Where
would you test your cyber weapons?
Ghost
ships, crop circles, and soft gold: A GPS mystery in Shanghai
On
a sultry summer night in July 2018, the MV Manukai was arriving at
the port of Shanghai, near the mouth of the Huangpu River. This busy
tributary of the Yangtze winds through the city and includes the
Bund, a historic waterfront area and tourist hot spot. Shanghai
would be the American container ship’s last stop in China before
making its long homeward journey to Long Beach, California.
As
the crew carefully maneuvered the 700-foot ship through the world’s
busiest port, its captain watched his navigation screens closely. By
international law, all but the smallest commercial ships have to
install automatic identification system (AIS) transponders. Every
few seconds, these devices broadcast their identity, position,
course, and speed and display AIS data from other ships in the area,
helping to keep crowded waterways safe. The position data for those
transponders comes from GPS satellites.
According
to the Manukai’s screens, another ship was steaming up the same
channel at about seven knots (eight miles per hour). Suddenly, the
other ship disappeared from the AIS display. A few minutes later,
the screen showed the other ship back at the dock. Then it was in
the channel and moving again, then back at the dock, then gone once
more.
Eventually,
mystified, the captain picked up his binoculars and scanned the
dockside. The other ship had been stationary at the dock the entire
time.
When
it came time for the Manukai to head for its own berth, the bridge
began echoing to multiple alarms. Both of the ship’s GPS units—it
carried two for redundancy—had lost their signals, and its AIS
transponder had failed. Even a last-ditch emergency distress system
that also relied on GPS could not get a fix.
Now,
new research and previously unseen data show that the Manukai, and
thousands of other vessels in Shanghai over the last year, are
falling victim to a mysterious new weapon that is able to spoof GPS
systems in a way never seen before.
Only
a couple of decades late… A ‘Who’s Who” of Privacy experts?
An
Open Letter to Law School Deans about Privacy Law Education in Law
Schools
Recently
a group of legal academics and practitioners in the field of privacy
law sent a letter
to the deans of all U.S. law schools about privacy law education in
law schools.
My own brief intro about this endeavor is here in italics, followed
by the letter. The signatories to the letter have signed onto the
letter, not this italicized intro.
Although
the field of privacy law grown dramatically in past two decades,
education in law schools about privacy law has significantly lagged
behind. Most U.S. law schools lack a course on privacy law
The
following letter [click
here for the PDF version ]
aims to make deans aware of the privacy law field. I hope that the
letter is met with action.
[From
the letter:
Privacy
law is this century’s IP law.
Privacy
law is a large and rapidly growing field with nearly boundless job
opportunities.
Law
schools that offer real and deep education in privacy law are reaping
important competitive advantages.
Could
it happen here?
TW: Online
box office EZding liable for data theft and consequential damages
In
September 2019 a landmark appeal court decision found an online
information service provider liable for consequential damages of data
theft.
In
April 2017 subscribers and users of one of Taiwan’s most popular
box office websites, EZding,
reported numerous data theft incidents. EZding rejected the
complaints about its security management, insisting that it regularly
performed vulnerability scanning and, as a result, had received a
Trustwave compliance certificate for its data security.
The
plaintiff, a victim of the data theft, filed a civil action with the
Shilin District Court, claiming property loss and compensation for
non-pecuniary damages. She stated that she had received a scam phone
call requesting her authorisation of an account transfer to complete
a refund from EZding. After following the scammers instructions, the
plaintiff had lost approximately $8,500.
EZding
denied liability for all of the plaintiff’s claims. However, in
view of the police investigation report, the court considered EZding
liable for the data theft. Under Article 28 of the Personal Data
Protection Act, the plaintiff was therefore entitled to statutory
compensation of NT$20,000 (approximately $6,700). The plaintiff’s
other claims were rejected.
Automating
creativity raises a few questions.
Independent
Creation in a World of AI
Scholars
have long debated whether the outputs of AI systems should be subject
to copyright. On the one hand, the automated nature of many AI
systems may make copyright unnecessary as an incentive for the
creation of those AI systems’ outputs, in which case society would
be better off withholding copyright protections from them. On the
other hand, those outputs often exhibit sufficient creativity to
merit copyright protection, and without copyright, parties that use
AI systems to create such outputs may lack the necessary incentives
to do so.
In
this Essay, prepared as part of the Florida International University
Law Review's symposium on intelligent entertainment, I argue that
copyright law’s independent creation defense, as well as the
widespread availability of AI systems for helping authors in their
creative efforts, help address some of the concerns embedded in these
debates. Historically, the independent creation defense has rarely
applied, simply because independent creation of similar expression is
highly unusual. But as
this Essay explores, AI increases the likelihood of multiple parties
creating similar expression independently, meaning that
the defense can help defuse worries that applying copyright to AI
outputs will result in a copyright quagmire. Furthermore, the
availability of AI systems for assisting authors in their creative
efforts means that authors have tools for more readily creating
unique works that avoid many of the remaining copyright landmines.
Other
copyright issues linger, however, and the last part of this Essay
examines some of these concerns in brief. In particular, parties may
wish to use specific AI outputs in their own creative efforts, and
neither the independent creation defense nor the availability of AI
tools for creating something unique help address this problem.
Copyright law’s fair use defense may, however, and the Essay
concludes by briefly examining how.
I
doubt most lawyers even want to discuss the possibility.
On
Possibility of Perception of Modern Spanish Law Concepts of Legal
Personality for Artificial Intelligence: A View from Russia
Social
life and technical innovations are always ahead of their legal
regulation. This calls for a consistent reconsideration, renewal and
improvement of currently existing legislation. Scientific
discussions are now being held in Spain looking into the possibility
of granting legal personality to robots. The increasing
presence of artificial intelligence in our everyday life is rather
objective. Nevertheless, it causes people’s inconvenience and
anxiety. It is difficult for the legislator to define the level of
his impact which he or she can actually have on the problems of legal
regulation of the usage of using the artificial intelligence,
including the issues concerning prevention of crimes that involve
robots. The purpose of the following article is to study a number of
concepts of legal personality of artificial intelligence in Spain.
Some possibilities of proving a legal framework in the Spanish
legislation for these concepts are considered. A number of probable
problems caused by the vagueness of robots’ legal status are
examined. The opportunity of perception of artificial intelligence
as a subject of law in Spanish legislation is determined. The
leading methods of this research were systematic and comparative
approaches, methods of synthesis and analysis, which allowed to
analyze, summarize and systematize the concepts of legal personality
of artificial intelligence in Spain. As a result of studying the
following issues, the
authors came to the conclusion that there exists a crucial need to
establish some limits of legal personality of robots. The
public need for formation of a certain legal framework allowing to
resolve ethical and legal conflicts with participation of artificial
intelligence was discovered. The endeavor of society to harmonize
the legislation in the field of robotics at the international level
was revealed. The
necessity of hindering the usage of robots for criminal purposes was
proved
Perspective.
THE
EVERYTHING TOWN IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE
How
the tiny town of Roundup, Montana, became a hub in Amazon’s supply
chain
… It
all started in 2015. Kristal Graham, 39, had moved to the area ten
years earlier to work on a ranch, but when her brother died, she
turned to Amazon to sell off his books. She soon found herself
sucked into the world of Amazon Marketplace, the company’s platform
for third-party sellers that now represents the majority of goods
sold on the site. Though she had exhausted her supply of books, she
found she could buy all manner of goods (razors, K-Y Jelly, first-aid
kits) from other retailers and sell those on Amazon for a profit,
too.
This
sort of arbitrage is common
and has helped Amazon both expand its catalog and sap its
competitors. It’s hard for companies like
Nike to
refuse to sell on Amazon or for competitors like Target to lure
customers away with steep discounts when someone like Kristal can
just buy their wares and resell them at a markup. Amazon has made
buying stuff so frictionless and habitual, delivery so fast — and
for Prime members, free — that many
shoppers don’t
bother checking
prices anywhere else.
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