A Free Bite at the Apple: How Flawed Statutory Drafting Has Undermined the Purpose of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board

In the years before Congress passed the America Invents Act, patent litigation became exorbitantly expensive. Congress created three types of proceedings before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), which were intended to provide a cheaper and more cost-effective alternative to district court litigation over patent validity. A major factor in ensuring that the PTAB proceedings effectively substituted for district court litigation was a harsh estoppel provision that prevented any petitioner from relitigating any issue which was raised or reasonably could have been raised during the PTAB proceeding. The Federal Circuit, however, recently applied a narrow interpretation to the estoppel provision which jeopardizes the ability of PTAB proceedings to replace district court litigation. While it would be easy to place all the blame on the Federal Circuit for defanging the estoppel provision, this Note argues that the failure of PTAB proceedings to substitute for district court litigation ultimately stems from poor drafting within the America Invents Act. The combination of broad Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) substantive rulemaking power, unreviewable PTAB decisions to institute, and a sweeping estoppel provision doomed PTAB proceedings to failure. This Note offers that Congress must update the language of the statute itself in order to effectively address the issues presented by this combination

Temporal Aspects of Smart Contracts for Financial Derivatives

Implementing smart contracts to automate the performance of high-value over-the-counter (OTC) financial derivatives is a formidable challenge. Due to the regulatory framework and the scale of financial risk if a contract were to go wrong, the performance of these contracts must be enforceable in law and there is an absolute requirement that the smart contract will be faithful to the intentions of the parties as expressed in the original legal documentation. Formal methods provide an attractive route for validation and assurance, and here we present early results from an investigation of the semantics of industry-standard legal documentation for OTC derivatives. We explain the need for a formal representation that combines temporal, deontic and operational aspects, and focus on the requirements for the temporal aspects as derived from the legal text. The relevance of this work extends beyond OTC derivatives and is applicable to understanding the temporal semantics of a wide range of legal documentation

Quantum surveillance and 'shared secrets'. A biometric step too far? CEPS Liberty and Security in Europe, July 2010

It is no longer sensible to regard biometrics as having neutral socio-economic, legal and political impacts. Newer generation biometrics are fluid and include behavioural and emotional data that can be combined with other data. Therefore, a range of issues needs to be reviewed in light of the increasing privatisation of ‘security’ that escapes effective, democratic parliamentary and regulatory control and oversight at national, international and EU levels, argues Juliet Lodge, Professor and co-Director of the Jean Monnet European Centre of Excellence at the University of Leeds, U

Digital Technology as a Challenge to European Contract Law

Offering an overview of the interactions between digital technologies and contract law, we identify three pillars in this architecture: the regulatory framework; digital interventions over the life cycle of the contract; and digital objects of contracting. The regulatory framework, which itself may draw on digital technology to effectively pursue its ends, shapes, and is shaped by, the other two pillars. More specifically, on the one hand, we show how four key technologies – digital platforms, Big Data analytics, artificial intelligence, and blockchain – are being used at different stages of the contractual process (from the screening for contractual partners to formation, enforcement and interpretation) and engender novel market dynamics that, in many instances, necessitate regulatory responses. On the other hand, digitally facilitated contracting increasingly relates to digital content as the object of the contract; however, while this area has notably been the subject of the proposed Directive on Contracts for the Supply of Digital Content and thus has received some first ‘European structure’, we argue that a number of important blind spots remain that fail to be addressed by the directive. All in all, the use of digital technology in contracting will likely reinforce an adaptive, relational view and practice of contracting. This increased fluidity engenders a vast potential for preference-conforming, time-sensitive contracts; however, to the extent that it also mirrors novel asymmetries of information and power, the ordering mechanisms of the law may simultaneously be more needed than ever.Peer Reviewe

Jurisdiction and cloud computing: Further challenges to Internet jurisdiction

Copyright © 2013 Kluwer Law InternationalThe importance of this timely research can also be evidenced by the recent European Commission Decision of 18.06.2013 on setting up the Commission Expert Group on Cloud Computing Contracts ((2013/C 174/04)

Updating democracy studies: outline of a research program

Technologies carry politics since they embed values. It is therefore surprising that mainstream political and legal theory have taken the issue so lightly. Compared to what has been going on over the past few decades in the other branches of practical thought, namely ethics, economics and the law, political theory lags behind. Yet the current emphasis on Internet politics that polarizes the apologists holding the web to overcome the one-to-many architecture of opinion-building in traditional representative democracy, and the critics that warn cyber-optimism entails authoritarian technocracy has acted as a wake up call. This paper sets the problem – “What is it about ICTs, as opposed to previous technical devices, that impact on politics and determine uncertainty about democratic matters?” – into the broad context of practical philosophy, by offering a conceptual map of clusters of micro-problems and concrete examples relating to “e-democracy”. The point is to highlight when and why the hyphen of e-democracy has a conjunctive or a disjunctive function, in respect to stocktaking from past experiences and settled democratic theories. My claim is that there is considerable scope to analyse how and why online politics fails or succeeds. The field needs both further empirical and theoretical work

Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing: A Whitepaper

Illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing refers to fishing activities that do not comply with regional, national, or international fisheries conservation or management measures. This whitepaper characterizes the status of Illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing, the philanthropic community's current efforts to help reduce it, and potential opportunities for the Packard Foundation to become more actively engaged. The paper was drafted between March and June 2015, following a combination of desk research and a handful of select interviews