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Attacking Big Data: Strategic Competition, the Race for AI, and Cyber Sabotage
No full textSpeaker: Prof. Gary Corn, Director of the Technology, Law & Security Program and an adjunct professor at Washington College of Law. American Universit
Antisocial Innovation
Get PDFInnovation is a form of civic religion in the United States. In the popular imagination, innovators are heroic figures. Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, and (for a while) Elizabeth Holmes were lauded for their vision and drive and seen to embody the American spirit of invention and improvement. For their part, politicians rarely miss a chance to trumpet their vision for boosting innovative activity. Popular and political culture alike treat innovation as an unalloyed good. And the law is deeply committed to fostering innovation, spending billions of dollars a year to make sure society has enough of it. But this sunny vision of innovation as purely beneficial is mistaken. Some innovations, like the polio and Covid-19 vaccines, are unquestionably good for society. But many innovations are, on balance, neutral, and many more are simply bad for society (cigarette additives, worker surveillance, firearm bump stocks), or potentially catastrophic (artificial intelligence). Moreover, some neutral innovations transfer wealth from one group to another in ways that might be morally objectionable (pricing algorithms).
This Article argues that a fuller conception of innovation’s costs and benefits counsels a reorientation of law and policy. It begins with a taxonomy of various kinds of antisocial innovation, cataloging and describing individual, environmental, competition, labor, privacy, and societal harms. Then, the Article presents a series of policy recommendations to begin addressing antisocial innovation’s risks. We also consider further opportunities for law to engage in ex ante regulation of some kinds of innovation, to prevent harms before they arise
Bargaining in the Shadow of Poverty: New Pathways in International Intellectual Property Lawmaking
No full textProfessor Ruth Okediji, Jeremiah Smith Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, will deliver the 2024 David L. Lange Lecture in Intellectual Property, titled Bargaining in the Shadow of Poverty: New Pathways in International Intellectual Property Lawmaking. A foremost authority on the role of IP in social and economic development, Professor Okediji will explore how the interplay among U.S. identity politics, foreign relations crises, and the dynamics of European integration have shaped new frontiers in international IP lawmaking
