This book analyses the phenomenon of digitally mediated property and considers how it problematises the boundary between human and nonhuman actors. The book addresses the increasingly porous border between personhood and property in digitized settings and considers how the increased commodification of knowledge makes visible a rupture in the liberal concept of the property owning, free, person. Engaging with the latest work in posthumanist and new materialist theory, it shows, how property as a concept as well as a means for control, changes fundamentally under advanced capitalism. Such change is exemplified by the way in which data, as an object of commodification, is extracted from human activities yet is also directly used to affectively control - or nudge - humans. Taking up a range of human engagements with digital platforms and coded architectures, as well as the circulation of affects through practices of artificial intelligence that are employed to shape behaviour, the book argues that property now needs to be understood according to an ecology of human as well as nonhuman actors. The idea of posthuman property, then, offers both a means to critique property control through digital technologies, as well as to move beyond the notion of the self-owning, object-owning, human. Engaging the most challenging contemporary technological developments, this book will appeal to researchers in the areas of Law and Technology, Legal Theory, Intellectual Property Law, Legal Philosophy, Sociology of Law, Sociology, and Media Studies.

The Internet is not an unchartered territory. On the Internet, norms matter. They interact, regulate, are contested and legitimated by multiple actors. But are they diverse and unstructured, or are they part of a recognizable order? And if the latter, what does this order look like? This collected volume explores these key questions while providing new perspectives on the role of law in times of digitality. The book compares six different areas of law that have been particularly exposed to global digitality, namely laws regulating consumer contracts, data protection, the media, financial markets, criminal activity and intellectual property law. By comparing how these very different areas of law have evolved with regard to cross-border online situations, the book considers whether cyberlaw is little more than "the law of the horse", or whether the law of global digitality is indeed special and, if so, what its characteristics across various areas of law are. The book brings together legal academics with expertise in how law has both reacted to and shaped cross-border, global Internet communication and their contributions consider whether it is possible to identify a particular mediality of law in the digital age. Examining whether a global law of digitality has truly emerged, this book will appeal to academics, students and practitioners of law examining the future of the law of digitality as it intersects with traditional categories of law.

i) Several heated topics on internet regulations are examined. ii) The WTO case law method is applied. iii) The author of this book is a professor from one of the top institutes in China. iv) General readers interested in China's cyber law and international public law are also welcome to read this book. v) The Chinese version of this title sold over 3500 copies.

This work argues that current cryptocurrency regulation, particularly in the areas of enforcement and compliance, is inadequate. It proposes reflexive regulation as an alternative approach. This book provides strategies for a reflexive regulation approach to cryptocurrencies, developed through the identification of the internal self-regulatory mechanisms of the cryptocurrency system. Apportioning blame for current problems to the regulators' failure to take into account the inherent technical features of cryptocurrencies, the work promotes reflexive regulation in which the law acts at a subsystem-specific level to install, correct, and redefine democratic self-regulatory mechanisms. It provides strategies for this approach, developed through the identification of the internal self-regulatory mechanisms of the cryptocurrency system. These are identified as imbedded in the technical functionality of computer code and consensus-based distributive governance mechanisms respectively. In addition to providing a technical, historical and legal overview of cryptocurrencies, the book concludes by providing recommendations aimed at redirecting code and consensus towards achieving regulatory goals. In this way, it draws from the theory of reflexive law, in order to provide both a substantive and jurisprudential perspective on the regulation of cryptocurrencies and to illustrate how Financial Technology (Fintech) regulation can only be effective once regulators consider both the 'Fin' and the 'tech' in their regulatory approaches. The book will be of interest to researchers, academics and policy-makers working in the areas of Financial Regulation and Jurisprudence, Financial Crime, Banking Regulation, Information Systems, and Information Technology.

Law and the Technologies of the Twenty-First Century provides a contextual account of the way in which law functions in a broader regulatory environment across different jurisdictions. It identifies and clearly structures the four key challenges that technology poses to regulatory efforts, distinguishing between technology as a regulatory target and tool, and guiding the reader through an emerging field that is subject to rapid change. By extensive use of examples and extracts from the texts and materials that form and shape the scholarly and public debates over technology regulation, it presents complex material in a stimulating and engaging manner. Co-authored by a leading scholar in the field with a scholar new to the area, it combines comprehensive knowledge of the field with a fresh approach. This is essential reading for students of law and technology, risk regulation, policy studies, and science and technology studies.

Class actions in privacy law are rapidly growing as a legal vehicle for citizens around the world to hold corporations liable for privacy violations. Current and future developments in these class actions stand to shift the corporate liability landscape for companies that interact with people's personal information. Privacy class actions are at the intersection of civil litigation, privacy law, and data protection. Developments in privacy class actions raise complex issues of substantive law as well as challenges to the established procedures governing class action litigation. Their outcomes are integral to the evolution of privacy law and data protection law across jurisdictions. This book brings together established scholars in privacy law, data protection law, and collective litigation to offer a detailed perspective on the present and future of collective litigation for privacy claims. Taking a comparative approach, this book incorporates considerations from consumer protection law, procedural law, cross-border litigation, tort law, and data protection law, which are key to understanding the development of privacy class actions. In doing so, it offers an analysis of the novel challenges they pose for courts, regulatory agencies, scholars, and litigators, together with their potential solutions.

In 1918 a young Carl Schmitt published a short satirical fiction entitled The Buribunks. He imagined a future society of beings who consistently wrote and disseminated their personal diaries. Schmitt would go on to become the infamous philosopher of the exception and for a while the 'Crown Jurist of the Third Reich'. The Buribunks - ironically for beings that lived only for self-memorialisation - has been mostly lost to history. However, the digital realm, with its emphasis on the informatic traces generated by human doing, and the continual interest in Schmitt's work to explain and criticise contemporary constellations of power, suggests that The Buribunks is a text whose epoch has come. This volume includes the first full translation into English of The Buribunks and a selection of critical essays on the text, its meanings in the digital present, its playing with and criticism of the literary form, and its place within Schmitt's life and work. The Buribunks and the essays provide a complex, critical and provocative invitation to reimagine the relations between the human and their imprint and legacy within archives and repositories. There is a fundamental exploration of what it means to be a being intensely aware of 'writing itself'. This is not just a volume for critical lawyers, literary scholars and the Schmitt literati. It is a volume that challenges a broad range of disciplines, from philosophy to critical data studies, to reflect on the digital present and its assembled and curated beings. It is a volume that provides a set of fantastically located concepts, images and histories that traverse ideas and practices, play and politics, power and possibility.

This book identifies and explains the different national approaches to data protection - the legal regulation of the collection, storage, transmission and use of information concerning identified or identifiable individuals - and determines the extent to which they could be harmonised in the foreseeable future. In recent years, data protection has become a major concern in many countries, as well as at supranational and international levels. In fact, the emergence of computing technologies that allow lower-cost processing of increasing amounts of information, associated with the advent and exponential use of the Internet and other communication networks and the widespread liberalization of the trans-border flow of information have enabled the large-scale collection and processing of personal data, not only for scientific or commercial uses, but also for political uses. A growing number of governmental and private organizations now possess and use data processing in order to determine, predict and influence individual behavior in all fields of human activity. This inevitably entails new risks, from the perspective of individual privacy, but also other fundamental rights, such as the right not to be discriminated against, fair competition between commercial enterprises and the proper functioning of democratic institutions. These phenomena have not been ignored from a legal point of view: at the national, supranational and international levels, an increasing number of regulatory instruments - including the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation applicable as of 25 May 2018 - have been adopted with the purpose of preventing personal data misuse. Nevertheless, distinct national approaches still prevail in this domain, notably those that separate the comprehensive and detailed protective rules adopted in Europe since the 1995 Directive on the processing of personal data from the more fragmented and liberal attitude of American courts and legislators in this respect. In a globalized world, in which personal data can instantly circulate and be used simultaneously in communications networks that are ubiquitous by nature, these different national and regional approaches are a major source of legal conflict.

The dogma of the sovereignty of the state, deriving from the Peace of Westphalia, underpins much of the modern-day international system. However, developments in recent technology have led this ideology to depart from reality. Viewing state sovereignty through the prism of public international law, the book will begin with an overview of the settlement of Westphalia, how it has influenced international documents ever since, and how the advantages of centralised decisions came to be perceived. By surveying the Law of the Sea, Maritime Law, Air and Aviation, Telecommunications, Postal Services, Space Law and Mensuration, the book demonstrates how, in each, the interplay between state sovereignty and developing technologies have caused significant legal change. Some changes, Lyall argues, such as international measures of time and geography, have been born out of convenience, facilitated by technology developed for the purpose. Other areas of change developed out of a desire to reconcile conflicts or harmonise necessary state regulation. The book analyses the reasons behind these changes and discusses the ongoing attempts to balance state equality, measures adopted by new institutions to secure comprehensive representation. It ends by looking to the future of state sovereignty in an increasingly globalised world. The book is of use to any student or scholar interested in policy making, international law and international affairs, both legal and scientific, as well as those looking at legal administrative issues and government officiation.

What effect do robots, algorithms, and online platforms have on the world of work? Using case studies and examples from across the EU, the UK, and the US, this book provides a compass to navigate this technological transformation as well as the regulatory options available, and proposes a new map for the era of radical digital advancements. From platform work to the gig-economy and the impact of artificial intelligence, algorithmic management, and digital surveillance on workplaces, technology has overwhelming consequences for everyone's lives, reshaping the labour market and straining social institutions. Contrary to preliminary analyses forecasting the threat of human work obsolescence, the book demonstrates that digital tools are more likely to replace managerial roles and intensify organisational processes in workplaces, rather than opening the way for mass job displacement. Can flexibility and protection be reconciled so that legal frameworks uphold innovation? How can we address the pervasive power of AI-enabled monitoring? How likely is it that the gig-economy model will emerge as a new organisational paradigm across sectors? And what can social partners and political players do to adopt effective regulation? Technology is never neutral. It can and must be governed, to ensure that progress favours the many. Digital transformation can be an essential ally, from the warehouse to the office, but it must be tested in terms of social and political sustainability, not only through the lenses of economic convenience. Your Boss Is an Algorithm offers a guide to explore these new scenarios, their promises, and perils.

This handbook provides an overview of research related to smart technologies and how they permeate the economic and social fabric. It covers a wide spectrum of topics and issues raised in the debate surrounding the increasing importance of smart technologies. It takes on a strongly multi- and interdisciplinary perspective, providing readers from different backgrounds and with varying knowledge of this topic with a comprehensive and comprehensible overview of the main upcoming technological trends from a scientifically eclectic viewpoint. This handbook draws together an international team of researchers from different scientific disciplines. The list of contributors comprises authors from Europe, North America, Australia and South Korea, and includes both internationally outstanding scientists and experts from a more policy-related and/or industry-related background.

Digital Totalitarianism: Algorithms and Society focuses on important challenges to democratic values posed by our computational regimes: policing the freedom of inquiry, risks to the personal autonomy of thought, NeoLiberal management of human creativity, and the collapse of critical thinking with the social media fueled rise of conspiranoia. Digital networks allow for a granularity and pervasiveness of surveillance by government and corporate entities. This creates power asymmetries where each citizen's daily 'data exhaust' can be used for manipulative and controlling ends by powerful institutional actors. This volume explores key erosions in our fundamental human values associated with free societies by covering government surveillance of library-based activities, cognitive enhancement debates, the increasing business orientation of art schools, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories in network media. Scholars and students from many backgrounds, as well as policy makers, journalists and the general reading public will find a multidisciplinary approach to questions of totalitarian tendencies encompassing research from Communication, Rhetoric, Library Sciences, Art and New Media.

Systemic Bias: Algorithms and Society looks at issues of computational bias in the contexts of cultural works, metaphors of magic and mathematics in tech culture, and workplace psychometrics. The output of computational models is directly tied not only to their inputs but to the relationships and assumptions embedded in their model design, many of which are of a social and cultural, rather than physical and mathematical, nature. How do human biases make their way into these data models, and what new strategies have been proposed to overcome bias in computed products? Scholars and students from many backgrounds, as well as policy makers, journalists, and the general reading public will find a multidisciplinary approach to inquiry into algorithmic bias encompassing research from Communication, Art, and New Media.

As the threats posed by organised crime and terrorism persist, law enforcement authorities remain under pressure to suppress the movement, or flows, of people and objects that are deemed dangerous. This collection provides a broad overview of the challenges and trends of the policing of flows. How these threats are constructed and addressed by governments and law enforcement agencies is the unifying thread of the book. The concept of flows is interpreted broadly so as to include the trafficking of illicit substances, trade in antiquities, and legal and illegal migration, including cross-border travel by members of organised crime groups or 'foreign fighters'. The book focuses especially on the responses of governments and law enforcement agencies to the changing nature and intensity of flows. The contributors comprise a mix of lawyers, sociologists, historians and criminologists who address both formal legal and practical, on-the-ground approaches to the policing of flows. The volume invites reflection on whether the existing tool kit of governments and law enforcement agencies is adequate in this changing environment and how it could be modernised, for example, by increased reliance on technology or by reappraising the role of the private sector. As such, the book will be useful not only for academics and practitioners who work on security-related matters, but also more generally to those who are interested in what the near-term future of policing is likely to look like and how the balance between law enforcement on the one hand and human rights and civil liberties on the other can be achieved.

Legal Data and Information in Practice provides readers with an understanding of how to facilitate the acquisition, management, and use of legal data in organizations such as libraries, courts, governments, universities, and start-ups. Presenting a synthesis of information about legal data that will furnish readers with a thorough understanding of the topic, the book also explains why it is becoming crucial that data analysis be integrated into decision-making in the legal space. Legal organizations are looking at how to develop data-driven insights for a variety of purposes and it is, as Sutherland shows, vital that they have the necessary skills to facilitate this work. This book will assist in this endeavour by providing an international perspective on the issues affecting access to legal data and clearly describing methods of obtaining and evaluating it. Sutherland also incorporates advice about how to critically approach data analysis. Legal Data and Information in Practice will be essential reading for those in the law library community who are based in English-speaking countries with a common law tradition. The book will also be useful to those with a general interest in legal data, including students, academics engaged in the study of information science and law.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has augmented human activities and unlocked opportunities for many sectors of the economy. It is used for data management and analysis, decision making, and many other aspects. As with most rapidly advancing technologies, law is often playing a catch up role so the study of how law interacts with AI is more critical now than ever before. This book provides a detailed qualitative exploration into regulatory aspects of AI in industry. Offering a unique focus on current practice and existing trends in a wide range of industries where AI plays an increasingly important role, the work contains legal and technical analysis performed by 15 researchers and practitioners from different institutions around the world to provide an overview of how AI is being used and regulated across a wide range of sectors, including aviation, energy, government, healthcare, legal, maritime, military, music, and others. It addresses the broad range of aspects, including privacy, liability, transparency, justice, and others, from the perspective of different jurisdictions. Including a discussion of the role of AI in industry during the Covid-19 pandemic, the chapters also offer a set of recommendations for optimal regulatory interventions. Therefore, this book will be of interest to academics, students and practitioners interested in technological and regulatory aspects of AI.

Exploring the evolution of the right to be forgotten, its challenges, and impacts on privacy, reputation, and online expression, this book lays out the current state of the law on the right to be forgotten in Canada and in the international context while addressing the broader theoretical tensions at the core of the right to be forgotten.

This book considers a new approach to online copyright infringement. Rather than looking at the subject within a purely technological context, it provides legal analysis from a human perspective. This book highlights that there are three key instances in which the capacity of a human mind intersects with the development of copyright regulation: (1) the development of copyright statutory law; (2) the interpretation of the copyright statutory law the judiciary; and (3) human interaction with new technology. Using a novel framework for constructing digital perspectives, the author, Dr Hayleigh Bosher, analyses the laws relating to online copyright infringement. She provides insights into why the law appears as it does, shedding light on the circumstances of how it came to pass and demonstrates a clear malfunction in the interpretation and application of copyright law to online activities that derives from the disconnect between the technological and the human perspectives. The book proposes putting the human element back into copyright analysis to enable the return of reason where it has been lost, and provide a clearer, more consistent and fair legal regulation of online copyright infringement. Law, Technology and Cognition: The Human Element in Online Copyright Infringement will be of interest to students, academics, researchers, as well as practitioners.

Using the UK as a case study the book aims to provide a detailed rationale for the tension between a policy perspective that tries to provide protection for victims of such practices through legislation and the need to better understand a phenomenon that constantly evolves as a result of new technology, disruptive adoption and social norms.

Beyond identifying and characterising the particular types of risk and liability that may arise in decentralised digital economies, this book suggests safeguards for different types of distributed networks. It explores relationships between people and will be of interest to academics, practitioners, and students.

This book explores the question of whether software should be patented. It analyses the ways in which the courts of the US, the EU, and Australia have attempted to deal with the problems surrounding the patentability of software and describes why it is that the software patent issue should be dealt with as a patentable subject matter issue, rather than as an issue of novelty or nonobviousness. Anton Hughes demonstrates that the current approach has failed and that a fresh approach to the software patent problem is needed. The book goes on to argue against the patentability of software based on its close relationship to mathematics. Drawing on historical and philosophical accounts of mathematics in pursuit of a better understanding of its nature and focusing the debate on the conditions necessary for mathematical advancement, the author puts forward an analytical framework centred around the concept of the useful arts. This analysis both explains mathematics', and therefore software's, nonpatentability and offers a theory of patentable subject matter consistent with Australian, American, and European patent law.

The use of biometric identification systems is rapidly increasing across the world, owing to their potential to combat terrorism, fraud, corruption and other illegal activities. However, critics of the technology complain that the creation of an extensive central register of personal information controlled by the government will increase opportunities for the state to abuse citizens. There is also concern about the extent to which data about an individual is recorded and kept. This book reviews some of the most current and complex legal and ethical issues relating to the use of biometrics. Beginning with an overview of biometric systems, the book goes on to examine some of the theoretical underpinnings of the surveillance state, questioning whether these conceptual approaches are still relevant, particularly the integration of ubiquitous surveillance systems and devices. The book also analyses the implementation of the world's largest biometric database, Aadhaar, in detail. Additionally, the identification of individuals at border checkpoints in the United States, Australia and the EU is explored, as well as the legal and ethical debates surrounding the use of biometrics regarding: the war on terror and the current refugee crisis; violations of international human rights law principles; and mobility and privacy rights. The book concludes by addressing the collection, use and disclosure of personal information by private-sector entities such as Axciom and Facebook, and government use of these tools to profile individuals. By examining the major legal and ethical issues surrounding the debate on this rapidly emerging technology, this book will appeal to students and scholars of law, criminology and surveillance studies, as well as law enforcement and criminal law practitioners.

The ideal of an inclusive and participatory Internet has been undermined by the rise of misogynistic abuse on social media platforms. However, limited progress has been made at national - and to an extent European - levels in addressing this issue. In England and Wales, the tackling of underlying causes of online abuse has been overlooked because the law focuses on punishment rather than measures to prevent such abuses. Furthermore, online abuse has a significant impact on its victims that is underestimated by policymakers. This volume critically analyses the legal provisions that are currently deployed to tackle forms of online misogyny, and focuses on three aspects; firstly, the phenomenon of social media abuse; secondly, the poor and disparate legal responses to social media abuses; and thirdly, the similar failings of hate crime to tackle problems of online gender-based abuses. This book advances a compelling argument for legal changes to the existing hate crime, and communications legislation.

In the information society, electronic intrusion has become a new form of trespassing often causing significant problems and posing great risks for individuals and businesses. ""Socioeconomic and Legal Implications of Electronic Intrusion"" focuses on abusive and illegal practices of penetration in the sphere of private communications. A leading international reference source within the field, this book provides legal and political practitioners, academicians, and intrusion researchers with expert knowledge into global theft and spam perspectives, identity theft and fraud, and electronic crime issues.

Combines academic rigour with case studies and activities designed to aid learning Suitable for courses both in the UK and internationally, and it uses international examples