Lifeboat Foundation

Google surreptitiously amasses billions of bits of information —every day — about internet users even if they opt out of sharing their information, three consumers alleged in a proposed class action lawsuit.

“Google tracks and collects consumer browsing history and other web activity data no matter what safeguards consumers undertake to protect their data privacy,” according to the complaint filed Tuesday in federal court in San Jose, California.

The lawsuit argues that while Google lets users turn off data collection when using its Chrome web browser, other Google tools used by websites themselves scoop up their data anyways. The suit includes claims for invasion of privacy and violations of federal wiretapping law.

Are you interested in having children, but turned off by the whole pregnancy thing? Well, there may be an option available in the not-too-distant future. The artificial womb — or at least the ability to create one — is inching its way toward us. The big question is whether or not society is ready for it.

The obstacles to ectogenesis — development of the fetus outside of a mother from fertilization to full-term infancy — will soon be dominated more by legal and ethical matters than by technological and medical limitations. Those who embrace technology without reservation may be waiting with open arms. But there will certainly be others who find the prospect disturbing.

A biometric data privacy suit against Clearview AI will move forward, and in the District Court for Northern Illinois, as requested by the plaintiff, after a pair of rulings by Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman reported by Law Street Media.

There are two separate BIPA cases currently ongoing against Clearview, known by their plaintiffs Hall and Mutnick. Mutnick filed a motion for a preliminary injunction several months into the case, and says in a clarified motion for reassignment that it is seeking to have Hall v. Clearview AI, Inc., et al. moved to Illinois, and that plaintiff Hall agrees with the motion.

Clearview had filed a motion to stay the proceedings pending decisions on its motion to dismiss based on personal jurisdiction, and to move the case to the Southern District of New York, where the company is based. In New York, Chief Justice Colleen McMahon said that because the suit applies an Illinois state law and includes class members based on their Illinois residence at the time of the alleged violation, it is not clear that the cases belong in New York district court.

China’s legislators will discuss a new national security law specifically crafted for Hong Kong. The issue has long been controversial in the city, despite the Basic Law requiring its enactment.

There is an interesting case of a blockchain engineer and a crime in the article.

A district court in China has reportedly ruled that Ethereum’s cryptocurrency is legal property with economic value. This ruling follows a couple of other verdicts on the legality of cryptocurrency, including bitcoin, by various Chinese courts. While cryptocurrency is not legal tender in China, people can hold and transfer them like property.

The Shenzhen Futian District People’s Court in Guangdong Province, China, has ruled that ether is legal property, protected by Chinese law, local media reported last week. This means that the Chinese are not barred from owning or transferring the cryptocurrency, local publication 8btc explained, adding that according to the court ruling:

Continue reading “Chinese Court Declares Ethereum Legal Property With Economic Value” »

Metamaterials, which are engineered to have properties not found in nature, have long been developed and studied because of their unique features and exciting applications. However, the physics behind their thermal emission properties have remained unclear to researchers—until now.

In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, Sheng Shen, an associate professor in Carnegie Mellon’s department of mechanical engineering, and his student Jiayu Li, a Ph.D. candidate, have created a new scale law to describe the thermal emission from metasurfaces and metamaterials.

“With this new scale law uncovering the underlying physics behind the collective thermal emission behavior of metamaterials, researchers could easily utilize existing design and optimization tools to achieve desired thermal emission properties from metamaterials, instead of blindly searching for the best solution through mapping the entire design space,” Li said.

Elon Musk tweeted a complaint about Tesla’s share price that wiped $14bn off the company’s stock market value on Friday morning.

The seven-word tweet was the latest controversial outburst from the outspoken chief executive, whose outpourings on Twitter have landed him in hot water before. An incorrect claim in the middle of 2018 that he was close to a buyout of Tesla led to a complaint from the US Department of Justice and a settlement that involved Mr Musk agreeing not to issue market-moving tweets in future without first clearing them with his company’s legal department.

Tesla did not immediately confirm whether Mr Musk’s tweet had been given legal clearance, and did not respond to a question about whether the company currently has a general counsel. Tesla lost three general counsels last year, one of them quitting after only two months.

Bad news.

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has ruled that artificial intelligence systems cannot be credited as an inventor in a patent, the agency announced earlier this week. The decision came in response to two patents — one for a food container and the other for a flashing light — that were created by an AI system called DABUS.

Among the USPTO’s arguments is the fact that US patent law repeatedly refers to inventors using humanlike terms such as “whoever” and pronouns like “himself” and “herself.” The group behind the applications had argued that the law’s references to an inventor as an “individual” could be applied to a machine, but the USPTO said this interpretation was too broad. “Under current law, only natural persons may be named as an inventor in a patent application,” the agency concluded.

Continue reading “US patent office rules that artificial intelligence cannot be a legal inventor” »

On March 6, the Moon Village Association unveiled a set of 15 draft Moon Village Association (MVA) Principles intended to help facilitate the peaceful settlement of the Moon by establishing best practices for the long-term sustainability of lunar and cislunar activity. The MVA Principles are now published on the MVA website and are open for public comment. The announcement by the president of the MVA, Dr. Giuseppe Reibaldi, took place during a day-long symposium on Returning to the Moon: Legal Challenges as Humanity Begins to Settle the Solar System hosted by the Global Space Law Center at Cleveland State University’s Cleveland-Marshall College of Law (see “Hard law or soft law? The debate about the future of space law”, The Space Review, April 13, 2020).

As discussed further below, all stakeholders, including members of the general public, are invited to submit their comments on the principles through the MVA website. The purpose of this article is to answer some basic questions about the nature of the MVA Principles and to provide a concise summary of the principles to acquaint readers with their scope.

What is the Moon Village Association? The concept of the “Moon Village” is a vision of peaceful global cooperation in lunar exploration and utilization. The concept contemplates a collection of international efforts that involve both governmental and non-governmental (i.e. private) entities conducting activities in a spirit of cooperation and mutual assistance. Everyone is free to contribute to humanity’s future on the Moon in accordance with their individual capabilities. The Moon Village Association (www.moonvillageassociation.org) was incorporated in Vienna in 2017 with the goal of implementing the Moon Village concept by serving as a hub of communication for stakeholders in the new international push to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon. At the core of the MVA is an extensive network of professionals and institutions from more than 40 countries.