All Pairs Routing Path Enumeration Using Latin Multiplication and Julia

Enumerating all routing paths among Autonomous Systems (ASes) at an Internet-scale is an intractable problem. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the standard exterior gateway protocol through which ASes exchange reachability information. Building an efficient path enumeration tool for a given network is an essential step toward estimating the resiliency of the network to cyber security attacks, such as routing origin and path hijacking. In our work, we use the matrix Latin multiplication method to compute all possible paths among all pairs of nodes. We parallelize this computation through the domain decomposition for matrix multiplication and implement our solution in the Julia high-performance programming language. We also compare our method with the classical Monte Carlo method. Our results provide positive evidence for the applicability of the method

Designing Journeys to the Social World: Hegel's Theory of Property and His Noble Dreams Revisited

The conventional interpretations of Hegel's theory of property show that property plays an important role in developing human individuality through the person-to-thing relationship. In this paper, I seek to repudiate the conventional interpretations by demonstrating that they are narrow-minded and unfaithful to Hegel's thought on property. I then offer a new interpretation of Hegel's theory of property. By and large, I aim to show that Hegel's property theory provides a vantage point for us to rethink the relationship between persons and the society in general and the nature of property in particular. Situated in the whole picture of Hegel's social theory of freedom, I demonstrate that Hegel sees property as a social institution that plays a crucial role in shaping human individuality as well as sociability. On the one hand, mediated by the institution of property, a person nurtures and develops individuality or personal freedom in the social world consisting of things and other persons. On the other hand, the institution of property facilitates the cultivation of sociability by helping human beings become members of our society. Furthermore, social institutions in the Hegelian ethical life act as the indispensable catalyst for empowering property to spark the synergies between human individuality and sociability so as to actualize freedom for all human beings

COPYRIGHT LAW AS AN ENGINE OF PUBLIC INTEREST PROTECTION

Courts around the world have been confronted with bewilderingly complex challenges in protecting the public interest through copyright law. This article proposes a public interest principle that would guide courts to settle fair use cases with better-informed decisions. I argue that the proposed principle would legally upgrade fair use from serving as an engine of free expression to serving as an engine of public interest protection. Based on comparative study of the conflicting rulings handed down by the U.S. and Chinese courts on Google Library, the article first considers the necessity of adopting the public interest principle in guiding the judicial settlement of fair use cases substantively and procedurally. The article then canvasses the two substantive legal standards to be embodied in the public interest principle. First, the principle would create a public interest use standard for courts to utilize in weighing the first fair use factor without applying the dichotomy of transformative and non-transformative use. At the same time, it would also require courts to employ the significant market harm standard when considering the fourth fair use factor. Second, the public interest principle would also modify the procedural rules concerning the assignment of burden of proof in fair use cases. It would place only the burden of proving a public interest use under the first factor on the user of a work who is the defendant in the judicial proceedings at hand. Moreover, the article also demonstrates how the public interest principle could be used to develop a meaningful alternative that bridges the gaps between the fair use and fair dealing doctrines. By largely preserving the existing attributes of both, the principle would serve as a commonly shared principle for adjudicating cases and developing further legislative reforms in both fair use and fair dealing jurisdictions

Reinvigorating the Human Right to Technology

The right to technology is a forgotten human right. Dating back to 1948, the right was established by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (“UDHR”) in response to the massive destruction wrought by technologically advanced weapons in the Second World War. This human right embodies one of the most profound lessons the framers of the UDHR learned from this war: Technology must benefit humanity rather than harm it. It has been more than seventy years since the adoption of the UDHR, and technology has advanced at a rapid pace and become more important than ever in our daily lives. Yet in this age of technology, the right to technology remains obscure, dormant, and ineffective. No other human right has received such scant attention, and the right to technology has indeed become an “orphan” in the international human rights regime. This article traces the origins of society’s disregard for the right and attributes it to the confluence of three main contributing factors: (1) the right’s inherent obscurity, (2) the ineffective human rights enforcement system, and (3) the international community’s overemphasis on intellectual property protection. The current human rights regime is unable to sufficiently address these complex factors, as it remains deeply rooted in the individual rights system and lacks a fully-fledged distributive justice vision. Against this backdrop, this article reinvigorates the right to technology by recommending its protection as a collective right. It considers how and why the right to technology should be redefined as a collective right that entitles people to enjoy the benefits of technological progress and minimizes the harms that such progress may cause. A collective right to technology can protect both larger societal interests in maintaining public freedom and dignity, as well as specific group interests in guarding against the use of technologies to prejudice group freedom and dignity. This new understanding of the right to technology, therefore, sets distributive justice agendas for promoting the development of intellectual property law into the public interest

Artificial Intelligence Inventions

In the new technological era, artificial intelligence (AI) reigns supreme. With the assistance of AI systems, society is undergoing a radical transformation. AI may not only soon replace human labor in many industrial sectors, but as AI gains the power to generate greater inventions, it may also outsmart human inventors. How should patent law and policy adapt to the formidable challenges of the AI era? One of these challenges, addressed by patent offices and courts in 2020 and beyond, is whether AI inventorship should be recognized. The United States Patent and Trademark Office and European Patent Office declined to recognize the autonomous AI system DABUS as an inventor despite its two inventions. Courts in the United States and United Kingdom upheld these rulings. However, the Federal Court of Australia and the South African Patent Office steered patent law in the opposite direction, accepting DABUS as an inventor and thereby legally recognizing Al inventorship. This Article argues that these divergent approaches to determining the legal status of AI inventorship fail to address proper policy considerations central to shaping AI and patent law in service of the public interest. Applying broad-based, forward-looking policy considerations, this Article puts forward three legal principles for protecting ALgenerated inventions. The first principle draws on the doctrine of piercing the corporate veil to ascertain the sole patent proprietor of AI-generated inventions. It attempts to remove the unnecessary cost of protecting AI systems that are incapable of securing ownership of their inventions. The second principle considers the capacity to take legal responsibility as a means of evaluating whether AI systems should be recognized as inventors. It channels an ethos mandating that any grant of patent rights be conditioned on certain legal responsibilities. The third principle dictates that patent protection of AI-generated inventions must promote robustness of the public domain through the free flow of information and knowledge not subject to proprietary control. Together, these principles can better protect a wide range of public interests implicated in the patent protection of AI inventions

Toward a Public Trust Doctrine in Copyright Law

As a full-fledged legal tool in property and environmental law, the public trust doctrine has played an important role in deterring inappropriate exploitation of natural resources and improving protection of the environment. In this article, I explore the possibility of introducing the public trust doctrine into copyright law and explain why we need to expand the use of the public trust doctrine from natural resources to knowledge and information as informational resources. By and large, I demonstrate that compared with the Copyright Clause and the First Amendment, the public trust doctrine, if introduced into copyright law, can create more effective and powerful institutional mandates to invalidate the socially unsound expansion of copyright protection, such as the recent extension of copyright terms. Moreover, I propose that we can tap into the public trust doctrine to generate a set of new legal techniques aimed at enriching copyright adjudication and policy-making discourse. To this end, I argue that we should use the doctrine to promote the ethical values of guardianship, responsibility, and community. Embedded in these values, the doctrine, as I will show, aims to promote and protect the public’s collective rights in knowledge and information held in public trust for all citizens. Moreover, the doctrine paves a new way to enforce both the government’s political responsibilities and the copyright holders’ social responsibilities regarding public access to and use of knowledge and information. Besides, I show how courts could apply the public trust doctrine to create alternative approaches to weigh the constitutionality of the recent twenty-year extension of copyright terms and to lay out a new decision for the Google Book Search Project case

Corporate Fundamental Responsibility: What Do Technology Companies Owe the World?

In this digital age, technology companies reign supreme. However, the power gained by these companies far exceeds the responsibilities they have assumed. The ongoing privacy protection and fake news scandals swirling around Facebook clearly demonstrate this shocking asymmetry of power and responsibility. Legal reforms taking place in the United States in the past twenty years or so have failed to correct this asymmetry. Indeed, the U.S. Congress has enacted major statutes minimizing the legal liabilities of technology companies with respect to online infringing acts, privacy protection, and payment of taxes. While these statutes have promoted innovation, they have also had the unintended effect of breeding irresponsibility among technology companies. Against this backdrop, this Article offers a new lens through which we can deal with the ethical crisis surrounding technology companies. It puts forward the concept of corporate fundamental responsibility as the ethical and legal foundation for imposing three distinct responsibilities upon technology companies: to reciprocate users’ contributions, play their role positively, and confront injustices created by technological development. The Article further considers how these responsibilities could be applied to improve protection of private data and to encourage responsible exercise of intellectual property rights by technology companies. The tripartite conception of corporate fundamental responsibility, this Article shows, is built upon the ethical theories of reciprocity, role responsibility, and social justice. Therefore, corporate fundamental responsibility paves the way for technology law to embrace ethics whole-heartedly, creating new legal and ethical guidance for the benevolent behavior of technology companies. In developing technologies, collecting data, and regulating speech, technology company leaders must act responsibly for the future of humanity

Intellectual Property and “The Lost Year” of COVID-19 Deaths

Protecting intellectual property (IP) is a question of life and death. COVID-19 vaccines, partially incentivized by IP, are estimated to have saved nearly 20 million lives worldwide during the first year of their availability in 2021. However, most of the benefits of this life-saving technology went to high- and upper-middle-income countries. Despite 10 billion vaccines being produced by the end of 2021, only 4 percent of people in low-income countries were fully vaccinated. Paradoxically, IP may also be partly responsible for hundreds of thousands of lives lost in 2021, due to an insufficient supply of vaccines and inequitable access during the critical first year of vaccine rollout, most notably in low-income countries that lacked the ability to buy or manufacture vaccines to save their populations. IP is implicated in the choked supply of COVID-19 vaccines in low-income countries, particularly during the crucial first year of the vaccines’ availability in 2021. This Article first diagnoses how the IP system bears some blame for a “lost year” of COVID-19 deaths and devastation in 2021. While the promise of monopoly rights in breakthrough technology helps incentive life-saving innovation, holding life-saving knowledge hostage in corporate monopolies to maximize private profit has tragic consequences. This Article diagnoses a number of causes for the inequitable distribution of life-saving COVID-19 vaccines, from misguided reliance on IP rights and voluntary mechanisms to share knowledge and vaccines, to the rise of vaccine nationalism and vaccine diplomacy, to unequal global IP institutions that disenfranchise low-income countries and continue to reproduce colonial era dependency by poor countries on high-income nations’ for life-saving technologies. Ultimately, unequal access to life-saving vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked untold havoc on human lives and the global economy. Glaring inequity in global access affected rich countries, as well, as variants emerged in poorly vaccinated parts of the world and spread worldwide, prolonging the health and economic effects of the pandemic. In response to the diagnosis, this Article develops cures to promote a timely and equitable supply of critical medicines in the next pandemic. As the WHO draft Pandemic Treaty recognizes, there is a critical “need to establish a future pandemic prevention, preparedness and response mechanism that is not based on a charity model.” This Article suggests several reforms to prevent such inequity in the next pandemic, including delinking vaccine development that depends on public funding from monopoly rights in technology, enhanced legal requirements to share publicly funded technologies in pandemic times, and investment in technology transfer hubs and local vaccine manufacturing capacity in low- and middle-income countries. We further suggest reforming the IP system to create a robust global technology transfer mechanism and to stimulate faster sharing of patented medicines and vaccines