisions based on big data. This makes them minimally transparent, and increases the risk of bias. Especially if the data it is learning from is skewed, its predictions may quickly become discriminatory. For example, an algorithm trained on the massively Black and Latin NYPD gang ties database will almost certainly flag up far more minorities than white people in the future. Also, an algorithm being used in healthcare to sort people by how much help they needed gave equally sick black people lower risk scores because of the specific terms it used.
Can the AI making decisions based on big data ever really be accountable either? Accountability is another GDPR principle, but it becomes complicated when the processing is automatic and at such a massive scale. Who exactly is responsible for the results of the processing? Who is responsible for how the data was acquired? How do people know what data is being processed and what it is being processed for? The ICO also says that for an AI's processing to be accountable, bias has to be avoided before it affects people rather than spotted after. How do we do that?
The ICO is the Information Commissioner's Office, the entity whose role is to ensure data protection and that the GDPR is followed. They are the ones you can complain to if you feel that your data rights are being infringed.
All in all, while big data has a lot of potential, it also has many risks. If we can ensure that the data does not relate to humans when it does not have to (such as when it's about the environment) and that when it does the specifics are clear to every subject and they have given their consent then big data has the potential to make the world a better, more efficient place. However, we need to be very careful that the price of efficiency is not our data safety.
('AI and data protection: balancing tensions' by Rob Sumroy and Natalie Donovan on Thomson Reuters Practical Law)
Can you sell video games second hand? Sort of
In 2012 the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) decided the case of UsedSoft v Oracle. UsedSoft sold second had software licences, such as the one by Oracle. Oracle's software licence allowed for 25 users, so UsedSoft would sell access to the software for any left over spaces. UsedSoft argued that the licence was paid for so exhaustion applied.
Exhaustion is a legal term meaning that when you sell something to someone you no longer control it and who they can sell it on to. For example, if you buy a physical book from the publisher they cannot stop you from selling it second hand.
The question of exhaustion was much debated, in part because there were two statutes that could apply. Both the InfoSoc Directive and the Software Directive say that the right holder holds the exclusive right to distribute the work (that is, the creator or original owner) but both also say in Art.4 that that right is exhausted after the first sale. The ECJ decided that this was fulfilled when it comes to software if the acquirer has paid the fair amount for an indefinite (or effectively indefinite, like 99 years) licence.
So far it seemed all was good. We could have a second hand market for software, allowing for example for people to sell on games they had beaten. However, and this is where it gets complicated, the court decided in 2018 that this only applied to software and not to other forms of digital media such as ebooks or music. In the case of Tom Kabinet, the eponymous company would allow the members of its "book club" to download any of the ebooks it owned. They were supposed to not make copies and to delete it when they finished and pass it on, but this was not effectively policed.
The court decided that rather than falling under art 4 (distribution to the public), it fell under art 3 (communication to the public) This is significant, as the Directive is clear that while the copyright owner's distribution right is exhausted with respect of a copy of the work by the first transfer of ownership of that copy with the right-holder's consent, so that the purchaser is free to resell it, the right of communication to the public is not subject to exhaustion.
The ECJ differentiated this from UsedSoft by saying that sending a program is the same as buying the CD original for one, whereas sending an ebook is different to getting a physical book. They decided that software falls under the lex specialis of the Software Directive, but digital media does not because it is not software.
Lex Specialis refers to the rule in law (mostly used in international law) that a more specific law trumps a more general one. If there is a law to do with food production and it clashes with one to do with the cleaning of beef, the more specific latter one would apply.
This raises many problems which have yet to be resolved. Firstly, the ECJ said that receiving a physical book is different to receiving an ebook. While that may be true, what about other forms of digital media (Angelopoulos, C.L.R. 2020)? Buying an album of Nickelback in CD is effectively the same as buying the album online and downloading it, especially nowadays when music is rarely on CDs.
They say programs should be treated differently to other forms of media because they are harder to share, however anyone moderately dedicated could copy a video game on their computer (Van der Donk, E.I.P.R. 2020).
They also say that you cannot sell intellectual property other than software (such as music or books) second hand, but seem to forget that it is almost impossible to find software that does not include IP (Ross, Ent. L. R 2020). Can I sell someone my second hand game but not the music on it?
Why does non-software intellectual property deserve more protection? Why should the people making video games have to accept the loss of income from having people buy second hand instead of from them but authors shouldn't? You could say that it's because there is lex specialis, but the question here is if the law is right, not what the law is, and if you did say that you are a boring person.
Intellectual property refers to the non physical property protected by patent, trademark, copyright etc. Copyright for example protects books, music, plays or software; and patents protect inventions. They make it so people cannot for example write an exact copy of A Song Of Ice And Fire and sell it.
Furthermore, in Tom Kabinet there was the issue that the company did not really make sure that only one person could read the book at a time, and that they deleted it before passing it on. Angelopoulos believes that if the ebook sharing was done properly, which is absolutely possible, the ECJ would likely allow it. It would be much more similar to how once you sell a book second hand you cannot read it again, and the ECJ seems to like that (see Vereniging Openbare Bibliotheken C-174/15).
So really it’s all fairly unclear, but we’ll see how things change and if the ECJ ever decided to make sense. Until then, it seems like most companies are going to be quite careful with any second hand sales, but maybe some enterprising UsedSoft 2 will come along.
One of the world’s largest investment management companies, Vanguard, has rejected Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as an asset class.
With the increasing demand for digital currencies around the globe, Vanguard has made it clear that it will not support the creation of Australia’s cryptocurrency exchange-traded fund (ETF). In finance, ETFs are used to invest in a basket of stocks/assets rather than specifically choosing a certain company. This means that instead of investing solely in Bitcoin, consumers who purchase ETFs can purchase a slice of various cryptocurrencies to widen their exposure and minimise risk.
Introduction to Intellectual Property and Information Technology
As humans, we possess the ability to think abstractly and create material ranging from artistic works to technical designs. We are influenced by previous creators and that inspiration from existing work is fundamental to the development of artistic and technical material. Inspired as we may be by previous creators, the lines between original content and regurgitated material can get quite blurred! Intellectual property is described by the World Intellectual Property Organization as property that “refers to creations of the mind: inventions; literary and artistic works; and symbols, names and images used in commerce”, it covers two core areas: industrial property and copyright.
Intellectual property rights, as with many areas of law, has had to evolve with the advent of information technology. Advances in computing power and the ability to connect to millions of individuals through the internet has created many hurdles for intellectual property. In particular, the innovation of computers led to the development of user-oriented software through the use of programming languages. Coding a software using a programming language requires a highly skilled individual to write a series of commands that form the source code of that program. Source code (and the object code once compiled) fall under copyright protection because the code is essentially a piece of literary work and software code in both formats has a well-established history of being protected by copyright provisions. Problems arise as software is ultimately a functional tool rather than a work of art to be enjoyed subjectively by an individual, leaving programmers the headache of being able to write a program that performs a function which may require the same code a competitor uses. Though copyright law protects the code of a software and the ‘look and feel’ of an interface, the function of the software is not protected. This inevitably leads to similar programs being made available to the public, who are left to choose their preferred program but leaves companies hefty legal fees as they contest their ownership to ideas in court.
Ultimately intellectual property rights in software are well protected by the law and there are clear rules as to what is and isn’t permitted but as technology continues to evolve we will see increased arbitration in the courts as creators fight for their ownership rights (not the worst scenario in the world if you’re an IP lawyer!).
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/12/designers-copyright-law-essentials/
Technology Outpacing Laws
We live in an age when technology keeps trying to one-up the last hit thing. This works not only for legitimate technology for the masses, but also for people who might be taking illegal actions.
Recently there has been an interesting increase in robocalls to people who had previously signed up for the no call list. The problem is while legitimate businesses will follow the no call list, the…
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Technology Outpacing Laws
We live in an age when technology keeps trying to one-up the last hit thing. This works not only for legitimate technology for the masses, but also for people who might be taking illegal actions. Recently there has been an interesting increase in robocalls to people who had previously signed up for the no call list. The problem is while legitimate businesses will follow the no call list, the…
View On WordPress
