The March 21st passing of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) has dramatically altered the rules of engagement for social media companies. The new law amends and clarifies that the Communications Decency Act of 1996 was never intended to legally protect websites that unlawfully…
Social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have written “white papers” and devoted considerable resources to projects intended to create services that encourage trust and a sense of familiarity on the part of users. Messages, photos and personal information are easily shared with groups of friends and co-workers, or in…
For all the talk of artificial intelligence and the benefits to be found in the related field of machine learning, there are also plenty of practical issues that companies on both sides of the vendor/client relationship will need to resolve. We recently examined one of these questions in the post, “Come…
What is it worth to be able to block employees from using social media while on the job? And how should one determine that value, exactly? While it might be easy to determine the value of a stand-alone invention, it is much more difficult to determine the value an invention…
We have previously examined the evolving role of the hashtag in intellectual property law, particularly trademark law. While the nuances of the symbol’s existence and use protections continue to be ironed out by the courts and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the hashtag has quickly become a ubiquitous tool…
If there’s a golden rule for the online age we live in, it’s “Always assume anything you post online will be visible to all.” Just like the original Golden Rule, it’s a maxim ignored often enough to bear repeating and frequent illustration. With that in mind, let’s check in on…
Recent developments in deep learning artificial intelligence have enabled almost anyone to superimpose facial features—including an entirely different face—into a preexisting video with relatively minimal effort. Until very recently, editing facial features in a video has been incredibly difficult. Even movie studios with access to professional video editing tools have…
Artificial intelligence is a transformative technology–or existential threat, depending on what futurist/sci-fi author you read–that will leave few if any industries untouched when all is said and done. Still, no matter how transformed your particular business landscape, most companies that decide they need to employ AI probably won’t be AI…
Bots get purged, bots hijack the IoT, bots come to your emotional rescue and more! (There is some non-bot news, as well.) Burger King goes political (and viral) with a video weighing in on the debate over Net Neutrality. (Aaron Mak, Slate) Is Twitter in the midst of a bot…
Three years after Elon Musk announced in his famous “All Our Patent Are Belong To You” blog post that Tesla would be opening all of its patents to the public, he tweeted a recommendation of Max Tegmark’s recent book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence—which just…