Intellectual Property Law

The Laws of Technology and the Technologies of Law Event 2011

Posted on July 21, 2010
The Laws of Technology and the Technologies of Law Event 2011OverviewLawyers and legal institutions regularly face technological change. The public record of the Twentieth and this century is populated by numerous crisis events that surround emerging technology where law was called forth to channel, to regulate, or prohibit certain technologies and technological mediated activities...

Announcing Upcoming Virtual Conference

Posted on February 05, 2010
On March 18, 2010, from 1 pm to 5 pm (Eastern Standard Time), we will hold a 'virtual' conference in Second Life (at the Queen's University Faculty of Education virtual island). The topic of this conference will be the same as the one for our most recent blog: 'Human Autonomy, Law and Technology...

Summary: Human Autonomy, Technology and Law

Posted on March 10, 2009
I?d like to thank our bloggers for their many thought-provoking posts: Frank Pasquale, Jennifer Chandler, Kieran Tranter, Gaia Bernstein, Lyria Bennett-Moses, Lisa Austin, and Samuel Trosow (also thanks to Jennifer for suggesting the blog topic). Many thanks as well to Jim Chen for administrating the techtheory blog, and for helping out with technical glitches...

Bringing in some economic analysis (2)

Posted on March 05, 2009

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Bringing in some economic analysis

Posted on March 03, 2009

Introducing Samuel Trosow

Posted on March 02, 2009

Control yourself, or at least your ?core? self

Posted on February 28, 2009

Are We All Control Freaks Now?

Posted on February 26, 2009
Earlier this month, Facebook quietly changed its terms of service and waded into what I will call the ?control wars? over personal information. Facebook?s changes would enhance its control over users posted information, including material that had been deleted...

Introducing Lisa Austin

Posted on February 25, 2009
Thanks to Lyria and all of the previous bloggers for their many thought-provoking posts. We're now in the home stretch with two bloggers left to go.Our next blogger, Lisa Austin from the University of Toronto, conducts research in areas that include privacy law and the ethical and social justice issues raised by emerging technologies...

Technology bias

Posted on February 23, 2009
In her comment on my previous post, Gaia Bernstein asks an important question:The question is should the autonomy of scholars be constrained and their efforts be directed to areas of law where their insights would be most effective?Actually, I agree with Gaia, that the answer is "no...

Turning the lenses inward

Posted on February 22, 2009
With my posts, I am going to do a different blend of the concepts autonomy, law, technology and explore the reasons why legal scholars use their autonomy to focus on issues surrounding new technologies. By ?issues surrounding new technologies? I don?t mean why are we here discussing law and technology theory (there are, after all, relatively few of us, and many justifications we could offer for our choice of scholarship, some of which were collected in the MJLST symposium)...

Introducing Lyria Bennett Moses

Posted on February 21, 2009
Our next blogger, Lyria Bennett Moses, hails from the University of New South Wales.An earlier paper by Lyria discussed how the law deals with 'recurring dilemmas' when confronted with new technologies as well as the ways that technology change differs from other social changes that challenge traditional legal interests...

Two Technological Tales: Email and Minitel

Posted on February 20, 2009
We tend to think that a technology which failed to diffuse must have been a bad idea. But, there are technologies, which undergo long social adoption processes and eventually achieve mainstream adoption. These long social adoption processes, if at all acknowledged, are usually attributed off-handedly to technical issues...

The User as a Resister of New Technologies (or Hail the Couch Potato)

Posted on February 18, 2009
Legal scholars have recently discovered the user of new technologies. But, we tend to concentrate on a specific type of user ? the user as an innovator. We look at the user who designs, who changes a technology to reflect his needs. For example, much has been written about users innovating with open source software...

Introducing Gaia Bernstein

Posted on February 17, 2009
Our next blogger is Gaia Bernstein from Seton Hall Law School.Gaia, along with Frank Pasquale, organized and hosted our earlier law and technology theory blog.Gaia also organized the first symposium issue on works that considered the development of a general theory of law and technology...

Stories of Autonomy, Technology and Law II

Posted on February 15, 2009
The Autonomy StoryFreedom has exercised particular attraction to the modern imagination. The technology story saw the tool using human as freeing humanity from the constraints of a fickle and oppressive nature. The legal story saw contract and government as freeing human from too much freedom in the state of nature...

Stories of Autonomy, Technology and Law

Posted on February 13, 2009
I?ll address the most important topic raised in Art?s introduction. Re: Galactica. I am planning to do some more writing on Galactica later in the year and that might answer the question whether I am ?enjoying? Season 4. The enjoyment has morphed into a compulsion...

Introducing Kieran Tranter

Posted on February 13, 2009
We will hear next from Kieran Tranter of Griffith University.I first came across Kieran's law and technology work in an article where he studied the complex historical processes that influenced the regulation of automobiles in early 20th Century Australia...

Does technology make "an offer you cannot refuse"? Some thoughts on human autonomy and technology.

Posted on February 12, 2009
Autonomy is the state of freedom from external control and constraint one one?s decisions and actions. We are constrained by many things such as, for example, the earth?s gravity. Interestingly, many of our technologies increase our autonomy in the face of some of these constraints...

One of the slogans of the 1933

Posted on February 10, 2009
One of the slogans of the 1933 Chicago Worlds? Fair was the following: ?Science discovers, genius invents, industry applies, and man adapts himself to, or is molded by, new things...Individuals, groups, entire races of men fall into step with science and industry...

Introducing Jennifer Chandler

Posted on February 09, 2009
Up to bat next is Jennifer Chandler from the University of Ottawa.Jennifer writes in the areas of tort law, health law and cyberlaw, including discussions of network and software security. She also teaches an interesting course on 'technoprudence: legal theory in the information age...

More on the Tech-Driven Rat Race: From Professors to Police

Posted on February 08, 2009
I hope to get a chance to address the great comments on my last post soon. I'm going to do this second post now so I can get my contribution to this online symposium in the right ordering.In a recent discussion of the Nature Editorial I mentioned in my last post, one of its authors came under serious criticism for several flaws in its reasoning...

Cognition-Enhancing Drugs: Can We Say No?

Posted on February 06, 2009
A recent book on health care rationing in the US, Can We Say No?, worries that political pressures for health spending will ultimately bankrupt the US economy. This idea of a spending ratchet is a commonplace of the health care finance literature. Less well-covered has been a creep toward performance-enhancing drugs...

Introducing Frank Pasquale

Posted on February 05, 2009
Next up, we will hear from Frank Pasquale, currently visiting at Yale Law School.A serial blogger at Concurring Opinions and madisonian.net, Frank researches and writes in the areas of health law and intellectual property law. One of Frank's interesting law and technology papers 'Technology, Competition, and Values' reviews the role of law in promoting or inhibiting the diffusion of new technologies, and how this process affects social values...

Privacy and State Investigations Using New Technologies

Posted on February 03, 2009
Part of my research focuses on trying to understand how privacy laws and interests are challenged by technological change in the context of post-9/11 government surveillance.Countries such as Canada have constitutional protections against unreasonable state searches...

Instrumental and Substantive Theories of Technology

Posted on February 02, 2009
In my first post, I'll set out some background on different views on the relationship between human autonomy and technology. Technology thinkers are sometimes broken down into two groups: instrumental and substantive theorists (for discussion, see, for example, Andrew Feenberg, Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited (Oxford University Press, 2002)...

Introduction: Human Autonomy, Technology and Law

Posted on February 02, 2009
Do machines control us or do we control machines? Do we live in a Matrix-like environment oblivious to the fact that technologies structure our individual lives as well as the societies in which we live? Or are we in charge of these technologies?How one thinks about the relationship between individual autonomy (sometimes referred to as individual willpower or human agency) and technology can influence the way legal thinkers develop policy at the intersection of law and technology...

From Theory to Method

Posted on February 14, 2007
In this, my final post, I would like to move from theory to method.So far I have argued for the following propositions.This forum has set out Law, Technology and Society Studies (LTSS) an interdisciplinary project that uses social scientific material to generate some specific generalizations about law and technology...

Sovereignty, Heidegger, Haraway

Posted on February 13, 2007
In the last post I concluded with the observation that LTSS embodies an understanding of law as technology. In this post I want to interrogate this claim from within two theoretical traditions; legal theory and technology theory. I want to emphasis that my purpose is not to trash LTSS in a 1970s CLS style...

FRANKENSTEIN AND LAW AS TECHNOLOGY

Posted on February 09, 2007
In my last entry I finished on three points. First the contributions to this symposium seemed to be establishing a field of ?Law, Technology and Society Studies? (LTSS), but not providing a theoretical account of law and technology (LaTT).Second, while LTSS is a significant, worthwhile project which I strongly support, it is characterized by two absences...

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