Source: https://www.law.nyu.edu/areasofstudy/ip-and-innovation/intellectual-life/archived-ip-information-law-events
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 12:55:42+00:00

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A day-long gathering where innovation and intellectual property scholars presented their works in progress for commentary in a workshop environment. The papers for review examined issues on a variety of topics relating to innovation and intellectual property protection in design. The program included keynote talks by design experts Judy Yee (Microsoft) and Michael Bierut (Pentagram). The conference concluded with a paper slam in which authors shared information and invited commentary on their works in early stages of development.
This year, the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU School of Law hosted the annual International Intellectual Property Law Roundtable. Members of the Roundtable presented works in progress in a variety of fields, including international trademark law, trade secrecy law, and enforcement, as well as papers at intersection of intellectual property and development, human rights, and trade.
If you buy a book at the bookstore, you own it. You can take it home, scribble in the margins, put in on the shelf, lend it to a friend, sell it at a garage sale. But is the same thing true for the ebooks or other digital goods you buy? Retailers and copyright holders argue that you don’t own those purchases, you merely license them. That means your ebook vendor can delete the book from your device without warning or explanation—as Amazon deleted Orwell’s 1984 from the Kindles of surprised readers several years ago. These readers thought they owned their copies of 1984. Until, it turned out, they didn’t. In The End of Ownership, Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz explored how notions of ownership have shifted in the digital marketplace, and make an argument for the benefits of personal property. Of course, ebooks, cloud storage, streaming, and other digital goods offer users convenience and flexibility. But, Perzanowski and Schultz warn, consumers should be aware of the tradeoffs involving user constraints, permanence, and privacy. The rights of private property are clear, but few people manage to read their end user agreements. Perzanowski and Schultz argued that introducing aspects of private property and ownership into the digital marketplace would offer both legal and economic benefits. But, most important, it would affirm our sense of self-direction and autonomy. If we own our purchases, we are free to make whatever lawful use of them we please. Technology need not constrain our freedom; it can also empower us.
An entertaining multimedia presentation by Peter S. Menell (UC Berkeley Law, Koret Professor of Law and Co-Director, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology) concerning the long-running IP litigation between Oracle and Google pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. At issue in Oracle v. Google is whether Oracle can claim a copyright on Java APIs (software) and, if so, whether Google infringes these copyrights. Christopher Sprigman (NYU School of Law and Engelberg Center Faculty Co-Director) provided commentary.
A presentation on the recent litigation between two universities (the MIT- and Harvard-affiliated Broad Institute versus UC Berkeley) concerning their respective patent claims to the gene editing technology CRISPRCas9. Our expert panelists discussed the CRISPR technology, which was developed via federal research grants, and the patent litigation issues. In particular, they offered their perspectives on how the recent ruling may affect the short-term strategy of companies seeking to innovate using the CRISPR platform, and the longer-term implications of these universities’ CRISPR licensing strategies for downstream innovation using the CRISPR platform.
The 2017 Tri-State Region IP Workshop brought together intellectual property scholars (including professors, fellows, visitors, graduate students, and practitioners) from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Philadelphia to present their works in progress for commentary in a workshop environment. The papers examined issues concerning patent law, copyright law, teaching intellectual property, and intellectual property theory.
The 2016 IP Institute, co-hosted by the Engelberg Center and Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, brought together leading judges, scholars, business people, and lawyers in the field to discuss developments across a range of intellectual property topics. The speakers included: The Honorable Raymond T. Chen (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit); The Honorable Paul R. Michel (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit) (Retired); The Honorable Leonard P. Stark (U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware); The Honorable Joseph J. Farnan, Jr. (U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware) (Retired); The Honorable Faith Hochberg (U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey) (Retired); The Honorable Denise L. Cote (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York); The Honorable Colleen McMahon (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York); Professor Scott Hemphill (NYU School of Law); and a demonstration of IBM Watson (The Platform for Cognitive Business).
This conference assembled distinguished federal jurists, academics, and practitioners to discuss whether the 7th Amendment guarantees a right to a jury trial in patent cases and to analyze, in a series of presentations and roundtable discussions, current issues and trends in how patent jury trials are conducted. The Honorable Kathleen O’Malley delivered the keynote address. Mark Lemley presented an update to his 2013 paper Rush to Judgment? Trial Length and Outcomes in Patent Cases. Engelberg Center Student Research Fellow Margaret Diamond discussed data on current trends in patent trials. The conference was hosted by NYU School of Law’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy and the Civil Jury Project at NYU School of Law.
The conference brought together distinguished academics, industry representatives, and policy experts to discuss how the music licensing ecosystem can compensate the right people more transparently, fairly, and efficiently. Roundtable discussions included: How do we structure a modern digital music distribution music-licensing ecosystem to be more competitive and work efficiently and fairly for all stakeholders?; Deep Dive into Digital Databases; What Changes to the Current System Are Feasible that Would Facilitate a Transition to a More Competitive Market? The conference was jointly organized by the Technology Policy Institute and New York University School of Law’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy.
The conference brought together experts from academia, industry, and government to discuss how to modernize the U.S. Copyright Office to best serve the needs of content creators, distributors, users, and the general public in the digital era. Speakers included Sandra Aistars, George Mason University Law School; Stuart Benjamin, Duke Law School; Troy Dow, Disney; Dave Green, Microsoft; Joseph Liu, Boston University Law School; Bill Raduchel, independent director and investor; Arti Rai, Duke Law School; Mary Rasenberger, The Authors Guild; Pam Samuelson, Berkeley Law School; Matt Schruers, Computer & Communications Industry Association and Georgetown Law School; and Chris Sprigman, New York University School of Law. The conference was jointly organized by the Duke Law School Center for Innovation Policy and the New York University Law School’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy.
IPNY: Whose Knowledge Is It Anyway? Innovations in Traditional Knowledge Protection.
Whose Knowledge Is It Anyway? focused on the project entitled Local Contexts and its application from both tribal and institutional perspectives. Local Contexts, www.localcontexts.org, is an online platform that was developed to address the intellectual property needs of Native, First Nations, Aboriginal and Indigenous peoples in relation to the extensive collections of cultural heritage materials currently held within museums, archives, libraries and private collections. This project addresses the unique problem of public domain materials and third party owned content that is divorced from local communities and missing important information about use and circulation. One of the key devices for engaging this curatorial challenge is the suite of Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels. Professor Jason Schultz (Professor of Clinical Law) NYU School of Law, moderated the discussion along with panelists Professor Jane Anderson, NYU, James Francis, Sr., Penobscot Nation, and Dr. Elizabeth Peterson, American Folklife Center.
Innovation experts from industry, government, and academia discussed the rise of successful technology clusters in Silicon Valley, Israel and elsewhere, and whether there’s a “special sauce” that others can copy to develop their local regional innovation centers. The conference was jointly organized by Teva Pharmaceuticals, AIPLA, Goodwin Procter LLP, and NYU School of Law Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy.
A discussion with the Honorable Pauline Newman and the Honorable Timothy B. Dyk, United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, as they fielded questions from Professor Rochelle C. Dreyfuss, NYU School of Law, and Anne Hassett, Engelberg Center Executive Director, regarding their perspectives on Supreme Court review of important issues in intellectual property law.
Over the past two decades the number of secondary pharmaceutical patents has grown in developed countries, together with concern about the diffusion of this practice to developing countries. Some developing countries have enacted policies restricting their grant on the view that such patents are not sufficiently innovative inventive and can raise prices and create barriers to access to medicines. The conference brought together academics and practitioners to examine (1) the restrictions that exist in developed and developing countries on obtaining and enforcing secondary patents, and their effectiveness; (2) whether and how secondary pharmaceutical patents affect prices and access to medicines, and their impact, if any, on innovation incentives. This conference was sponsored by NYU School of Law’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy and The London School of Economics and Political Science.
The Workshop brought together intellectual property scholars (including professors, fellows, visitors, graduate students, and practitioners) from the tri-state region (broadly defined to include Philadelphia also) to present their works in progress for commentary in a workshop environment.
This conference, presented jointly by the Engelberg Center and Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, assembled thought leaders in the field of IP for a day of discussion focused on cutting-edge issues affecting innovation, intellectual property law and practice, and competition in the domestic and international arenas. The keynote speaker was The Honorable Diane P. Wood, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
The Engelberg Center co-hosted with Engine a panel discussion of the implications of the litigation challenging the FCC’s Order implementing net neutrality (United States Telecom Association v. Federal Communications Commission, et al.) in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which will be argued on December 4, 2015. The discussion also considered the impact on Internet businesses if the Court upholds only portions of the order. Panelists included: Michael Cheah, Vimeo, Jameson Dempsey, Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, Julie Samuels, Engine, and Professor Christopher Sprigman, NYU School of Law.
The meeting was an off-the-record conversation about labor and employment issues for NY Tech startups with the NY Attorney General’s Internet bureau.
ETH/NYU Transatlantic Innovation Scholarship Conference: Design Protection → Design Innovation?
IPRs at the PTAB: Should They Be District Court Lite or a Second Bite at the Prosecution Apple?
Engelberg Center Executive Director Anne Hassett moderated a panel discussion among industry representatives, including the pharmaceutical and high tech industries, on whether innovation is better supported by having the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) apply in inter partes review (IPR) proceedings the same legal standards that U.S. District Courts apply in patent litigation or the standards which the USPTO applies in patent prosecution. Panelists included: Matthew Levy, Computer and Communications Industry Association; Hans Sauer, Biotechnology Industry Organization; Jaime A. Siegel, ACACIA Research Group LLC; Marian Underweiser, IP Policy & Strategy, IBM; Jane Wasman, Acorda Therapeutics, Inc.
Will Fee Shifting Help or Hinder Patent Enforcement?
Professor Jason Schultz moderated a discussion on whether fee shifting as proposed in Congress is needed in view of the relaxed standard for exceptional case recovery since the SCOTUS decisions in Octane and Highmark. Panelists included: Eric Cohen, Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP; John Desmarais, Desmarais LLP; Professor Rochelle Dreyfuss, NYU Law; Theresa Gillis, Mayer Brown LLP; David Kappos, Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP; John Pegram, Fish & Richardson.
The Annual Tri-State Region IP Workshop brought together intellectual property scholars (including professors, fellows, visitors, graduate students, and practitioners) from the tri-state region to present their works in progress for commentary in a workshop environment. The papers examined issues concerning patent litigation, patentability, downstream market effects of intellectual property, intellectual property in the high-tech sector, and copyright law.
This conference, presented jointly by the Engelberg Center and Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, assembled thought leaders in the field of IP for a day of discussion focused on cutting-edge issues affecting innovation, intellectual property law and practice, and competition in the domestic and international arenas. The keynote speaker was The Rt. Hon. Professor Sir Robin Jacob, University College London, who presented a European perspective on the U.S. IP system. The various panels examined the issues from the perspectives of industry, the judiciary, academia, and federal and state agencies. Together with the Honorable Faith S. Hochberg (U.S. D.N.J.) and Micky Minhas, Microsoft Corporation, Professor Dreyfuss participated in a panel discussion on “What Litigators Need to Know About U.S. PTO Post-Grant Processes.” Professor Dreyfuss and David J. Kappos were co-organizers of the IP Institute.
The Authors Guild lawsuits against Google and its library partners (brought separately as Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust) have set much of the stage for how U.S. copyright law impacts efforts to mass digitize book collections. On December 3, 2014 at 2 p.m., the Second Circuit heard argument in the appeal of Authors Guild v. Google, where Judge Denny Chin granted judgment in favor of Google, finding that its book digitizing activities were fair use under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act. This panel focused on the contents of the appeal, including the questions presented, the briefing, the argument, and the implications for any certiorari petition to the Supreme Court. Featured speakers included: Greg Cram, Associate Director of Copyright and Information Policy, New York Public Library; Jeremy Goldman, Frankfurt Kurnit Klein + Selz PC, Counsel for the Authors Guild; Joseph Gratz, Durie Tangri LLP (Counsel for Google); Corynne McSherry, Intellectual Property Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation; Professor Jason Schultz, Director, Technology Law & Policy Clinic and Co-Director of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy; and Fred von Lohmann, Legal Director for Copyright, Google. Co-sponsored by the New York Public Library.
Stream the panel discussion here.
Laura Sheridan, Patent Counsel at Google, discussed ideas for improving the quality of U.S. patents, focusing both on institutional reforms that could make the PTO better at turning away low-quality patent applications, and changes in the patent law that could also help us reach that goal. The Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy faculty also shared their insights.
Discussion of the political, legal, and technological questions raised by the increasing use of “warrant canaries” by technology companies to inform the public about government surveillance.
This conference launched the Engelberg Center's Empirical Initiative for empirical research related to intellectual property law and other legal rules that affect innovation. The goal for the Initiative is to provide a foundation for data-driven consideration of whether, and how, to reform these areas of law. The conference brought together leaders in the empirical study of intellectual property and innovation, as well as scholars and researchers in related areas, to discuss existing research on intellectual property, assess where progress has been made toward producing policy-relevant evidence, identify key policy-relevant questions that are in need of further study, and consider the directions and methods for future research. Colleen V. Chien (Senior Advisor to the CTO, Intellectual Property and Innovation White House Office of Science and Technology Policy) delivered the keynote address. Each of the three plenary panels (Copyright, Patent, and Trademark) discussed a specific empirical question of importance to IP policy. Professors Jeanne Fromer, Christopher Sprigman, and Katherine Strandburg organized the conference.
Coinciding with the US launch of the graphic novel, Ricky Rouse Has a Gun, this panel asked whether copyright has lost one of its principle functions: to protect authors and original ideas. In the digital age, does copyright have a purpose beyond protecting corporations from illegal copying and file sharing? Panelists include Jörg Tittel, Author, Ricky Rouse Has a Gun; Charles Brownstein, Executive Director, Comic Book Legal Defence Fund; Professors Christopher Sprigman and Barton Beebe, NYU School of Law.
This interdisciplinary conference, co-sponsored with the International Association for the Study of the Commons, convened an international group of researchers studying cooperative arrangements for sharing intellectual resources, or “knowledge commons.” Focusing on the fields of medicine and the environment, presenters considered how knowledge commons work, what contributes to their durability and effectiveness, and what undermines them. Professor Katherine Strandburg was co-chair of the conference.
This focused interdisciplinary workshop brought together researchers studying medical and health innovation from the user innovation and knowledge commons governance approaches; explored potential synergies between these two groups of researchers, who brought different backgrounds, methodologies, and expertise to these issues; and interrogated and critiqued the role of intellectual property in medical research and innovation in light of the potential for user innovation and knowledge commons approaches.
The inaugural IPNY event; a new series of public lectures from experts on contemporary issues of IP and innovation law and policy. For the first installment of IPNY, Richard Mendelson and Professor Sprigman had a lively debate on the role of geographical indications.
March 9, 2014 marked the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision on the freedom of the press in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. In the decision, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment protects reports about public officials -- even false ones -- unless they have been made with actual malice (with knowledge that they are false or in reckless disregard of their truth or falsity). This case allowed much of the press reports on civil rights in the South to move forward. Fifty years later, we convened to consider the implications and lasting significance of the Supreme Court's decision.
The inaugural Innovation Law & Policy Edit-a-thon, co-sponsored by the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy and the Wikimedia Foundation, brought together a coalition of experienced editors, as well as law professors, activists, and other professionals, to create and improve Wikipedia articles at the intersection of law and policy.
The Annual Tri-State Region IP Workshop brought together intellectual property scholars (including professors, fellows, visitors, graduate students, and practitioners) from the tri-state region to present their works in progress for commentary in a workshop environment.
Stream the keynote speech here.
The Drones & Aerial Robotics Conference was a multidisciplinary conference about UAVs and drones—with a special emphasis on civilian applications. DARC broadens the public conversation beyond the privacy and targeted killing debates. We delved deep into the impact of unmanned systems on society and advance knowledge in legal and practical domains.
The entire cosmos has been hopelessly hooked on humanity's music ever since "Year Zero" (1977 to us), when American pop songs first reached alien ears. This addiction has driven a vast intergalactic society to commit the biggest copyright violation since the Big Bang. The resulting fines and penalties have bankrupted the whole universe. We humans suddenly own everything-and the aliens are not amused. Join author and entrepreneur Rob Reid for a unique look at the institution of copyright law, followed by a conversation with David Pashman (General Counsel, Meetup) and a Year Zero book signing.
An informal discussion between Judges Timothy Dyk and Pauline Newman. The interchange was lively as both are judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit with very different ideas about intellectual property policy and theories of adjudication.
The Defensive Patent License (DPL) is a new legal mechanism to protect innovators by networking patents into powerful, mutually-beneficial legal shields that are 100% committed to defending innovation – no bullies, trolls, or other leeches allowed. It is designed to address the most broken parts of the patent system. The DPL also helps prevent adversaries from patenting open technologies and pulling them out of the public domain. It is an open source-style patent license that seeks to promote the use of patents to encourage freedom to innovate & to operate instead of using them to shut down competition, for rent-seeking, or to inhibit access to knowledge. This approach offers several potential benefits, especially to open innovation communities and/or start-ups: 1) A way to legally bind companies/patents to exclusive defensive use; 2) A way to allow those who are skeptical/critical of the patent system to participate without worry that their innovations will be offensively weaponized; 3) A way to improve prior art by filing defense-oriented patent applications that will preempt future offensive applications; 4) A way to prevent patent trolls from exploiting patents by preemptively committing them to defensive-only use; and 5) A way to provide access to a clear collection of patents that anyone can use for free as long as they are also committed to defensive uses.
Professors, fellows, visitors, graduate students, and practitioners from the tri-state region presented their works in progress for commentary in a workshop environment. Topics were related to intellectual property or information law. The format involved a series of plenary sessions chaired by a senior commentator. This annual workshop will make it possible for IP and information law scholars located in the tri-state region to get together on a more regular basis to share and discuss each other’s work.
A panel discussion on how to transition from law school to private practice.
The purpose of this workshop was to gather scholars from a variety of disciplines who share interests in the study of commons as governance regimes in information, knowledge, and other cultural contexts. The focus was on institutional analysis of commons, common pool resources, and related institutions for governance of knowledge and information and rights in knowledge and information. Relevant disciplines included law, political science, economics, sociology, organizational science, information science, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and the history of science and technology, among others.
This workshop brought together a small group of legal and cultural scholars to explore the concept and the utility of cultural protocols in relation to Indigenous and local knowledge management issues. The focus of the workshop was predominately legal – and this is quite deliberate. In thinking about the possibilities of protocols and how they can be used as a useful strategy as well as a tool of leverage for Native American communities in the United States, as well as elsewhere, it is critical that there is an inter-linked and robust legal framework that can work in support of the further development of cultural protocols. This will not only contribute to the ability for communities to make informed decisions about how cultural protocols can be effectively utilized, but also provide significant background work in the instances where specific cultural protocols are undermined or delegitimized by third parties.
This Workshop considered the draft report of a project undertaken as part of NYU’s Global Administrative Law (GAL) Network, sponsored by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada and jointly coordinated by the University of the Andes (Colombia) and NYU. The project was aimed at examining, through a series of case studies, the processes and administrative mechanisms that states use internally to negotiate the balance between intellectual property rights and other policy and human rights considerations.
User and Open Innovation: How Should Intellectual Property Law Respond?
The NYU’s Engelberg Center and the UC Berkeley Center for Law & Technology co-sponsored a workshop to consider the implications of user and open innovation for intellectual property doctrine. The importance of these creative paradigms relative to centralized innovation by manufacturers and mass media producers is increasingly recognized in the business community, yet has not been systematically addressed by intellectual property law. The workshop brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars of law, management, and economics to consider whether and in what specific ways intellectual property law should be modified to accommodate the increasing importance of innovation by users for their own use and of collaborative and open processes of innovation.
The Engelberg Center at NYU School of Law and the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law [MPI] held a two-day workshop to consider whether Enough is Enough: whether it is time to consider limits on the expansion of intellectual property rights within the international framework. The intent is to talk about existing limits within, and outside, intellectual property law (including human rights and competition law). Also considered were existing proposals for mandatory limits imposed through international intellectual property law.
A workshop for the authors of the Trade Secrecy book in the hope of making the final volume better integrated and giving the authors the opportunity to benefit from one another’s feedback.
The Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law Society of NYU School of Law hosted a symposium on digital convergence and copyright. The Symposium was held under the aegis of Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy. The Symposium addressed copyright issues associated with emerging media services, from both a business as well as legal perspective, discussing digital distribution of entertainment and phenomenon that blurs the boundaries between different media and copyrightable subject matters.
In June, 1998, The Engelberg Center convened a conference at La Pietra to examine the expanding boundaries of intellectual property protection. Various proposals were made for cabining the trend. Subsequent experience has demonstrated, however, that cabining is politically unfeasible and administratively difficult. In the face of increasing concern that strong rights could hinder innovation and slow dynamic competitiveness, this conference was organized to investigate approaches to working within the expanding intellectual property paradigm.
This workshop explored the case for expanding trademark protection beyond its traditional realm, examined its implementation in practice, and considered countervailing considerations.
The Privacy Research Group is a weekly meeting of students, professors, and industry professionals who are passionate about exploring, protecting, and understanding privacy in the digital age.
Explanation has long been deemed a crucial aspect of accountability. By requiring that powerful actors explain the bases of their decisions — the logic goes — we reduce the risks of error, abuse, and arbitrariness, thus producing more socially desirable decisions. Decisionmaking processes employing machine learning algorithms and similar data-driven approaches complicate this equation. Such approaches promise to refine and improve the accuracy and efficiency of decisionmaking processes, but the logic and rationale behind each decision remains opaque to human understanding. The symposium grappled with the question of when and to what extent decisionmakers should be legally or ethically obligated to provide humanly meaningful explanations of individual decisions to those who are affected or to society at large.
Obfuscation strategies offer creative ways to evade surveillance, protect privacy, and improve security by adding, rather than concealing, data to make it more ambiguous and difficult to exploit. This interdisciplinary workshop convened researchers, scientists, developers, and artists to discuss a broad range of technical, theoretical, and policy approaches to obfuscation, from tools that anonymize users’ social media data to new methods for writing code itself. The workshop surveyed some of the existing and emerging applications and technologies, threat models and scenarios for which obfuscation offers solutions, tests and tools for studying the strengths and weaknesses of obfuscation approaches, new challenges and applications (such as authentication, intellectual property, and security), benchmarks and approaches to formalizing obfuscation strategies, and general best practices for design, implementation, and evaluation of obfuscating systems.
This workshop provided a forum for work that explores the benefits and drawbacks of thinking about privacy—legally, practically, and conceptually—in terms of property. Given our common law heritage, the association between privacy and property is reflexive and ingrained. Nevertheless, significant problems arise in trying to make property norms “do the work” for privacy, particularly with respect to issues of data privacy. At the same time, it would also be wrong to dismiss property norms as wholly irrelevant to privacy. The right question, ultimately, is how property concepts and doctrines can be profitably incorporated into discussions of privacy—and likewise, to what extent we should wary about leaning too much on property-privacy analogy, in lieu of theorizing privacy independently.
The Conference, co-organized by NYU Department of Media, Culture and Communication, and BCLT, addressed two related issues. The first is a set of normative challenges associated with the open data movement, including e.g. privacy and other civil liberties, equitable access to data, and what counts a public interest. The second addressed obligations of private/commercial holders of data to make their holdings available for public and research purposes. Panels included leading thinkers and actors representing a range of perspectives and positions. The conference kicked off with a keynote address by Dr. Amen Ra Mashariki, City of New York's Chief Analytics Officer in charge of the Mayor's Office of Data Analytics.
The Information Law Institute hosted an informal meeting with FTC Commissioner Julie Brill to discuss consumer privacy and other topics of mutual interest.
This Symposium, co-hosted by the Center on Law and Security, presented cutting-edge research on domestic, international and transnational legal approaches to regulating government access to data stored in the cloud. The Symposium brought legal scholars together with participants who bring law enforcement, industry, privacy advocacy and human rights perspectives to bear on the important and often contentious debate about this rapidly evolving issue.
The threats to privacy are well known: the NSA tracks our phone calls, Google records where we go online, companies constantly lose our personal information, and our children are fingerprinted and their test scores saved for posterity. Professors Helen Nissenbaum, Frank Pasquale, and Katherine Strandburg; policy experts Sheila Kaplan and Faiza Patel; and contributing editor, Jeramie Scott celebrated the publication of Privacy in the Modern Age The Search for Solutions. The discussion was moderated by contributing editor, Professor Katherine Strandburg. Opening remarks by contributing editor, Jeramie Scott. Sponsored by NYU Information Law Institute and Electronic Privacy Information Center.
More than ever before, people today rely on cloud computing services for email, online storage and backup, social media, video services, and gaming. However, the laws governing data privacy obligations were written long before anyone dreamed up the cloud. This makes regulatory issues very complicated at the purely domestic level, but even more so when cross-jurisdictional issues come into play as users, their data, and technology providers can all reside in different physical locations. In fact, government and industry are grappling with these issues on many fronts – in diplomatic discussions between the U.S. and Europe, in legislation introduced in the U.S. Senate, and, most recently, in a legal case brought by Microsoft Corp. challenging a US government search warrant for customer communications stored in a company datacenter in Dublin, Ireland. This talk explored the specific legal questions raised by these jurisdictional issues, the laws involved, and arguments on how these issues should be resolved. Panelists included Ira Rubinstein, Senior Fellow, Information Law Institute, Zachary Goldman, Executive Director, Center on Law and Security, and Katherine Strandburg, Alfred B. Engelberg Professor of Law.
Scholars, stakeholders, and policymakers question the adequacy of existing mechanisms governing algorithmic decision-making and grapple with new challenges presented by the rise of algorithmic power in terms of transparency, fairness, and equal treatment. Algorithms increasingly shape our news, economic options, and educational trajectories. The centrality and concerns about algorithmic decision making have only increased since we hosted the Governing Algorithms conference in May 2013. This event built upon that conversation to address legal, policy and ethical challenges related to algorithmic power in three specific contexts: media production and consumption, commerce, and education. Organized by the Information Law Institute, NYU School of Law and cosponsored by NYU Steinhardt Department of Media, Culture and Communications, the Intel Science & Technology Center for Social Computing and Microsoft.
The roundtable, co-hosted by the Center on Law and Security, addressed legal and policy issues related to government cloud access spurred by the Microsoft search warrant case. It was a closed door/off-the-record session conducted according to Chatham House Rules.
Together with the Microsoft Innovation and Policy Center, the Information Law Institute organized a symposium on student privacy in higher education entitled “Building Privacy into Data-Driven Education.” The event examined the new ethical concerns, legal questions and institutional challenges raised by the growth in use of data-driven platforms at higher education institutions.
The Symposium on Obfuscation brought together experts from a variety of backgrounds who study, script and design technologies that either simulate, detect, or are susceptible to obfuscation. By obfuscation we mean the production of misleading, ambiguous and plausible but confusing information as an act of concealment or evasion. In the course of the day, we explored and assessed the use of obfuscation as a strategy for individuals, groups or communities to hide; to protect themselves; to protest or enact civil disobedience, especially in the context of monitoring, aggregated analysis, and profiling in (digital) space.
The Security Research Seminar at New York University, launched in January 2014, is a weekly meeting of students, faculty, policy makers and industry professionals interested in analyzing the ways in which advanced technologies are putting pressure on legal regimes and concepts of security. The seminar addresses a variety of perspectives on security in a digital age, including security of information and software, computer networks, cyber-physical systems and infrastructure and will include discussions about national as well as international cyber-security law and policy.
Algorithms are increasingly invoked as powerful entities that control, govern, sort, regulate, and shape everything from financial trades to news media. Nevertheless, the nature and implications of such orderings are far from clear. What exactly is it that algorithms “do”? What is the role attributed to “algorithms” in these arguments? How can we turn the “problem of algorithms” into an object of productive inquiry? This conference set out to explore the recent rise of algorithms as an object of interest in scholarship, policy, and practice.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has defined the PHR as an “electronic record of health-related information on an individual that conforms to nationally recognized interoperability standards and that can be drawn from multiple sources while being managed, shared, and controlled by the individual” (2008:19). Introducing the term “portfolio,” we sought to broaden the initial conceptualization and explored parallels with similar initiatives in other social contexts.
The age of ubiquitous computing is here. People routinely carry smartphones and other devices capable of recording and transmitting immense quantities of personal information and tracking their every move. Privacy has suffered in this new environment, with new reports every week of vulnerabilities and unintended disclosures of private information. The conference aimed to bring together the policy and technology communities to discuss the substantial privacy issues arising from the growth of mobile and location technologies.
The Roundtable brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars of privacy, intellectual property, and the digital society to debate and discuss issues revolving around the relationships between technological platforms and their users, with an eye toward the role that law might play in mediating or structuring these relationships. Roundtable Sessions approached the topic from a variety of angles: Platforms as Fiduciaries (should platform technologies have any duties toward their users?); Platforms as Co-Creators (the role of platforms in the creative activities of their users); Platforms as Regulators (the extent to which platforms should be instruments of regulation of user conduct, either at the behest of government or independently; Platforms as Social Spaces (the effects of technological platforms on social relationships).
Experts from academia, industry, government, and public interest advocacy organizations examined comprehensive federal privacy legislation under consideration by Congress. Panelists began the day by reviewing current bills and offering an informed analysis and debate concerning the more controversial issues such as preemption, remedies, access and choice, and safe harbors. The morning then continued with a discussion of whether fair information practices (FIPs) should remain the foundation of privacy legislation or need to be modified or abandoned. The afternoon panels then examined emerging issues such as social networking, collective privacy and behavioral advertising and assess how well any proposed bills address these new concerns. There was also keynote speeches by top FTC officials and participation in panels by key Congressional staffers. Our aim was to achieve meaningful progress toward a well-rounded understanding of pending legislation and perhaps even to resolve some outstanding issues.
This roundtable considered the important goals served by logging and storing search query data, such as improving and personalizing services, maximizing advertising effectiveness, improving general search performance and addressing click fraud and security threats. How can this be reconciled with privacy? To consider the growing importance of effective web search for users and related dependence on, and appreciation of, search service providers. At the same time consider potential vulnerabilities and anxieties about these vulnerabilities as user become increasingly aware of the insights third parties gain into their lives based on search. How can consumer trust be maintained, and what effects might self-protective actions by consumers have on the search space? To consider the general environment created by relevant external actors, such as government, on the one hand asserting claims on search information and on the other seeking to protect consumer privacy. To consider ways technical design of web search engines and their business models afford both logging and obfuscating user’s search activities. What design variables may come into play to help alleviate concerns over search privacy?
Increasingly, who we are is represented by key bits of information scattered throughout the data-intensive, networked world. Online and off, these core identifiers mediate our sense of self, social interactions, movements through space, and access to goods and services. There is much at stake in designing systems of identification and identity management, deciding who or what will be in control of them, and building in adequate protection for our bits of identity permeating the network. This symposium examined critical and controversial issues surrounding socio-technical systems of identity, identifiability and identification. It showcased emerging scholarship of graduate students at the cutting edge of humanities, social sciences, artists, systems design & engineering, philosophy, law, and policy to work towards a clearer understanding of these complex problems, and build foundations for future collaborative work. In addition to graduate student panels, a keynote talk was delivered by Professor Ian Kerr, University of Ottawa.
A workshop co-sponsored by the Information Law Institute, NYU and Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University where experts from academia, industry, government, and public interest advocacy organizations examined spyware in the broader context of computer security, governance of the information infrastructure, and the rights of individual computer-users in relation to public and commercial institutions with which they interact online.

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