Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

The Importance of Section 230 Immunity for Most

posted by Danielle Citron

Why leave the safe harbor provision intact for site operators, search engines, and other online service providers do not attempt to block offensive, indecent, or illegal activity but by no means encourage or are principally used to host illicit material as cyber cesspools do?  If we retain that immunity, some harassment and stalking — including revenge porn — will remain online because site operators hosting it cannot be legally required to take them down.  Why countenance that possibility?

Because of the risk of collateral censorship—blocking or filtering speech to avoid potential liability even if the speech is legally protected.  In what is often called the heckler’s veto, people may abuse their ability to complain, using the threat of liability to ensure that site operators block or remove posts for no good reason.  They might complain because they disagree with the political views expressed or dislike the posters’ disparaging tone.  Providers would be especially inclined to remove content in the face of frivolous complaints in instances where they have little interest in keeping up the complained about content.  Take, as an illustration, the popular newsgathering sites Digg.  If faced with legal liability, it might automatically take down posts even though they involve protected speech.  The news gathering site lacks a vested interest in keeping up any particular post given its overall goal of crowd sourcing vast quantities of news that people like.  Given the scale of their operation, they may lack the resources to hire enough people to cull through complaints to weed out frivolous ones.

Sites like Digg differ from revenge porn sites and other cyber cesspools whose operators have an incentive to refrain from removing complained-about content such as revenge porn and the like.  Cyber cesspools obtain economic benefits by hosting harassing material that may make it worth the risk to continue to do so.  Collateral censorship is far less likely—because it is in their economic interest to keep up destructive material.  As Slate reporter and cyber bullying expert Emily Bazelon has remarked, concerns about the heckler’s veto get more deference than it should in the context of revenge porn sites and other cyber cesspools.  (Read Bazelon’s important new book Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy).  It does not justify immunizing cyber cesspool operators from liability.

Let’s be clear about what this would mean.  Dispensing with cyber cesspools’ immunity would not mean that they would be strictly liable for user-generated content.  A legal theory would need to sanction remedies against them.  Read the rest of this post »

  January 25, 2013 at 4:10 pm   Posted in: Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Google and Search Engines, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   5 Comments

“Kicking the Tires” is not “Looking Under the Hood”

posted by Frank Pasquale

Celebrated in the tech press only a week ago, the FTC inaction (and non-explanation of its inaction) with respect to search bias concerns is already starting to curdle. The FT ran a front page headline titled “Europe Takes Tough Stance on Google.” Another story included this striking comment from the EU’s competition chief:

Almunia insists that the Federal Trade Commission decision will be “neither an obstacle [for the European Commission] nor an advantage [for Google]. You can also think, well, this European authority, the commission, has received a gift from the American authorities, given that now every result they will get will be much better than the conclusions of the FTC,” he said with playful confidence. “Google people know very well that they need to provide results and real remedies, not arguments or comparisons with what happened on the other side [of the Atlantic].”

In response to allegations of search bias, Google has essentially said, “Trust us.” And at the end of its investigation into the potential bias, the FTC has essentially said the same. One public interest group has already put in a FOIA request for communications between Google and the FTC. Consumer Watchdog has requested a staff report that was reported to have recommended more robust action. Will Google, an advocate of openness in government and the internet generally, hold firm to its professed principles and commend those requests?
Read the rest of this post »

  January 11, 2013 at 10:28 am   Posted in: Antitrust, Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Government Secrecy, Political Economy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Technology   Print This Post   2 Comments

Google Antitrust: the FTC Folds

posted by Frank Pasquale

Both Eric Goldman and James Grimmelmann have the details on the FTC’s rather extraordinary capitulation today. It is a big win for Google. Still, a few questions remain. I have the following:

1) Commissioner Rosch included this intriguing footnote in his concurrence/dissent:

I . . . have concerns that insofar as Google has monopoly or near-monopoly power in the search advertising market and this power is due in whole or in part to its power over searches generally, nothing in this “settlement” prevents Google from telling “half-truths”–for example, that its gathering of information about the characteristics of a consumer is done solely for the consumer’s benefit, instead of also to maintain a monopoly or near-monopoly position. . . .That is a genuine cause for “strong concern.”

Did Google ever say that it was gathering data purely for consumers’ benefit? That would seem to be an odd representation for a for-profit company to make.
Read the rest of this post »

  January 3, 2013 at 9:51 pm   Posted in: Antitrust, Consumer Protection Law, Google & Search Engines, Technology   Print This Post   6 Comments

Prohibitions on Egg and Sperm Donor Anonymity and the Impact on Surrogacy

posted by Gaia Bernstein

Egg and sperm donations are an integral part of the infertility industry. The donors are usually young men and women who donate relying on the promise of anonymity. This is the norm in the United States. But, internationally things are changing. A growing number of countries have prohibited egg and sperm donor anonymity. This usually means that when the child who was conceived by egg or sperm donation reaches the age of eighteen he can receive the identifying information of the donor and meet his genetic parent.

An expanding movement of commentators is advocating a shift in the United States to an open identity model, which will prohibit anonymity. In fact, last year, Washington state adopted the first modified open identity statute in the United States. Faced by calls for the removal of anonymity, an obvious cause for concern is how would prohibitions on anonymity affect people’s willingness to donate egg and sperm. Supporters of prohibitions on anonymity argue that they only cause short-term shortages in egg and sperm supplies. However, in a study I published in 2010, I showed that unfortunately that does not seem to be the case. My study examined three jurisdictions, which prohibited donor gamete anonymity: Sweden, Victoria (an Australian state) and the United Kingdom. It showed that all these jurisdictions share dire shortages in donor gametes accompanied by long wait-lists. The study concluded that although prohibitions on anonymity were not the sole cause of the shortages, these prohibitions definitely played a role in their creation.

In a new article, titled “Unintended Consequences: Prohibitions on Gamete Donor Anonymity and the Fragile Practice of Surrogacy,” I examine the potential effect of the adoption of prohibitions on anonymity in the United States on the practice of surrogacy. Surrogacy has not been part of the international debate on donor gamete anonymity. But the situation in the United States is different. Unlike most foreign jurisdictions that adopted prohibitions on anonymity, the practice of surrogacy in the United States is particularly reliant on donor eggs because of the unique legal regime governing surrogacy here.  Generally, there are two types of surrogacy arrangements: traditional surrogacy and gestational surrogacy. In a traditional surrogacy arrangement the surrogate’s eggs are used and she is the genetic mother of the child, while in gestational surrogacy the intended mother’s eggs or a donor’s eggs are used and the surrogate is not the genetic mother of the conceived child. Most U.S. states that expressly allow surrogacy provide legal certainty only to gestational surrogacy, which relies heavily on donor eggs, while leaving traditional surrogacy in a legal limbo. Without legal certainty, the intended parents may not be the legal parents of the conceived child, and instead the surrogate and even her husband may become the legal parents. Infertility practitioners endorse the legal preference for gestational surrogacy also for psychological reasons, believing that a surrogate who is not genetically related to the baby is less likely to change her mind and refuse to hand over the baby.

The adoption of prohibitions on anonymity in the United States could destabilize the practice of surrogacy in a way that did not occur in other countries that adopted these prohibitions. If, as has happened elsewhere, prohibitions on anonymity will play a role in creating shortages in donor egg supplies in the United States, this could affect the practice of surrogacy in two ways. Individuals seeking surrogacy may need to resort to traditional surrogacy, which does not rely on donor eggs, with the accompanying legal uncertainty. Alternatively, those deterred by the uncertainty enveloping traditional surrogacy may refrain from seeking surrogacy altogether, resulting in a significant contraction of  the practice of surrogacy in the United States. These potential complications suggest that those supporting the adoption of prohibitions on anonymity in the United States, should consider these changes with great caution and think beyond the traditional debate about the privacy of the donors, the privacy and procreational interests of the intended parents, the best interests of the children and the direct effect on gamete supplies.

 

  December 21, 2012 at 10:42 am  Tags: egg donor anonymity, Family Law, Health Law, infertility, reproductive technologies, sperm donor anonymity, surrogacy  Posted in: Family Law, Health Law, Privacy, Privacy (Medical), Technology, Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments

Why Did Egg Freezing Wait So Long?

posted by Gaia Bernstein

Thank you to the permanent bloggers of Concurring Opinions for having me back. It is great to be here.

Egg freezing has become the new hot trend in the infertility industry. Although infertility practitioners first used  egg freezing in the mid 1980s,  it was only recently that success rates have significantly risen making this an attractive option for women.  A woman can now freeze her eggs at any age and use it a few years later or much later with the sperm of her then chosen partner or a donor to have a baby through IVF. Using egg freezing technology, a woman can today have a baby at a time that best suits her career and family situation.

There is no doubt that egg freezing as a viable option is a huge revolution for women’s autonomy. But the big question is why only now? Why has egg freezing become a really viable option only during the first decade of the Twenty-First Century. We have known how to freeze sperm since the 1950s. And, embryo freezing was first tried out around the same time as egg freezing, during the mid-1980s. Yet, unlike egg freezing, embryo freezing became common practice soon thereafter. So why did we have to wait so long for effective egg freezing technology?

The answer usually given to this question is that it was just too complicated technologically and took a long time to develop. But were technological complications the only cause for delay?  Is it really much harder to freeze and thaw eggs for later IVF use than to freeze and thaw embryos for later use? We tend to be taken by the illusion that science is value neutral — that scientific progress is not affected by choices directed by social values. But even if technological diffiuclties played a role in the delay, could egg freezing technology have been held back because resources were invested elsewhere? Unlike other forms of reproductive technology that promote the reproductive interests of both men and women, egg freezing promotes mainly the autonomy interests of women.  Egg freezing’s impact on women autonomy can be compared only to the revolutionary effect of the birth control pill. At the same time, the infertility industry is comprised overwhelmingly by male practitioners. And while some have no doubt worked relentlessly to promote egg freezing technology, it may be time to stop assuming that technological complications held back this important women emancipating technology. It may be time to begin asking whether  the advancement of egg freezing was placed on the back burner for years because of the type of interests it promotes?

  December 7, 2012 at 10:26 am  Tags: egg freezing, infertility, IVF, oocyte cryopreservation, reproductive technology, women autonomy  Posted in: Family Law, Feminism and Gender, Health Law, Technology   Print This Post   6 Comments

“The App from Hell” — A Short Comical Cartoon About Apps and Privacy

posted by Daniel Solove

For my privacy and security training company, TeachPrivacy, I recently created this 2-minute comical cartoon vignette to teach about the importance of privacy and apps.  No login is required.  Click the link above or the image below to see the video.

  December 3, 2012 at 10:17 am   Posted in: Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   No Comments

Scan Books at Home: Google Releases Open Source Material for Book Scanner

posted by Deven Desai

Book Scanner DIY-style for about $1,500. Wow. Locker Gnome reports that Google has made the specs for the Linear Book Scanner open source. The device is not perfect but even with its flaws (some torn or folded pages, some skipped ones, issues with which books work on the default modes) the price is quite a drop. Locker Gnome sys that the device can scan 1,000 pages in about 90 minutes. Now put on your Google hat. First launch, some flaws, but overall solid iteration. Hmm. Open source it. Ah yes. Let many folks tinker and soon the device will be cheaper, work better, and viola, more analog will be digital data. Mmmm digital data. Yummy. Before folks think only of copyrighted books, remember that the fellow who made some DIY plans for a book scanner that used old cameras and some wood, but needed a human to turn pages, helped developing countries too. Preservation of archives, public records, and many works that are analog but would benefit by being in digital form comes with cheaper, easier tech like these two options. Oh to be capable of non-infringing uses now that fall is here.

  November 16, 2012 at 7:48 pm   Posted in: Intellectual Property, Technology   Print This Post   No Comments

Calling Klingons and Romulans, Cloaking Now Available (Sort of)

posted by Deven Desai

According to the BBC, “Scientists have succeeded in “cloaking” an object perfectly for the first time, rendering a centimetre-scale cylinder invisible to microwaves.” OK this method works only for microwaves, works only in one direction, and not for visible light. Nonetheless, “The design principles that make the cloak work in microwaves would be difficult to implement at optical wavelengths. But microwaves are important in many applications, principally telecommunications and radar, and improved versions of cloaking could vastly improve microwave performance.”

The advance is cool to me in that the ideas started in 2006 from a paper on “transformation optics.” with an implementation of the idea coming that year as well. So the science fiction world of true cloaking is not here, but the fact that a few folks did some basics science, a test application followed fast, and now a full version of the microwave idea is in place within seven years is rather great. The practical side of the work may mean that funds are coming quickly from industry and the government. I am not sure which. Still I love the idea that one of the oldest fantasy/sci-fi bits of magic, invisibility, is a little closer to reality.

  November 16, 2012 at 6:33 pm   Posted in: Innovation, Technology   Print This Post   No Comments

Some Tech 101 (maybe 201) about How Google (and others) Go Offline

posted by Deven Desai

A few days ago, Google went offline. You may have missed it. Jennifer Rexford at Princeton pointed folks to this article about the specific event. Better yet, the article goes into the way the Internet works (well the routing part which was the issue) and how to fix it. One thing that jumped out at me is that humans, yes HUMANS!, are still a big part of the system, and that trust or maybe a Social Life of Information play big roles along with the hardware and software. One of the people who identified the source of the issue called (not email, phone, Paul Ohm and Mike Madison who note my preference for phones) someone they knew at the source. I post the details below as I think it shows the way the system works:

The solution was to get Moratel to stop announcing the routes they shouldn’t be. A large part of being a network engineer, especially working at a large network like CloudFlare’s, is having relationships with other network engineers around the world. When I figured out the problem, I contacted a colleague at Moratel to let him know what was going on. He was able to fix the problem at around 2:50 UTC / 6:50pm PST. Around 3 minutes later, routing returned to normal and Google’s services came back online.
Looking at peering maps, I’d estimate the outage impacted around 3–5% of the Internet’s population. The heaviest impact will have been felt in Hong Kong, where PCCW is the incumbent provider. If you were in the area and unable to reach Google’s services around that time, now you know why.

Building a Better Internet
This all is a reminder about how the Internet is a system built on trust. Today’s incident shows that, even if you’re as big as Google, factors outside of your direct control can impact the ability of your customers to get to your site so it’s important to have a network engineering team that is watching routes and managing your connectivity around the clock. CloudFlare works every day to ensure our customers get the optimal possible routes. We look out for all the websites on our network to ensure that their traffic is always delivered as fast as possible. Just another day in our ongoing efforts to #savetheweb.

  November 16, 2012 at 12:42 pm   Posted in: Technology   Print This Post   No Comments

Forget Facial Recognition, Try Tattoos

posted by Deven Desai

Imagine that your cool CSI, NCIS, Mentalist, (fill in the procedural (as in cop show, not law), detective sees a tattoo on someone, but no face. She wants to know who that person was. Quick! Check the database! Turns out MSU is developing such a thing. The article admits that a nationwide database is not on the immediate horizon, but the FBI and local agencies want it. The piece has some cultural overtones too. The researcher Anil Jain noted that one could ask

“Is this tattoo connected to a gang? Who were the previous individuals who were arrested with the same tattoo and other such information?” Jain said. “And then right away you have some information about this person. You may not know his name – the tattoo is not a unique identifier – but it can narrow down the list of identities for this particular tattoo.”

One can start to see where a person fits, or used to fit, into a social setting. Then again someone may get the tattoo just for kicks. Hmm, maybe intellectual property law will foil this one? Remember the Hangover II and the tattoo suit? I wonder whether the database will face cease and desist letters from alleged copyright and or trademark holders. Or maybe they will support the database so they can enforce their rights!

Seriously, however, I think that the use of tattoos to identify people has an established history. I am not sure whether that is just a claim in books and film. But this project seems to lend credence to the idea that those marks really do follow you forever.

  November 15, 2012 at 9:44 pm   Posted in: Criminal Law, Cyberlaw, Technology   Print This Post   No Comments

BRIGHT IDEAS: Werbach and Hunter on For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business

posted by Deven Desai

This Bright Ideas post looks at Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter’s new book, For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business. I have posted about it, but Kevin and Dan were gracious enough to answer some questions. We go into what is gamification, the differences between internal and external uses of the technique, how it relates to super-crunching, and the ethical and legal implications of the technique.

Kevin and Dan, you have drilled into an area, gamification, that seems almost arcane, a technique known to initiates. Why do it?

[KW] We actually think gamification is quite relevant for a broad range of audiences. First of all, video games have a huge impact on our culture. The games industry generates more revenue annually than Hollywood does at the box office. According to a Pew survey, 97% of American teeagers play video games, and it’s not just young people: the Entertainment Software Association reports that the average age of a gamer is 30, with almost half of them women. We can dismiss video games the way we used to dismiss social networking… and e-commerce before that… and the Internet before that… or we can look at why they are so powerful and apply those lessons in other contexts.

Second, the core goal of gamification is motivation. Think about all the situations where motivation matters: at work, at home, as consumers, in legal compliance, in social activism, and in collective action, to name a few. In all these cases, greater engagement drives material results. If there were motivational techniques that were proven in real-world businesses, consistent with decades of psychological research, and synergistic with big data and other leading-edge technology trends, wouldn’t you want to understand them?

And third, gamification is happening. It’s a rapidly growing business trend among startups, Fortune 500 companies, non-profits, and even government agencies. It raises a host of significant legal, operational, and ethical issues, as well as a variety of practical business concerns. We felt that my work on emerging technology and policy trends through the Supernova conference, and Dan’s scholarship on virtual worlds and background in cognitive psychology, gave us a unique ability to tackle these questions in a serious way. That’s why we put together the first gamification course at Wharton, and wrote For the Win as business guide to this emerging field.

OK, so what is gamification?

[KW] Gamification means applying design techniques from video games to business and other problems. In other words, it’s the process of motivating customers, employees, and communities by thinking like a game designer. It doesn’t mean turning everything into a game. Quite the contrary! Gamification involves incorporating elements of games into existing activities, the way Nike weaves levels and awards into its Nike+ system, or Microsoft motivated employees to review half a million Windows 7 dialogue boxes for localization errors with a competition among offices.

When you look at it that way, the basic concept of gamification is pretty simple, but doing it well is hard. Even experienced game designers often create games that aren’t much fun. Executing gamification effectively requires a combination of skills and knowledge, which we describe in For the Win.

Right. I see games are important in that they are big business and a big part of many folks’ lives. Let’s talk a little more about motivation. Is this approach a sort of applied behavioral economic one? Someone identifies levers and then builds systems to nudge or indeed shift the way others engage and behave?

Read the rest of this post »

  November 15, 2012 at 9:30 pm   Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics, Bright Ideas, Cyberlaw, Innovation, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   No Comments

Stanford Law Review Online: Software Speech

posted by Stanford Law Review

The Stanford Law Review Online has just published a Note by Andrew Tutt entitled Software Speech. Tutt argues that current approaches to determining when software or speech generated by software can be protected by the First Amendment are incorrect:

When is software speech for purposes of the First Amendment? This issue has taken on new life amid recent accusations that Google used its search rankings to harm its competitors. This spring, Eugene Volokh coauthored a white paper explaining why Google’s search results are fully protected speech that lies beyond the reach of the antitrust laws. The paper sparked a firestorm of controversy, and in a matter of weeks, dozens of scholars, lawyers, and technologists had joined the debate. The most interesting aspect of the positions on both sides—whether contending that Google search results are or are not speech—is how both get First Amendment doctrine only half right.

He concludes:

By stopping short of calling software “speech,” entirely and unequivocally, the Court would acknowledge the many ways in which software is still an evolving cultural phenomenon unlike others that have come before it. In discarding tests for whether software is speech on the basis of its literal resemblance either to storytelling (Brown) or information dissemination (Sorrell), the Court would strike a careful balance between the legitimate need to regulate software, on the one hand, and the need to protect ideas and viewpoints from manipulation and suppression, on the other.

Read the full article, Software Speech at the Stanford Law Review Online.

  November 15, 2012 at 10:18 am  Tags: Constitutional Law, Cyber Civil Rights, First Amendment, search engines, technology, videogames  Posted in: Constitutional Law, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Google and Search Engines, Law Rev (Stanford), Supreme Court, Technology   Print This Post   3 Comments

Harvard Law Review Symposium on Privacy & Technology

posted by Daniel Solove

  November 5, 2012 at 3:43 pm   Posted in: Articles and Books, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Technology   Print This Post   15 Comments

Robots for Relief: Disaster Robot Challenge

posted by Deven Desai

With Sandy upon the U.S. Eastern coast, DARPA’s “Robotics Challenge” could not come fast enough. As NPR reports, robots were used after Fukushima, but the need for robots anyone can use and especially for disaster operations is high. The contest will be a “junkyard-wars-style competition next year. The robots will have to open a blocked door, operate a valve, climb a ladder. And perhaps the toughest: get into and drive a vehicle.” As my friend Brett Kennedy of JPL notes in the piece, JPL’s RoboSimian has many advantages but may not do so well with car driving as yet.

This challenge offers $2 million to the winner, but the real prize maybe like the self-driving car challenge. Great technology is developed, industry sees it potential, and a whole new industry blossoms. There are some questions about what technology can be proprietary when the core was from government funds. Peter Lee’s work on this point comes to mind. Nonetheless, I dig this approach and the goals. Cylons to help us in nasty places and nasty jobs, oops, did I say cylons? Seriously, I hope we don’t need these sorts of options for Sandy or other disasters, but the odds are we will. So working on finding better ways to deal with the aftermath of such events is great and smart in my view.

The video below is from the Drexel project, Hubo, I believe.

  October 30, 2012 at 2:37 pm   Posted in: Innovation, Intellectual Property, Technology   Print This Post   No Comments

Innovation, Magic: Gasoline Out of Thin Air?

posted by Deven Desai

If remotely true this article about a technique to convert air into gasoline is wild but great. As the BBC video embedded on the link above shows the folks at Air Fuel Synthesis have not, repeat not, solved the core issue which is how much energy is needed to create the fuel. But the hope is that

The fuel is not only viable; … it will be suitable for high-performance vehicles. But the biggest benefit of the fuel is its sustainability. Since burning the fuel only releases the same carbon dioxide that was already in the air to begin with, it is carbon neutral. (That is, so long as the electricity required to make the necessary chemical conversions is sourced from renewable energy like wind or solar.)

Another potential benefit of the fuel is that it will be price-predictable. Gas prices won’t fluctuate because the fuel source will be stable.

Science fiction? Perhaps. But there is a market here and if someone breaks through some rather cool outcomes could be in our future. For patent folks, I saw some idea that an oil company would buy up patents just to get this one off the market. I have heard similar claims in energy before. I wonder whether anyone has an example of that in energy? And has anyone argued that a break through for energy would have to be shared a la drug needs?

  October 30, 2012 at 2:18 pm   Posted in: Intellectual Property, Science Fiction, Technology   Print This Post   4 Comments

Gamification – Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter’s new book

posted by Deven Desai

Gamification? Is that a word? Why yes it is, and Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter want to tell us what it means. Better yet, they want to tell us how it works in their new book For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business (Wharton Press). The authors get into many issues starting with a refreshing admission that the term is clunky but nonetheless captures a simple, powerful idea: one can use game concepts in non-game contexts and achieve certain results that might be missed. As they are careful to point out, this is not game theory. This is using insights from games, yes video games and the like, to structure how we interact with a problem or goal. I have questions about how well the approach will work and potential downsides (I am after all a law professor). Yet, the authors explore cases where the idea has worked, and they address concerns about where the approach can fail. I must admit I have only an excerpt so far. But it sets out the project while acknowledging possible objections that popped to mind quite well. In short, I want to read the rest. Luckily the Wharton link above or if you prefer Amazon Kindle are both quite reasonably priced. (Amazon is less expensive).

If you wonder about games, play games, and maybe have thought what is with all this badging, point accumulation, leader board stuff at work (which I did while I was at Google), this book looks to be a must read. And if you have not encountered these changes, I think you will. So reading the book may put you ahead of the group in understanding what management or companies are doing to you. The book also sets out cases and how the process works, so it may give you ideas about how to use games to help your endeavor and impress your manager. For the law folks out there, I think this area raises questions about behavioral economics and organizations that will lay ahead. In short, the authors have a tight, clear book that captures the essence of a movement. That alone merits a hearty well done.

  October 30, 2012 at 1:39 pm   Posted in: Book Reviews, Innovation, Social Network Websites, Sociology of Law, Technology   Print This Post   No Comments

Because It’s Cool, Time Lapse from Space

posted by Deven Desai

I sometimes suggest that folks, especially lawyer folks, should look up and remember the coolness of the world. This post of star trails and city lights looks down, down at the Earth from the ISS. It’s sort of 2001 updated. According to Wired, “Photographer Christoph Malin from Austria created the stunning film by stacking image sequences taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station.”

  October 19, 2012 at 9:27 pm   Posted in: Innovation, Just for Fun, Technology   Print This Post   No Comments

Picking Up Technical Knowledge

posted by Frank Pasquale

As I teach in some technical fields, I often get questions from students about “how much tech do I need to know to succeed in this field?” For example, the Health Law Survey includes many complex medical situations; my seminar Health Information, Privacy, and Innovation covers standards for certifying “meaningful use” of health information technology; and even the intro to IP course tends to include some forbidding patent cases in it. I think this advice from Michal Tsur and Leah Belsky is reassuring:

[S]uccessful tech companies require a variety of skillsets – from design and community management to operations and business development- both at the entry level and in leadership positions. Significant technical skills can also be learned both on the job and outside of traditional academic education. Take Marissa Mayer vs. Sheryl Sandberg. While Mayer, the current CEO of Yahoo may have graduated Stanford with a CS degree, Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, rose through the business ranks at Google, gaining enough product knowledge on the job to become one of the leading operators and innovators in the space.

Having just reviewed the offerings at Coursera this fall, I can definitely vouch for the idea that many tech skills are “on offer” outside the classroom. I’ve also heard from former students who picked up some tech management skills; for example, one learned software programming skills in order to deal with the massive paperwork in a litigation involving many small disputes. I’m also hoping to teach law students how to work with computer scientists and quantitative analysts in a spring course on data analysis and advocacy for attorneys (which I’ll be co-teaching with a professor from my university’s Department of Mathematics and Computer Science). I know that Michigan State & Daniel Katz have really blazed a trail here; I’m hoping to apply some computational legal studies ideas in courses on health and IP law. If anyone has any suggestions on doing so, I’d love to hear them.

X-Posted: Madisonian.

  October 15, 2012 at 12:11 pm   Posted in: Teaching, Technology   Print This Post   6 Comments

Calling Roland Barthes, Einstein’s Brain App

posted by Deven Desai

Somewhere Roland Barthes is smiling. Slashgear reported that there’s an iPad app that allows you “to investigate Albert Einstein’s brain as if they were looking through a microscope. The goal of the app is to make slides and images of Einstein’s brain more accessible to scientists, students, and anyone else curious about the genius. I read Barthes’s Mythologies and the essay “The Brain of Einstein” when I was studying rhetoric at Berkeley. The app reminded of his essay. Barthes shows that the focus on Einstein’s brain strips away magic, turns him into a machine, and “introduce[s] him into a world of robots.” “Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.” For me Barthes evokes Chaplin’s Modern Times but for the great man when he describes that Einstein becomes “genius so lacking in magic that one speaks about his thought as of a functional labour analogous to the mechanical making of sausages, the grinding of corn or the crushing of ore: he used to produce thought, continuously, as a mill makes flour, and death was above all, for him, the cessation of a localized function: ‘the most powerful brain of all has stopped thinking’.”

Why would we do this? Because we want to capture and conquer nature and move beyond magic. Maybe if we reduce and reify we can find the secret to Einstein and all become him (and then the fashion industry collapses as all realize wearing the same thing is quite smart). Yet we want the magic too. The blog Quantum Lit puts it this way:

Barthes goes on, with no little touch of sarcasm: “Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula,” and no fewer than six times, uses the word ‘magic’ when referring to the myth of Einstein and his search for a unifying theory, concluding that “In this way [having not discovered the unifying theory] Einstein fulfills all the conditions of myth, which could not care less about contradictions so long as it establishes a euphoric security: at once magician and machine, eternal researcher and unfulfilled discoverer, unleashing the best and the worst, brain and conscience, Einstein embodies the most contradictory dreams, and mythically reconciles the infinite power of man over nature with the ‘fatality’ of the sacrosanct, which man cannot yet do without.”

Who knows? Maybe some physical thing is at work. “The study of Einstein’s brain allowed researchers to discover that Einstein’s parietal lobe was 15% wider than normal. The parietal lobe is the area of the brain that has to do with understanding math, language, and spatial relationships.” A clue but the riddle is unsolved. And alas! MRI was not available to model Einstein’s brain. Nonetheless the app enables crowd-sourcing of the quest: “slides and images of Einstein’s brain [are] more accessible to scientists, students, and anyone else curious about the genius.” So all is well. Together we can partake of the brain, the myth, of Einstein. Perhaps we will even grok Einstein; and if we can clone him, consume him as Jubal Harshaw did for Valentine Michael Smith.

SIDE NOTE: Apparently the version of Mythologies I referred to and read dropped some essays from the original. A new English translation is available.

  October 12, 2012 at 12:20 pm   Posted in: Just for Fun, Technology   Print This Post   No Comments

Some more on ISPs and 6 Strikes – Where’s The Citizen Policing?

posted by Deven Desai

I wrote about the Six Strikes plan earlier today. I wanted to add a call for transparency on download speeds so the average citizen could police the penalties. The Wired report noted that responses “might include reducing internet speeds.” Given the problems with ISPs providing clear and consistent speeds, it seems to me that if they can reduce speeds in the name of copyright enforcement, they should also be open about what those speeds are. Google’s speed test may be useful and its M-Lab may play a role (M-Lab claims “Measurement Lab (M-Lab) is an open, distributed server platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools. The goal of M-Lab is to advance network research and empower the public with useful information about their broadband connections. By enhancing Internet transparency, M-Lab helps sustain a healthy, innovative Internet.” Hmm. I wonder whether Google’s foray into broadband will not only show the speeds easily but jump onto the ISP copyright enforcement bandwagon. I suppose that would be a consistent approach given the copyright/search results policy, but it may be one that starts to indicate that the alleged tech industry/online activist solidarity is well, alleged.

  October 12, 2012 at 2:49 am   Posted in: DRM, Google and Search Engines, Intellectual Property, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   No Comments

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