Georgetown Law
Technology Review

The Federal Rules of Evidence were originally established to create uniformity in evidence law by providing guidance for every evidentiary problem that could be reasonably expected to occur at a trial. The rules are firmly grounded in the tangible, as courts typically deal with the concrete concerns posed by physical evidence or the testimony of […]

Introduction In May of 2014, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit incorrectly reversed the United States District Court for the Northern District of California’s decision in Oracle v. Google. By broadly extending copyright protection to Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), the Federal Circuit drastically shifted the landscape of coding and app […]

Introduction As technology continues to evolve, the need to provide meaningful consumer protections remains an immense challenge for legislators and jurists. Aging statutes and inadequate precedents make devising modern technological solutions difficult. Increasingly, courts have had difficulty grappling with the questions arising from the increasing volume of consumer data, particularly how to consider the implications […]

Introduction Spokeo is a people search engine that allows its users to view a profile of the searched individual that includes information such as: age, employer, address, relatives, marital status, and economic status. Spokeo does not retrieve all of its information from one particular source, nor does Spokeo search for the data. Instead, Spokeo aggregates […]

Introduction In a few short years, our skies will be far more crowded. Existing avian occupants will have to share the space above our heads with a new, man-made species of flying machines carrying packages, cameras, and pizzas: Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), a.k.a., drones. On neighborhood streets, Amazon Prime Air will use a fleet of […]

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the public gaining access to the World Wide Web. To say communications have come a long way since then would be quite the understatement. Today, billions of people around the world can be reached in seconds—a far cry from the time when email was only common among academics, […]

Introduction We’ve seen an unprecedented number of breaches in the United States in recent years, spanning both the public and private sector. Despite how critical data privacy laws are to preventing breaches and sustaining internet health, the U.S. lacks a comprehensive consumer privacy law and national data breach standard. Instead, American consumers face a patchwork […]

Introduction It was recently discovered that Baltimore, MD—a city known for its aggressive policing of black communities, had used cell site simulators (“CS simulators”) to surveil these communities over 4,300 times in the last eight years. 4,300 already seems like a considerable figure; however, comparing it to the number of simulators deployed in New York […]

Introduction “Big Data” is the bogeyman of the information age: powerful, and as ill-defined as it is abstractly threatening. Broadly, it encompasses “technology that maximize[s] computational power and algorithmic accuracy”; “types of analyses that draw on a range of tools to clean and compare data”; and the underlying belief in the correlation between the size […]

“We are not a law firm or a substitute for an attorney or law firm. We cannot provide any kind of advice, explanation, opinion, or recommendation about possible legal rights, remedies, defenses, options, selection of forms or strategies.” When machines take the place of persons in providing certain services, what is considered a marketable skill […]

Widespread access to the Internet, multimedia messaging, and a myriad of other advances in communications technology over the past few decades have made it easier than ever to share information, but more difficult than ever to control information. The many positive results of this evolution, however, are marred by the ease with which it has […]

The burgeoning development of automated vehicle technology has been an increasing focus of journalists and scholars since major technology companies such as Google announced plans to develop the systems several years ago.. Coupled with the excitement over the technology’s potential advantages has come a slew of controversies pertaining to the safety of such technology, and […]

Astronomers across the globe marveled at news that a Russian radio telescope detected a uniquely strong signal of unknown origin, coming from the direction of a solar system akin to our own. The signal’s strength, much greater than noise power generally detected by the Russian satellite, was consistent with something extraterrestrial. As researchers analyze and […]

Healthcare is in the midst of a mobile revolution, and it will only be a matter of time before mobile healthcare applications (“apps”) change how we deliver, consume, measure, and pay for healthcare. The rapid pace of innovation and broad applicability of mobile healthcare applications have fueled this revolution. The healthcare mobile app market, currently […]

Introduction In a future that is nearly upon us, machines outthink human beings. In many specialized domains, machines already do; beyond the nearly instantaneous math and text processing that has become mundane, computer systems have overtaken humans in tasks as complex as image and facial recognition, learning to play simple video games, and guessing where […]

Introduction – Creative Content Users Creating the New Regime Conventional copyright doctrine views copyright from a “top down” perspective where copyright holders possess the power and control over their exclusive rights, expecting potential users to seek permission for any and all protected uses. However, this viewpoint does not map onto what is occurring in our […]

Introduction Every day, lawyers, regulators, and policy advocates must use information about a situation to evaluate, predict, and draw conclusions about the world around them. The problem is ubiquitous: You have a hypothesis that attempts to explain something in the real world – perhaps the cause of a disease, the guilt of an accused criminal, […]

Introduction Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics. Computers operate on the foundation of if/then logic statements, whereas natural human language systems do not; NLP endeavors to bridge this divide by enabling a computer to analyze what a user said (input speech recognition) and process what the […]

In early April, WhatsApp, an online messaging service with more than a billion users, announced that they added “end-to-end” encryption to every form of communication on the service. This means WhatsApp’s server now acts as an illiterate messenger, passing along messages that it cannot itself decipher. Because of this newly adopted technology, WhatsApp is unable […]

The Origins of Tor Security in online activity, and privacy from those who wish to monitor it, has been a priority for internet users since creation of the web. To achieve this goal, the concept of onion routing was developed by the United States Naval Research Laboratory (“NRL”) in the mid-1990s to protect online communications […]

One may occasionally see five letters displayed at the beginning of a URL: HTTPS. To understand HTTPS and its importance in internet communication, it is first necessary to understand HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol.) The difference of a single letter could contribute to the invasion of your privacy on the internet and the theft of your […]