Pittsburgh Journal of Technology Law and Policy (University of Pittsburgh)
Not a member yet
177 research outputs found
Sort by
Flying the Friendly Skies May Not be so Friendly in Outer Space: International and Domestic Law Leaves United States’ Citizen Space Tourists without a Remedy for Injury Caused by Government Space Debris
Get PDF“Ladies and Gentlemen, we would like to welcome you to the moon. Please keep your seat belt fastened until the pilot completely stops at the gate. If this is your final destination, please collect your bags at baggage claim D. If you are headed on to Mars, your bags will be checked through to your final destination.”These words may sound funny now, but the possibility of them becoming a reality is not as far-fetched as it might seem. On September 18, 2006, Anousheh Ansari, a United States citizen of Iranian origin, became the fourth space tourist and the first female civilian to enter outer space.1 She also became the first astronaut to keep a space blog of her experiences to which readers could post a response.2 Shortly before Ms. Ansari’s adventure, on October 1, 2005, Gregory Olsen, scientist and entrepreneur, was the third paying civilian space tourist, and took flight on a Russian shuttle.3 Although his trip cost 20 million,4 it is not unforeseeable that ordinary citizens will soon be able to take a short trip around the moon or visit a space resort. It has been estimated that space tourism has the potential to generate 10 billion to $20 billion in income in the next few decades.5 Counting on that projection, Virgin Galactic, founded by Richard Branson (the well-known billionaire adventurer6), recently reached an agreement with the State of New Mexico to build a space port on state land.7 Moreover, recent batches of space vehicle competitions and exhibits have piqued greater interest in space tourism for adventurers, scientists, travel agents and government officials alike.
Regulatory Disparity: The Constitutional Implications of Communications Regulations That Prevent Competitive Neutrality
Get PDFIn recent years, the communications industry has changed drastically as new technologies have created industry convergence. On its face, convergence is beneficial to the consumer because it provides more options when choosing services, which in turn should lead to decreased prices. However, convergence has also led to enormous problems in communications regulations. Traditionally, the FCC regulated the industry with regulations that focused on the type of service provider and the technology medium used to provide services. While this worked for many years, the recent onslaught of convergent technologies has led to an environment where companies selling essentially the same services to consumers face different regulations because they use different mediums of transmission. This leads to obvious competition problems because some companies have fewer restrictions and/or costs associated with their service offerings. At this point, the FCC has begun to update its regulations to conform with the newly converged industry, but it still has a long way to go. In the mean time, companies are using defective regulatory classifications to their benefit. This sort of a system is not only unfair, but it is unconstitutional. The United States has long adopted the idea that corporations are “persons” under the constitution, and for that reason, the constitution bestows equal protection guarantees upon them. Corporations have rarely challenged the FCC’s regulations on constitutional grounds because they would probably be valid if examined under rational basis review. Until now, the FCC could hide behind technological distinctions and antitrust concepts to protect its regulations from equal protection claims. However, with the convergence of markets, a valid argument could be made challenging the government’s interest in its regulations. If a corporation makes that claim, the courts will have to decide whether these regulatory distinctions further a legitimate government interest. If the courts take a closer look, they may realize that the distinctions are arbitrary and capricious and mandate regulatory parity on equal protection grounds
The Limitations of “Information Privacy” in the Network Environment
Get PDFThe modern concept of privacy as a right to be let alone was developed in the context of print media. With the advent of digital technology, the focus of the privacy concept has changed to individuals’ right to control their information. In this essay, we explore why the individual right to control personal information is not enough to protect privacy in a meaningful way in a networked environment, given the interactive nature of the Internet and the voluntary nature of information activities of individual users. The greatest difficulty for individuals who become the object of surveillance in the current technological environment lies in the fact that as individual users\u27 identities become more and more exposed, subjects of surveillance and their activities become less and less identifiable. Given the power disparity regarding identifiability that always has existed between individuals and institutions and among different individuals, we argue that privacy should not only be an individual\u27s right but also a social good with concerns for the public interest
Undampened Oscillations in the Circuit: Combining the Components of 271(f) Doctrine Supplied by the Federal Circuit
Get PDFRecent Federal Circuit interpretations of patent infringement laws that control cross-border activities appear to be tangled and conflicting because they are not based upon any underlying doctrine. In this note I attempt to unravel andsynthesize current case law into a cogent set of principles. I demonstrate that, although the case law delineates a coherent doctrine, this doctrine is by no means ideal or well-settled due primarily to the fact that method claims areincluded in the purvey of a statute not originally enacted to regulate such inventions. This over breadth causes many tensions that require complex rules, such as the detailed doctrine necessary to properly determine component status of tangible products in relation to a process invention. Insome cases, these rules reinforce the underlying doctrine by correctly excluding certain situations from the creation of § 271(f) liability. This is done, however, at the great cost of complexity and awkwardness. These problems have not only increased the inherent tension in § 271(f) doctrine, buthave also unsettled the Federal Circuit itself, resulting in the issuance of contentious dissenting opinions acknowledging the shortcomings of the current majority. This paper shows that although it is possible to coherently synthesize current C.A.F.C. § 271(f) case law, the resulting rules leave thedoctrine in a precarious position that will not stabilize as long as § 271(f) governs process inventions
Escaping Davy Jones\u27 Locker: How the Motion Picture Industry Can Stop Digital Piracy Without Unnecessary Litigation
Get PDFContrary to popular belief, motion picture piracy is not a modern phenomenon.2 Indeed, Hollywood studios have been engaged in a continuous battle against pirates ever since theatres began showing films in the late nineteenth century.3 One of the earliest methods of motion picture piracy, for example, was the “bicycling of prints,” a practice by which a theatre operator would literally transport film reels between multiple theatres by bicycle to avoid the cost of licensing reels for each.4 With the advent of the Internet, however, the rate of motion picture piracy has increased exponentially. While truly measuring the extent of such illegal activity is impossible, recent estimates by the Motion Picture Association of America (“MPAA”) suggest that somewhere between 300,000 and 350,000 motion pictures are illegally downloaded from the Internet every day.5 With Hollywood studios already losing four billion dollars in potential profits each year to analog piracy,6 the continuous growth of digital piracy threatens the very existence of the motion picture industry. It is no surprise, then, that industry trade organizations like the MPAA are now feverishly searching for an effective way to address the problems posed by digital piracy
The National Counterterrorism Center: Foreign and Domestic Intelligence Fusion and the Potential Threat to Privacy
Get PDFLate last year, Americans woke, dressed, read the newspaper, and learned that the Federal Government had been spying on them for over three years. The White House had asked theNew York Times not to publish an article detailing President Bush’s authorization of National Security Agency (NSA) wiretapping of American citizens.1 The paper consequently delayed publication of the story for a year.2 When the news finally broke, it ignited a firestorm of public controversy
Searching for Initial Interest Confusion im Trademark Protection in Cyberspace
Get PDFThe modern Internet enables “millions of people to communicate with one another and to access vast amounts of information from around the world.”1 Due to the enormous repository of information the Internet makes available online, some have compared the Internet to an immense “library with no card catalog.”2 While web users can generally access web sites directly with a domain name, the sheer size of the Internet makes it difficult for the average web surfer to locate the majority of web sites unless they know the web site address beforehand.
Security Interests in Patents and Patent Applications?
Get PDFThere is a question mark in the title of this article because more questions than answers have been encountered in researching the topic. The relative certainty with which owners of furniture, equipment, accounts and most other personal property can obtain credit by granting a security in their property rapidly dissipates when the property in question is intellectual property. Owners of patents and other intellectual property find barriers to obtaining secured credit that are not faced by other property owners because there is a historical gap between the federal law protecting rights of intellectual property owners and state laws addressing secured transactions. The increasing importance of intellectual property to the economy of the United States (patent filings having increased by seventy percent since 19962 raises the visibility of this gap and urges consideration of changes in law. This would permit owners of intellectual property access to the same financing opportunities that are available to owners of other personal property. There seems to be no public policy that justifies the current situation
Who\u27s Walking the Plank?: The Recording Industry\u27s Fight to Stop Music Piracy
Get PDFThe advent of the Internet has forever changed the way people interact, communicate, and share information. The World Wide Web allows Internet users to send a letter in a matter of seconds, to instantly find out the latest sports scores and stock prices, or to learn of breaking world news. The Internet even allows people to have realtime conversations with other Internet users anywhere around the world. The Internet has also provided users a medium through which they can engage in any number of illicit acts. One of the more popular illicit acts, engaged in by millions of Internet users, involves trading music files across file sharing networks. Users accomplish this file sharing, or pirating, by copying the music from a compact disc onto their computers and uploading a file of the copied music onto a network created by software such as Kazaa or Napster. An infinite number of other users can then access this network, providing them an instant ability to copy the file of that song to their own computers
Online Casino Advertising: Testing the Limits of Commercial Speech
Get PDFThe advent of the Internet has revolutionized the daily lives of everyone by giving increased access to information and consumer transactions, while also adding change and further complexity to the law. Gambling has adapted to the arrival of the Internet with online sports books2 and online casino gambling,3 both developing a presence on the Internet. These new online casinos have begun to advertise both on the Internet and through more traditional broadcasting, like radio and television.4 As a result, the Department of Justice has begun to crack down on online casino advertisers, primarily by threatening prosecution against advertisers through the Wire Act (18 U.S.C. § 1084)