“Your Honor, the Car Crashed Itself”: Navigating Autonomous Vehicle Liability in an Age of Innovation
Julia Doskoch Autonomous vehicles are increasingly permeating the consumer marketplace. This trend has caused a conundrum in tort liability law. It is standard in product liability law for manufacturers to be held strictly liable for defective products, but there is a gray area when autonomous vehicles are involved in car accidents due to defects. This Article dissects various proposals concerning how the legal system should proceed regarding autonomous vehicle liability. This Article also advocates for federal regulation to define the legal personhood of autonomous vehicles in the eyes of the law. Read Full Text Here
The Intersection of Product Liability Law and the Internet of Things
Lucas M. Amodio Every year, an increasing number of Internet of Things devices are released. These devices can make our lives easier, but they also make our data, and potentially ourselves, more vulnerable to hackers. The question is no longer theoretical, as many of these devices can have a real impact on the world around them, like a networked sprinkler system that, if hacked, could flood a target’s basement. Going forward, we can look to the current law of product liability and the Federal Trade Commission to protect individuals from harm and loss when these devices might be compromised. Read...
Liability of Tesla’s Autopilot System Under California Tort Law
Jamin Xu On September 19, 2016, the U.S. Department of Transportation (“DOT”) published federal policy guidelines on automated vehicles in which it expressed its support for the development of autonomous vehicles and stated the potential of autonomous vehicles to drastically improve people’s safety and mobility. In order to address safety concerns, the Department released guidelines instructing states to close the gap between regulations that govern human-driven vehicles from self-driving ones by allocating tort liability among Highly Automated Vehicle (“HAV”) owners, operators, passengers, manufacturers and others when a crash occurs, while providing very little guidance in doing so. This approach encourages...
Who’s Fault Is It Anyway? The Modern State of 3D Printing Copyright Liability
Marx Calderon When new technology arises, lawmakers struggle to keep up: how do I perform the balancing act of managing risk through regulation without stymying innovation. An ongoing struggle is the 3D printer and its copyright liability. 3D printers take a complicated manufacturing process and puts in our homes instead of a factory. The ease in which a person can create an object at home is an incredible feat, but it comes with consequences. Specifically, owners of copyrighted images are weary of their products being reproduced at home and sold in a secondary market. This article briefly describes the source...
Digital Copyright, “Fair Access” and the Problem of DRM Misuse
Nicolo Zingales The advent of the digital age and the wide diffusion of copyrighted works over the Internet have brought about a drastic challenge to the pre-existing rules and legal standards governing the exchange of information. This article points out one of the ways the development of these new technologies has altered the boundaries of copyright, specifically by enabling copyright holders to strategically expand the scope of protection through the strategic use of Digital Rights Management (hereinafter, DRM). After a brief overview of these technologies and their contribution to the development of online markets for copyrighted works, the article discusses...
Inequitable Results in Transnational Patent Infringement Liability: Closing the Method Loophole
Alejandro Valencia A set of recent patent infringement cases are primed to have major impacts and, some argue, inequitable effects on the current patent scheme in the United States. A problem has arisen concerning what kind of patent protection, or lack thereof, method and process patents should receive when certain steps of those methods or processes are implemented outside the U.S. Read literally, as the courts have, current law requires a method to have taken place in the U.S. for protection. But what results when a method or process patent is infringed partially in the U.S. and partially abroad? Should...
P2P File-Sharing: What the Supreme Court Has an Opportunity to Consider
Margo E. K. Reder When the United States Supreme Court hears Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. (04-480) on March 29th, it has an opportunity to consider for the first time, the rights, responsibilities and liabilities of p2p network creators and their users, the content industry, and ISPs. Over 25 of the world’s largest entertainment conglomerates joined together in petitioning the Supreme Court for a grant of certiorari. Petitioners characterize this case as “one of the most important copyright cases ever to reach this Court. Resolution of the question presented here will largely determine the value, indeed the very significance, of copyright...
Been Deep Linked? Apparent Authority Might Link You to Liability
Tan Pham Current trends in trademark law have not met the issue of deep linking with open arms. To date, there is a dearth of cases that touch on deep linking and trademark infringement. Cases such as Ticketmaster Corp. v. Tickets.com dismissed claims of deep linking as trademark infringement with little explanation, simply stating that deep linking itself is not a trademark violation absent “confusion of source.” Yet, there is no case to set the boundaries at the other end of when deep linking would be trademark infringement; it can be implied then that the traditional tests of likelihood of confusion would most...
Narrowing the Definition of an Interactive Service Provider Under § 230 of the Communications Decency Act
Miree Kim Congress enacted § 230 of the CDA in response to two cases in the 1990s that set forth contrasting standards for defamation liability in suits against ISPs related to users’ activity on the Internet. In 1991, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York concluded that CompuServe, an ISP, was not liable for defamation because it simply enabled users to access the Internet. In 1995, the New York Supreme Court held that Prodigy, which provided a service comparable to CompuServe’s, should be held liable for defamation. Section 230 reflects Congress’s concern that imposing liability...