28 September 2015 – GikII is a series of European workshops on the intersections between law, technology and popular culture. It is hosted at a different institution every year. The first conference was in 2006 and was held in Edinburgh. I have been attending the last few years. This year is was in Berlin, concluding this past Friday.
GikII tackled issues like artificial intelligence, 3D printing, robots and drones, how you will eventually be able to talk to your computer, how your mobile phone would become ubiquitous and have more power than the Apollo 11 computer system … all before any of this hit the mainstream media or became “cool”. Geek lawyers who mash-up popular culture, technology and law … at the forefront of thinking about legal issues well ahead of the curve.
To get an overview of the event and the subjects presented click here.
It is impossible to summarize everything so just a few items I found of interest:
I heard legal experts pondering a range of issues that are more than just fun thought experiments. For example, if a person who has a mechanized arm as a medical prosthesis (essentially, a cyborg) kills someone by hitting them with that arm, does that limb count as a body part or a deadly weapon?
However, the Internet of things (IoT) was the biggest recurring topic.
1. Derek McAuley, professor of digital economy at the University of Nottingham, called for transparency as homes become smarter: “The most disturbing thing would be if devices in my home are secretly talking to other devices outside my home without giving me access to what they’re saying.”
2. Miranda Mowbray, a security researcher at HP Labs, highlighted a study that showed the vast majority of IoT devices (from “smart” car keys to smartwatches) to be highly vulnerable: “The current state of security in the Internet of things is pants.”
3. Robin Wilton, who handles privacy outreach at the Internet Society, also warned of the IoT generating huge amounts of data that people won’t be able to escape or flush away.
4. Olswang regulatory lawyer Thomas Höppner spoke about ad-blocking, in particular the controversial German outfit Adblock Plus and Eyeo. These companies let through unobtrusive “acceptable ads” on some websites by whitelisting them, and it charges the biggest sites, such as Google and Amazon, for the privilege. Eyeo won’t say how much they charge, but Höppner recalled a report from a couple of years ago in German trade magazine Werben & Verkaufen that cited a secret contract to say Eyeo demanded 30 percent of the ad revenue.
And unrelated to IoT:
Melanie Dulong de Rosnay (permanent researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research) gave a brilliant talk on the relationship between law and technology assumes that the law must be adapted to take into account new forms of cultural practices – either to forbid them or to legalize them.
A brief post. I am still working through the many papers.
