Posts Tagged: "Data"

The generative artificial intelligence (AI) revolution the world is currently experiencing is powered by data. But what exactly are “data” and how can we make the term fit for use in the complex landscape of generative AI? In simple terms, data in this context can be any digitally formatted information. However, there is an inconsistency in the usage and understanding of the term when it comes to what is encompassed in a dataset used for training a generative AI model. Often, there is metadata or even identifiable information which, although possibly unintended, ends up being part of the training data. There can also be legal implications linked to the data, including systems trained on copyrighted or licensed works, or, for example, systems trained with any visual or textual information containing personal health information.

The simplest facts are sometimes the most difficult to comprehend. Patent suits are not as pervasive as they are portrayed in the media or by defendants. Remarkably few are filed relative to the number of patents that are active. The necessity to litigate patent disputes to get the attention of potential infringers and hold a meaningful licensing discussion has likely increased the total number of suits filed. If it has, it has not had much of an impact on the net total. This suggests that many patent holders who should be suing are not.

A widespread concern with many machine learning models is the inability to remove the traces of training data that are legally tainted. That is, after training a machine learning model, it may be determined that some of the underlying data that was used to develop the model may have been wrongfully obtained or processed. The ingested data may include files that an employee took from a former company, thus tainted with misappropriated trade secrets. Or the data may have been lawfully obtained, but without the adequate permissions to process the data. With the constantly and rapidly evolving landscape of data usage restrictions at the international, federal, state, and even municipal levels, companies having troves of lawfully-obtained data may find that the usage of that data in their machine learning models becomes illegal.

As the way we live and work has increasingly moved into virtual environments (I like to call it a legal metaverse), the boundaries between physical, digital, and biological worlds become blurrier by the day. Sensors lie within devices installed across every aspect of our home, office and mobile environments, connected from the edge of each of your devices to networks that are both local and cloud-based (with many in a foggy place between the two). The ensuing data traffic requires massive computing power for transfer, storage, analysis, and response. The migration to automated cloud computing power has further accelerated the deployment of containers across the public, private and hybrid cloud ecosystems for the transfer, storage, analysis, and response layers. Kubernetes and Docker have emerged as ubiquitous technologies to build, deploy and manage containerized applications using automation, and investors have noticed. Understanding the key legal issues will enable more successful client relationships for both vendors and customers, and inevitably growth and value creation.

A patent portfolio can be one of the greatest assets that a company owns. A patent portfolio may boost a company’s valuation for a stock offering or a sale, may be licensed for recurring revenue, may be sold to raise cash, or may be enforced to seek monetary damages or to exclude competitors from the market. However, growing a patent portfolio can be expensive. For this reason, many companies hire a portfolio manager to balance the value and expense of growing and maintaining the patent portfolio. A portfolio manager may be responsible for making decisions including a total target number of patent filings, target numbers of patent filings for different technology areas of the company, patent firms to use for filing and prosecuting patent applications, or how to manage costs per issued patent. The portfolio manager can improve the decision-making process by using data-driven decision making. This article shows some examples of data-driven decision making.

The European Commission is seeking feedback on its new strategy for data and has also launched a public consultation on a White Paper on Artificial Intelligence. Both measures were announced yesterday (February 19) by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen; Executive Vice-President for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age Margrethe Vestager; and Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton.

On Monday, December 3rd, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition for writ of certiorari in Carl M. Burnett v. Panasonic Corporation, declining to take up the case on appeal from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. This is now the latest case involving questions of patent-eligibility for an invention under 35 U.S.C. § 101 declined by the nation’s highest court. In this case, however, the Supreme Court hasn’t addressed the patentability of the relevant subject matter, namely electronic data and electromagnetic analog and digital signals, since 1853.

The GDPR’s entry into force has forced HR teams across the US and EU to re-evaluate the ways in which they justify the use of personal data relating to their employees, applicants and contractors. Whilst compliance priorities will vary between businesses, all US headquartered organizations with a presence or personnel in the UK should be particularly mindful of their enhanced obligations to satisfy multiple conditions under both the GDPR and the UK’s new Data Protection Act 2018 (“DPA 2018”) before collecting certain special categories of personal data.

It has been a long time coming, but the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is almost here. This new privacy regulation requires substantial changes to the collection and storage of data and will affect multiple disciplines, including the brand protection industry. One of the ‘victims’ of the new law is the WHOIS database. How will these changes affect its records?

Computers, processors, memories and transmission equipment are devices or machines. All these machines, as configured systems, have a documented history of addressing concrete technical problems that were difficult to overcome.  Ultimately, computing machines are characterized by what they do, or by their architecture. This article illustrates some of the historical issues in developing programmed and programmable machines.

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit entered a non-precedential decision in Art+Com Innovation Pool GmbH v. Google LLC, which affirmed a lower court’s invalidation of a patent covering methods of displaying geographic information to a user. The patent, issued in 2013 to Berlin-based Art+Com Innovationpool and claiming a priority date of December 1995, had been asserted in a patent case decided in the District of Delaware in which the German-based patent owner was seeking more than $100 million from Google for infringement committed by its Google Earth service.

To get the case off the ground, the court will decide whether Equifax can be sued in the first place – it’s tricky, because different federal circuits disagree about when this can happen. So, courts in Delaware, Illinois and Washington DC (for example) would allow the plaintiffs to proceed merely because their data is at risk after a hack. This is pretty easy to show. On the other hand though, New York, Conneticut and North Carolina would need to see not just a leak, but that the leaked data has actually been misused afterwards. Equifax HQ is in Atlanta, the 11th circuit. Although those courts have a history of recognising that difficulty (and so supporting data victim lawsuits), it hasn’t yet come down firmly on the question of risk vs misuse.

John Thorne was VP and deputy general counsel for Verizon during its legal battle against former American cable television company Cablevision where Verizon asserted a series of patents it owned… A closer look into the patents renders some interesting information about the patents Verizon asserted and the company’s legal strategy in the case. Two of the eight patents asserted by Verizon in the District of Delaware weren’t originally invented by Verizon, Bell Atlantic or other any other of Verizon’s predecessor companies; they were acquired from outside entities… And haven’t we been told by the likes of Unified Patents that all patent owners who enforce their patents are patent trolls? One would have to assume if Unified is being logically consistent they would have extraordinary problems with Verizon’s activities particularly here where the patents used to sue Cablevision were acquired and not the subject of in-house innovation.

ShadowIT involves workers’ use of unsanctioned products and applications to perform the work of the business enterprise. In other words, ShadowIT occurs when employees use their personal emails and applications, such as a cloud-based storage system, instead of company-approved solutions. According to a recent survey, about one-third of IT use is considered ShadowIT. Whether responding to a subpoena in a wage and hour dispute, attempting to safeguard previous corporate secrets, or analyzing the extent of a data breach, a company’s failure to understand the scope and location of ShadowIT data could be problematic. Companies should have policies in place regarding employees’ (and other workers’) use of unapproved applications, but there should also be an understanding that a policy is not a panacea.