Law and Technology

Pocket-lint speaks with Tejas N. Narechania, Berkeley Law professor, faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, and former Special Counsel to the FCC to get a refresher on net neutrality, learn what the FCC’s decision means, and what could happen next.

“The promise of AI is that it can create a level playing field for everybody. But we can already see that, organically, legal aid attorneys aren’t going to necessarily have access to the most cutting-edge technologies,” Professor Colleen Chien told Law360. “There’s a risk that this community in particular will be underserved by AI.”

“Generally, the guilty party must pay for past harm and refrain from future harm,” in copyright cases said Colleen Chien, co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at Berkeley Law School, in an email. “In the algorithmic context, we have started to see some creative forms of ‘disgorgement remedies’ including destruction of the model or algorithm, retraining it without the infringing material, or some combination of both,” she said.

AI can narrow justice gap, but women lawyers slower to adopt it found a Berkeley Law study co-authored by Professor Colleen Chien.

“To keep Big Tech from becoming an unregulated AI oligopoly, we should turn to the playbook regulators have used to address other industries that offer fundamental services, like electricity, telecommunications and banking services,” write Tejas N. Narechania, professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and Ganesh Sitaraman, professor of law at Vanderbilt University. 

“Stalkers always find a way to use location data, making this problem “totally foreseeable,” said Catherine Crump, a Berkeley Law School professor specializing in privacy issues involving technology. “It is disappointing that a company as sophisticated and well-resourced as Tesla doesn’t have better answers to this,” said Crump, who is also a former adviser to the White House Domestic Policy Council.

“Artificial intelligence is taking the world by storm, and University of California, Berkeley, School of Law is at the forefront, helping to mitigate risks and maximize benefits.”

Professor Colleen Chien noted that women and smaller companies typically have a more difficult time securing patents or getting their name on patents, and AI tools could help “level the playing field and improve patent quality.”

AI companies should embrace the concept of stakeholder capitalism which says businesses should consider their stakeholder network—not just their shareholders—when making decisions, says Berkeley Law lecturer and alum Jesse Finfrock.

The primary argument made in the lawsuit brought by the authors, in turn, centers on the alleged illegal use of copyrighted material for the training of the AI models, Pamela Samuelson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley Law School who specializes in the overlap between technology and copyright, told ABC News.