BC Law Library Archive
BC Law Library Archive

Tag: technology

2025Blog Post

BLOG POST: Generative AI – The Future of Efficient Police Reporting?*

*This writing is a blog post. It is not a published IPTF Journal article. Maeve Silk Axon Draft One is an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that generates police reports using recorded audio from body cameras.[1] Police departments across the United States use such tools to increase efficiency.[2] Officers spending less time writing reports are free to spend more time directly interacting with, and protecting, members of their community.[3] If officers no longer draft police reports independently, their reduced direct involvement in the process—which reinforces accountability—could affect their policing methods.[4] Many fear that the use of AI to generate police reports...
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2025Blog Post

BLOG POST: Chain Reactions – Decentralized Web3 Markets and the Jurisdictional Challenge*

*This writing is a blog post. It is not a published IPTF Journal article. Mira Ward Augmented reality, virtual reality, and decentralized finance are the essential building blocks of Web3, the third generation of the internet.[1] Intuitively, Web3 is the successor of Web1 and Web2.[2] Web1 refers to the earliest phase of the internet, a set of non-interactive sites aimed at content consumption rather than creation.[3] Web2 allowed for content creation and user interaction.[4] Web3 offers a decentralized, borderless online economy where users can own and trade assets.[5] The decentralized nature of Web3, the Metaverse, and encrypted transactions raises numerous...
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2025Data PrivacyTechnology Law

Fragmented Data Privacy Laws: Time for Federal Legislation

Lydia Rudden Federal data privacy legislation is necessary to safeguard consumer data against privacy breaches by tech companies with increasingly intrusive data practices. In 2018, California pioneered its own comprehensive data privacy legislation, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Currently, with nearly half of U.S. states in the process of formulating their own digital privacy laws, businesses are struggling to maintain compliance, causing financial difficulties and harming innovation. Piecemeal state legislation also leaves consumers with disparate protection depending on where they live. Without a comprehensive and uniform federal law, Big Tech lobbyists shift their focus to securing industry-friendly regulations from...
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2024PublicityTechnology Law

“It Wasn’t Me”: Rethinking the Right of Publicity in the Context of AI-Generated Content

Alexa Spitz Critics have chastised the right of publicity for expanding beyond its practical and moral justifications. Although the criticism is meritorious, technological advancements call for a reevaluation of the right of publicity’s role in protecting the public from AI-generated “deepfakes.” Deepfake technology exudes exciting potential, but it also threatens to misappropriate and exploit individuals’ identities to the detriment of both victims and the public at large. Bad actors have already leveraged deepfake technology to perpetrate acts of nonconsensual pornography, bullying, and deceptive advertising. Such abuses inflict feelings of helplessness and loss of control on victims, and those feelings are...
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2024Copyright

Copyright Thickness, Thinness, and a Mannion Test for Images Produced by Generative Artificial Intelligence Applications

Molly Torsen Stech Human authorship has always been, and continues to be, a foundational requirement for copyright protection to subsist in a work. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) challenges this prerequisite but does not overcome it. The output of generative AI is not discernibly different from the output of a human author and therefore benefits from a false sheen of originality. While some argue that prompt engineering fulfills the requirements of originality––the threshold for which is quite low across jurisdictions––prompting still lacks the requisite link between human creativity and the resulting work to receive copyright protections. International copyright treaties and domestic...
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2024Technology Law

Hands Off My Post: Rethinking Section 230 and Private Online Platform Liability

Justin Sells Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and the Israel-Hamas conflict, private online platforms, namely, social media websites such as Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter), have censored their respective users by removing, downgrading, or materially altering users’ posts. Before Murthy v. Missouri, the United States government encouraged and coerced private online platforms to censor users. Arguably, the joint efforts of the U.S. government and private online platforms to censor users have resulted in First Amendment violations, copyright infringement, and breach of contract. Private online platforms, however, are shielded from liability under 47 U.S. Code Section 230. This Article argues that...
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2024Artificial IntelligenceTechnology Law

Regulating Into the Void: Existential Uncertainty from a AI Necessitates a New Federal Research Agency

Alexander C. Kurtz Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is a nascent technology that threatens great harm while simultaneously promising significant benefits. Although AI possesses incredible capabilities to solve problems and complete tasks, it also poses two major threats: technological dislocation and existential catastrophe. Accordingly, the novelty and power of generative AI has led to calls for regulation, including requests for a new federal agency. This Article examines whether Congress should authorize a new federal agency for AI and, if so, what its scope of authority should be. In contemplating such regulation, it is important to consider whether existing agencies can...
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2024Artificial IntelligenceTechnology Law

Shock & Awe: Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems and the Erosion of Military Accountability

Austin Tarullo In 2023, the United States Department of Defense announced plans to deploy autonomous weapons systems by 2025. These weapons, which can select and fire upon targets without human intervention, are no longer the lore of science fiction. Although fears that such weapons will lower the barriers to entry to war have spurred global calls to ban them, the Department of Defense’s announcement confirmed that the use of autonomous weapons is inevitable. AI applications in other sectors––including consumer products, medical diagnoses, and law enforcement––have illuminated shortcomings inherent to intelligent algorithms, including bias, opaqueness, an inability to comprehend causation, and...
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2024Technology Law

The Antitrust Alphabet: Amazon, Buy Box, and Competition

Nathaniel DeMelis Eighty-three percent of sales made on Amazon.com come from the “Buy Box” system. This website feature has come under increased scrutiny in the State of California and the United Kingdom. Both jurisdictions have sued Amazon, citing that Amazon’s Buy Box is anticompetitive and harms consumers at large. This Article considers the parallel lawsuits Amazon is facing and examines the different antitrust enforcement mechanisms and policy motivations in both California and the United Kingdom. Ultimately, this Article suggests that the California courts will find the Buy Box to be anticompetitive, due largely to their willingness to diverge from the federal consumer-welfare...
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2023Technology Law

Facial Recognition in the Eyes of the Law

Emilia Ball Law enforcement throughout the United States uses facial recognition technology to make arrests, despite proof that reliance on this mechanism for identifying subjects has led to several wrongful arrests. Due to the United States’ lack of comprehensive federal data privacy laws, most Americans are unaware that their photos and data make up the information that facial recognition databases use to make these arrests. This Article examines the current state of facial recognition technology and data privacy laws in the United States and the European Union. Moreover, it advocates for a federal data privacy law that accommodates current and...
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