Also, you will earn class participation points for posting to Discussions (not Ed Discussions.)
Tuesday, February 27, 2024 - 12:10PM-1:30PM - SLB 128Think Local, Act Global: The Evolution of Tech Governance
Peter Micek, General Counsel and UN Advocacy Manager at Access Now
This "year of democracy," with over 65 elections globally in 2024, will shed a harsh light on the governance structures for new and emerging technologies. Whether this mix of unilateral, multilateral, multistakeholder, and self-regulated systems is fit for purpose carries implications for human rights, sustainable development, and peace and conflict. Drawing on over a decade in digital rights advocacy from a civil society lens, Peter Micek will present context and insights on key campaigns, including on mercenary spyware, internet shutdowns, and artificial intelligence. Our discussion can lead students towards career paths and legal inquiries that assert a law-centered vision of responsive, participatory tech governance.
Peter Micek is General Counsel and UN Advocacy Manager at Access Now, based in New York City. Peter leads the Legal team at Access Now, an international organization that defends and extends the digital rights of people and communities at risk. At the UN, Peter advances international norms and law on digital rights, including on privacy and spyware, censorship and internet shutdowns, and civic space. Peter is also Lecturer at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and an Affiliate of the Harvard University Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He sits on the Advisory Board of the Univ. of Oklahoma College of Law’s Center for International Business and Human Rights, and formerly the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Future of Cybersecurity. Peter completed a JD cum laude at the University of San Francisco School of Law, and in 2010 published "A Genealogy of Home Visits," critiquing surveillance of at-risk communities.
This event is cosponsored by the Yale Journal of Law & Technology (YJoLT).
Thursday, February 29, 2024 - 12:00PM-1:30PM - Baker Hall 405
Talkin' 'Bout AI Generation: Copyright and the Generative-AI Supply Chain
A. Feder Cooper, CS Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University
and
James Grimmelmann, Tessler Family Professor of Digital and Information Law at Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech
"Does generative AI infringe copyright?" is an urgent question. It is also a difficult question, for two reasons. First, “generative AI” is not just one product from one company. It is a catch-all name for a massive ecosystem of loosely related technologies, including conversational text chatbots like ChatGPT, image generators like Midjourney and DALL·E, coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, and systems that compose music and create videos. Generative-AI models have different technical architectures and are trained on different kinds and sources of data using different algorithms. Some take months and cost millions of dollars to train; others can be spun up in a weekend. These models are made accessible to users in very different ways. Some are offered through paid online services; others are distributed on an open-source model that lets anyone download and modify them. These systems behave differently and raise different legal issues.
The second problem is that copyright law is notoriously complicated, and generative-AI systems manage to touch on a great many corners of it. They raise issues of authorship, similarity, direct and indirect liability, fair use, and licensing, among much else. These issues cannot be analyzed in isolation, because there are connections everywhere. Whether the output of a generativeAI system is fair use can depend on how its training datasets were assembled. Whether the creator of a generative-AI system is secondarily liable can depend on the prompts that its users supply.
In this talk, we aim to bring order to the chaos. To do so, we introduce the "generative-AI supply chain": an interconnected set of stages that transform training data (millions of pictures of cats) into generations (a new, potentially never-seen-before picture of a cat that has never existed). Breaking down generative AI into these constituent stages reveals all of the places at which companies and users make choices that have copyright consequences. It enables us to trace the effects of upstream technical designs on downstream uses, and to assess who in these complicated sociotechnical systems bears responsibility for infringement when it happens. Because we engage so closely with the technology of generative AI, we are able to shed more light on the copyright questions. We do not give definitive answers as to who should and should not be held liable. Instead, we identify the key decisions that courts will need to make as they grapple with these issues, and point out the consequences that would likely flow from different liability regimes.
Click here to read the full draft paper.
A. Feder Cooper is a scalable machine-learning researcher who studies problems at the intersection of computer science and law. Currently, Cooper is a CS Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, an Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a student researcher at Google AI.
James Grimmelmann is the Tessler Family Professor of Digital and Information Law at Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech, and an Affiliated Fellow of the Yale Information Society Project. He studies how laws regulating software affect freedom, wealth, and power. He helps lawyers and technologists understand each other, applying ideas from computer science to problems in law and vice versa. He is the author of the casebook Internet Law: Cases and Problems and of over fifty scholarly articles and essays on digital copyright, content moderation, search engine regulation, online governance, privacy on social networks,, and other topics in computer and Internet law.
Upcoming Events
Monday, March 4, 2024, 12:00PM - 1:30PM EST
Abrams Institute Conversations presents: Will the Supreme Court Let States Take Control of the Internet?
In our next Conversation, Floyd Abrams will explore the conflicting views of two leading experts--Jack Balkin and Timothy Wu—about how the Supreme Court should resolve Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton, cases raising critical questions about the power of governments to regulate content on social media platforms. These cases arise from laws enacted by Florida and Texas to limit the power of the largest social media companies to curate the speech disseminated over their platforms and to compel them to disclose a variety of information to the public. They raise fundamental First Amendment questions—the platforms object that any regulation implicating their content-moderation decisions is unconstitutional, while Florida and Texas argue that content-moderation decisions do not implicate the First Amendment at all. They are also politically charged. The two states defend their laws as necessary to rein in powerful social media websites that are not elevating conservative voices. Opponents fear a decision upholding them would give governments unprecedented powers to control what voters read, increase the risk of political violence, and subvert elections.
Just days after the Court hears argument in these cases, this Conversation will explore the key constitutional arguments being advanced, their implications for the future of the Internet, and the reception they received at the Supreme Court. You won’t want to miss this insightful discussion with two of our nation’s deepest thinkers about the regulation of technology, protection of free expression, and preservation of competitive markets. Please join us.
Please click here to make your reservation (only if you have not done so already!)
Abrams Institute Conversations are made possible through the generous support of the Stanton Foundation.
Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School and the founder and director of Yale’s Information Society Project, an interdisciplinary center that studies law and new information technologies. He also directs the Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression and the Knight Law and Media Program at Yale. Professor Balkin is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and founded and edits the group blog Balkinization (http://balkin.blogspot.com/). Jack is the author of over a hundred and forty articles and the author or editor of fourteen books. His work spans many fields, including constitutional theory, Internet law, freedom of speech, reproductive rights, jurisprudence, and the theory of ideology. His books include The Cycles of Constitutional Time (Oxford University Press, 2020), What Obergefell v. Hodges Should Have Said (Yale University Press, 2020), Democracy and Dysfunction (University of Chicago Press, 2019)(with Sanford Levinson), Living Originalism (Harvard, Belknap Press, 2011), and Constitutional Redemption: Political Faith in an Unjust World (Harvard University Press 2011).
Tim Wu is the Julius Silver Professor of Law, Science and Technology at Columbia Law School. Hailed as the "architect" of the Biden Administration's competition and antitrust policies, Professor Wu writes and teaches about private power and related topics. First known for coining the term “net neutrality” in 2002, in recent years he has been a leader in the revitalization of American antitrust and has taken a particular focus on the growing power of the big tech platforms. In 2021, he was appointed to serve in the White House as special assistant to the President for technology and competition policy. He previously served as enforcement counsel in the New York Attorney General’s Office, worked on competition policy for the National Economic Council during the Barack Obama administration, and worked in antitrust enforcement at the Federal Trade Commission. In 2014, Wu was a Democratic primary candidate for lieutenant governor of New York. In his most recent book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age (2018), he argues that corporate and industrial concentration can lead to the rise of populism, nationalism, and extremist politicians.
Floyd Abrams is senior counsel at Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP and has taught courses in First Amendment law at Yale Law School, Columbia Law School and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of three books about the First Amendment of which the most recent was “The Soul of the First Amendment“ (2017). Mr. Abrams has argued numerous cases involving the First Amendment in the Supreme Court and lower courts. Among others, he was co-counsel to the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case, counsel to the Brooklyn Museum in its litigation against New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and counsel to Senator Mitch McConnell in the Citizens United case. Former Yale Law School Dean Robert Post has observed that “no lawyer has exercised a greater influence on the development of First Amendment jurisprudence in the last four decades.”
Re hw2: there is a new Merrill Lynch report posted to canvas/files about their process for constructing portfolios.
William N. GoetzmannEdwin J. Beinecke Professor of Finance and Management Studies & Director of the International Center for Finance
William N. Goetzmann is the Edwin J. Beinecke Professor of Finance and Management Studies and Faculty Director of the International Center for Finance at the Yale School of Management. He is an expert on a diverse range of investments. Professor Goetzmann’s past work includes studies of stock market predictability, hedge funds and survival biases in performance measurement. His current research focuses on alternative investing, factor investing, behavioral finance and the art market.
Professor Goetzmann has written and co-authored a number of books, including Modern Portfolio Theory and Investment Analysis (Wiley, 2014), The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations that Created Modern Capital Markets (Oxford, 2005), The Great Mirror of Folly: Finance, Culture and the Crash of 1720 (Yale, 2013) and most recently, Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible (Princeton, 2016). He teaches portfolio management, alternative investments, real estate and financial history at the Yale School of Management.
Empowering Data Scientists—and Citizen Data Scientists—in the Age of AIWe will take Eren to dinner at Villa Lulu at 6pm. We will conduct a lottery.Eren Orbey, a product manager for Microsoft’s new end-to-end analytics platform, will explore his team’s work building tools that enable organizations to make more informed decisions through data science and machine learning. Next-generation data platforms must bridge the domains of business intelligence and artificial intelligence, democratizing software for a range of users without sacrificing the complexity of the underlying technology. Eren will focus on two stages of the machine-learning workflow that are ripe for simplification: data preparation and model deployment. He’ll explore the promise and challenge of building low-code developer tools and incorporating LLMs in user-facing products. Attendees will also have the opportunity to ask questions about the transition from Yale Computer Science to the technology industry.
Eren Orbey is a product manager at Microsoft, where he works on a new end-to-end data and analytics platform called Fabric. His team's goal is to make data science easier for experts and more accessible to everyone, and his areas of focus include AI-assisted data-cleaning software and machine-learning tools. Eren graduated from Yale in 2019 with degrees in Computer Science and English, and he has a graduate degree from Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He is also a writer at The New Yorker magazine, where he has contributed since 2016.
See Conceptual Dependency and Its Descendants Steven Lytinen, 1992.
One day Joe Bear was hungry. He asked his friend Irving Bird where some honey was. Irving told him there was a beehive in the oak tree. Joe threatened to hit Irving if he didn’t tell him where some honey was.One day Joe Bear was hungry. He asked his friend Irving Bird where some honey was. Irving told him there was a beehive in the oak tree. Joe walked to the oak tree. He ate the beehive.
See also Goal-based Decision Making. Stephen Slade. Hardcover: 304 pages. Publisher: Psychology Press (October 1, 1993). It is also available at the Yale Bookstore. Online copy through Yale library Online copy of thesis from which book was derived at Yale Library
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