While Alice v. CLS Bank has confirmed that patent claims require a further “inventive concept” beyond an underlying abstract idea or law of nature for patent-eligibility, there is little agreement on what defines either an “abstract idea” or an “inventive concept.” Resolving this uncertainty is critical to determining the patent-eligibility of software claims beyond the …
The Alice Court’s characterization of computer programming has effectively repudiated, inter alia, the doctrine that programming a general-purpose computer creates a patent-eligible “new machine.” This Article revisits In re Bernhart, the first holding based on the “new machine” principle, concluding that the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals committed a category mistake in conducting its …
Within the past several years, a new business model has rapidly expanded into a billion dollar industry, with potential to expand further—the sharing economy. The North Carolina General Assembly has yet to address how it intends to regulate the sharing economy. The General Assembly could choose to create completely new regulations for the sharing economy, …
The mismatch of localized electricity regulations with interstate electricity generation and transmission creates large inefficiencies. It is possible to solve this problem without overturning the entire existing regime by affording federal, state, and local regulatory bodies more power to implement battery technology without traditional regulatory hindrances. Given the limited number of regulatory bodies responsible for …
According to federal regulations, all students have a right to a free appropriate public education in the most integrated, least restrictive environment appropriate. Discrimination based upon disabilities is a violation of civil rights. An estimated 10.2 million children in the United States have special healthcare needs, accounting for 13.9% of all children. Some students who …
Under the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, the constitutional privacy protections that many Americans take for granted are non-existent in cyberspace because of the third-party doctrine, which was born decades before the popular adoption of cyberspace social networks and data storage services. When someone in America posts a picture on Instagram or updates a status …
The United States government was granted a wide berth of surveillance powers post 9/11. At a time when Americans felt vulnerable to foreign attack, the executive branch passed the USA PATRIOT Act that balanced a reduction of privacy rights with a promise of increased national security. Twelve years later, Edward Snowden released documents showing exactly …
If the legal profession had been able to foresee in the late 1990s and early 2000s, prior to the meteoric rise and ensuing cultural ubiquity of social media, that every tagged spring break photo, 2:00 a.m. status update, and furious wall post would one day be vulnerable to potential exposure in the cold, unforgiving light …
This article re-examines and revises observations made in the author’s 2009 article, Googlestroika: Privatizing Privacy. 1 Specifically, it looks to the contractual obligations and practical considerations that define how users interact not only with Google, but also with social network websites and other online service providers. Consideration is given to how an individual leaves a …
Designing and implementing a cybersecurity legal policy is an ambitious endeavor. This Article offers primary guidelines focusing on the national level, and uses Israel’s newly created National Cyber Bureau as a case in point. Additionally, this Article offers a cross-section comparison between the national cybersecurity policies of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, …
