Friday, December 27, 2019


What did you get for Christmas?
Smart Home Tech, Police, and Your Privacy: Year in Review 2019
EFF: “If 2019 confirmed anything, it is that we should not trust the microphones and cameras that large corporations sell us to put inside and near our homes. Thanks to the due diligence of reporters, public records requesters, and privacy researchers and activists, consumers have been learning more and more about how these “smart” home technologies can be hacked, exploited, or utilized by the police and other law enforcement agencies. Because many technologies that record audio and video store their data on a cloud maintained by the company, police can gain access to stored content by presenting a warrant to those companies—bypassing consumers altogether. For instance, in November, police in Florida obtained a warrant for the recordings from an Amazon Echo that may have overheard a crime. This means that whether people think their Alexa is listening or not, their Alexa could be listening. Because Amazon stores and maintains that data, things said in the device’s presence can be made accessible to police via a warrant presented to the company…”




Starting to see the problem.
Law must be adapted for the Fourth Industrial Revolution
We are at the borders of a new revolution, characterized by a range of new technologies that are merging the physical worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries. It merges the capabilities of both the human and the machine, encompassing a wide swath of areas such as artificial intelligence, genome editing, biometrics, renewable energy, 3D printing, autonomous vehicles and the Internet of Things. Tech optimists posit that the wave of exponential growth in smart tech, artificial intelligence, machines and the interconnectedness of all aspects of modern life through technology will bring profound changes to society, and creates an unprecedented shift from the way we are familiar with — how we behave, interact and think.
However, like the industrial revolutions preceding it, the shifts in power brought about by such human-technological systems also bring about issues of inequality in terms of who benefits, as well as challenges to security, privacy and community.
… The legal challenges imposed by the Fourth Industrial Revolution are both new and greater. Data has now become a valuable business asset which fosters innovation, and lawyers must begin to ask the right questions in order to understand the creation process of data assets, its monetary value, and how it drives business.




IP is tougher in India? Some bits from the article.
Internet of Things (IoT) and Intellectual Property- The Interconnect
It has been predicted that by the year 2025, approximately 80 billion devices will be connected making an estimated economic impact of about $3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion per year[1]. With IoT said to be the next big thing, companies are spending huge amounts of money in the development of their versions of IoT to cash-in on the growing market trend.
… Companies such as Dell, Qualcomm, Google and even Rolls Royce have spent enormous amounts of money towards IoT. The International Data Corporation (IDC) has predicted a worldwide spending on IoT to reach $745 billion by the end of year 2019.[5] The numbers shows the potential growth revenues of this market and the seriousness of IP in the regard.
IoT and Patents
There has been a tremendous increase in the number of patent filings by tech giants in the field of IoT.
Software Patenting
Software per se is not protected under the Patent laws in India i.e. the source code cannot be protected.
IoT and Copyrights
Certain elements of computer programs can be protected by copyright as long as they are original. The code language in which the computer program is written, the graphical user interface (GUI) and the data collected or generated by the device are all copyrightable.[7]
Data ownership disputes
Although it is safe to say that copyright shall vest in the data collected by these IoT incorporated devices, however, it is difficult to ascertain the owner of such data.




Perspective.
Paper book readers better at various abilities than e-book readers
The Japan News: “People who habitually read paper books tend to have a higher degree of willingness to work on anything and to think more multilaterally than those who prefer to read electronic books on a smartphone or a computer, according to a recent survey by the National Institution For Youth Education, which was released Monday…
People who have a habit of reading possess such abilities regardless of the medium. But the survey has made it clearer that physical book readers are better in those abilities,” an official of the institution said…”



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