NSA Revelations Hurting US Tech

April 9, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Economy

Revelations of NSA spying cost US tech companies (NYT, 21 March 2014) – Microsoft has lost customers, including the government of Brazil. IBM is spending more than a billion dollars to build data centers overseas to reassure foreign customers that their information is safe from prying eyes in the United States government. And tech companies abroad, from Europe to South America, say they are gaining customers that are shunning United States providers, suspicious because of the revelations by Edward J. Snowden that tied these providers to the National Security Agency ‘s vast surveillance program. Even as Washington grapples with the diplomatic and political fallout of Mr. Snowden’s leaks, the more urgent issue, companies and analysts say, is economic. Tech executives, including Eric E. Schmidt of Google and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, are expected to raise the issue when they return to the White House on Friday for a meeting with President Obama. It is impossible to see now the full economic ramifications of the spying revelations – in part because most companies are locked in multiyear contracts – but the pieces are beginning to add up as businesses question the trustworthiness of American technology products. Despite the tech companies’ assertions that they provide information on their customers only when required under law – and not knowingly through a back door – the perception that they enabled the spying program has lingered. “It’s clear to every single tech company that this is affecting their bottom line,” said Daniel Castro, a senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, who predicted that the United States cloud computing industry could lose $35 billion by 2016 . Forrester Research, a technology research firm, said the losses could be as high as $180 billion , or 25 percent of industry revenue, based on the size of the cloud computing, web hosting and outsourcing markets and the worst-case scenario for damages.

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/Victor Habbick.

Licensing Education In Iran

April 7, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Education

Treasury Dept. issues license on exchange with Iran (InsideHigherEd, 21 March 2014) – The U.S. Department of Treasury on Thursday issued a general license allowing accredited U.S. universities to enter into academic exchange agreements with Iranian universities and permitting the export of some educational services, including university entrance examinations. The guidance also permits American universities and their contractors to enroll Iranian students in certain online undergraduate-level courses, including massive open online courses, or MOOCs. In January, Inside Higher Ed reported that the U.S. government had blocked access to the MOOC provider Coursera for individuals in Iran and other economically sanctioned nations.

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Audiorecording Without Permission Struck Down In Illinois

April 3, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment In the Law

Illinois Supreme Court strikes down broad ban on audiorecording conversations (Eugene Volokh, 20 March 2014) – Under Illinois law, any person who “knowingly and intentionally uses an eavesdropping device for the purpose of hearing or recording all or any part of any conversation” is committing a crime “unless he does so … with the consent of all of the parties to such conversation or electronic communication.” This isn’t limited to conversations that the parties reasonably intend to be private: “conversation” is defined as “any oral communication between 2 or more persons regardless of whether one or more of the parties intended their communication to be of a private nature under circumstances justifying that expectation.” DeForest Clark was indicted for violating this law; here’s how the ACLU of Illinois amicus brief describes the facts: [The] charges arose from a September 17, 2010 child support hearing before Judge Robert Janes in Kane County Circuit Court. Mr. Clark represented himself pro se at the hearing. The hearing was conducted in open court and no court reporter was present. Mr. Clark recorded the hearing in order to preserve a true and accurate record of public proceedings in which he was representing himself without the assistance of counsel and without the benefit of a court reporter. For the same reason, Mr. Clark also allegedly recorded a conversation between himself and opposing counsel, Colleen Thomas, prior to the hearing in a public hallway in the Kane County Judicial Center. Thursday, the Illinois Supreme Court held that the statute violates the First Amendment ( People v. Clark (Ill. Mar. 20, 2014) )

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Suing A Robot: Not An April Fool’s Joke

April 1, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment All

Can you sue a robot for defamation? (Ryan Calo at Forbes, 17 March 2014) – Life moves pretty fast. Especially for journalists. When an earthquake aftershock shakes America’s second largest city, news outlets scramble to be the first to cover the story. Today the news itself made news when various outlets picked up on a curious byline over at the Los Angeles Times : “this post was created by an algorithm written by the author.” The rise of algorithmically generated content is a great example of a growing reliance on “emergence.” Steven Johnson in his book by this title sees the essence of emergence as the movement of low-level rules to tasks of apparently high sophistication. Johnson gives a number of examples, from insects to software programs. As I see it, the text of the earthquake story likewise “emerged” from a set of simple rules and inputs; the “author” in question at the Los Angeles Times, Ken Schwencke, did not simply write the story in advance and cut and paste it. I imagine Schwencke had a pretty good sense of what story the algorithm would come up with were there an earthquake. This is not always the case. Even simple algorithms can create wildly unforeseeable and unwanted results. Thus, for instance, a bidding war between two algorithms led to a $23.6 million dollar book listing on Amazon. And who can forget the sudden “flash crash” of the market caused by high speed trading algorithms in 2010. I explore the challenges emergence can pose for law in my draft article Robotics and the New Cyberlaw . I hope you read it and let me know what you think. I’ll give you one example: Imagine that Schwencke’s algorithm covered arrests instead of earthquakes and his program “created” a story suggesting a politician had been arrested when in fact she had not been. Can the politician sue Schwencke for defamation? Recall that, in order to overcome the First Amendment, the politician would have to show “actual malice” on the part of the defendant. Which is missing. But, in that case, are we left with a victim with no perpetrator? If this seems far fetched, recall that Stephen Colbert’s algorithm @RealHumanPraise -which combines the names of Fox News anchors and shows with movie reviews on Rotten Tomatoes-periodically refers to Sarah Palin as “ a party girl for the ages ” or has her “ wandering the nighttime streets trying to find her lover .” To the initiated, this is obviously satire. But one could readily imagine an autonomously generated statement that, were it said by a human, would be libelper se .

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/Stuart Miles.

When MOOC Profs Move

March 31, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Education

When MOOC profs move (InsideHigherEd, 18 March 2014) – When faculty members move from one institution to the next, so do their courses, but after having spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare those courses to a massive audience, are universities entitled to a share of the rights? The question has so far gone unanswered (though not undiscussed) even at some of the earliest entrants into the massive open online course market, including Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since MOOC providers have gotten out of the intellectual property rights debate by saying they will honor whatever policy their institutional partners have in place, it falls on the universities to settle the matter. Almost two years after Harvard and MIT jointly launched the MOOC provider edX, Sanjay E. Sarma, director of digital learning at MIT, said his institution has “figured it out.” “Faculty have always had certain expectations and rights, and we want to respect them,” Sarma said. “In other words, we don’t want any new policy to change any rights they have right now.” Instead, Sarma said, MIT will introduce an interpretation of its intellectual property policy—which appears to support both the faculty members’ and the institution’s position—in the coming months.

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Software To Crowdfund With

March 28, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Tech for Lawyers

SeyfarthLean consulting unveils Disclosure Dragon software to “jumpstart” crowdfunding offerings (Seyfarth, 25 Feb 2014) – SeyfarthLean Consulting LLC, a subsidiary of law firm Seyfarth Shaw LLP, announced today its Disclosure Dragon software, designed specifically for the crowdfunding industry. Disclosure Dragon is the first advanced document automation solution that helps companies and online portals efficiently and effectively prepare the necessary legal and financial disclosure to conduct crowdfunding offerings. For small businesses and early stage companies, Disclosure Dragon automates, expedites and standardizes the development of a private placement memorandum (PPM) (or other required disclosure documents depending on the type of offering) and supporting exhibits required to satisfy the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission’s regulations pursuant to the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act of 2012. Traditionally handled by lawyers, consultants and other advisers, PPM development is typically an expensive and arduous process that proves insurmountable for many small companies. With its advanced user-populated engine, Disclosure Dragon’s interactive and adaptive framework auto-generates a draft PPM at a fraction of the cost and time, guiding users step by step through a detailed series of questions related to their businesses. PPM’s produced by Disclosure Dragon are expected to reduce the time and cost of preparing legal documentation by up to 80%. Importantly, further legal review will be required by the issuer’s counsel to finalize the PPM and is not provided by Disclosure Dragon. Disclosure Dragon will debut on Poliwogg, the leading life sciences funding platform, which expects that many of its funding clients will be attracted to Disclosure Dragon’s time and cost savings, as well as the standardization it provides. For these reasons, one such client, Insero Health, a clinical stage healthcare company developing novel therapeutics for the treatment of epilepsy, is already adopting Disclosure Dragon. This also marks one of first collaborations between Poliwogg and the Epilepsy Foundation, which announced in January their partnership to encourage investment and support for new therapies to help people living with recurrent seizures.

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/Stuart Miles.