Georgetown Law
Technology Review

Earlier this year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the marketing of a software program, Caption Guidance, that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help medical professionals administer cardiac ultrasounds. Caption Guidance helps the user capture high quality diagnostic images of a patient’s heart. After the images are captured, a cardiologist reviews the images […]

The Supreme Court will hear one of the most significant copyright law cases of the 21st century. The Google v. Oracle oral argument is scheduled for March 24th, with a decision likely by June. The foremost question presented is whether application programming interfaces (“APIs”) are copyrightable. A holding affirming that APIs are original works of authorship […]

The United States Supreme Court may take up two cases this term resolving critical questions about the constitutionality and scope of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (“TCPA”). The Court is currently reviewing briefs in support and opposition of certiorari from the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Duguid v. Facebook, Inc., 926 F.3d 1146 (9th […]

This January, Facebook updated its content policy covering “deepfakes.” Deepfakes range from the benign, such as modifications of scenes in the movie Forrest Gump, to the nefarious, like the massive volume of artificially-created porn featuring female celebrities. Facebook’s policy, which governs organic content, prohibits all media that has been edited in a way that “would […]

On January 22, 2020, a putative class action lawsuit was filed in the Northern District of Illinois claiming startup app Clearview AI has amassed a facial recognition database using more than 3 billion images extracted from social media websites. The case, Mutnick v. Clearview AI, seeks certification of a nationwide class and an Illinois class, alleging the […]

On January 8th, the Department of Transportation released its latest set of guidelines for driverless cars, entitled “Ensuring American Leadership in Automated Vehicle Technologies: Automated Vehicles.” Issued on an annual basis, this is the fourth time that the Department has released such guidelines, and this year the Department is placing a special emphasis on two […]

On November 22, the five commissioners of the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) voted unanimously in favor of an order that would limit the ability of telecommunications firms to purchase equipment from Chinese telecommunications equipment manufacturers Huawei and ZTE. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai introduced the two-part proposal in an effort to “protect U.S. communications networks from […]

On November 1, 2019, Google announced its acquisition of FitBit, Inc. for $2.1 billion. The transaction, expected to close in 2020, makes Google a formidable competitor in a booming smartwatch market where industry-wide revenue is set to double by 2023. The deal supplements Google’s recent acquisitions in wearable tech, including a $40 million purchase of […]

On June 28, 2018, former Governor of California Jerry Brown signed into law the most comprehensive consumer privacy law in the United States. Some refer to the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) as a mini-GDPR, the European Union’s consumer privacy regulation. The regulatory schemes in both the CCPA and GDPR do not neatly overlap. However, […]

Protecting and managing consumer data has undoubtedly proven to be a difficult task for Facebook in recent years. In 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal saw the personal data of up to eighty-seven million Facebook users misappropriated for political purposes. An internal investigation led Facebook to suspend sixty-nine thousand applications that improperly collected personal information from […]