The Roundtable
Welcome to the Roundtable, a forum for incisive commentary and analysis
on cases and developments in law and the legal system.
on cases and developments in law and the legal system.
 By Nayeon Kim
Nayeon Kim is a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. On March 29, the long-awaited Oculus Rift became available to the general public for purchase. [1] Although the virtual reality headset doesn’t seem to be ready to dominate the market just yet, this release clearly marks a big leap in the technology behind virtual reality in that a high-resolution fully-immersive virtual reality headset was actually made as a product and released to the world. The more significant thing is that Oculus Rift is not simply an interesting gadget introduced without context; it represents a beginning of the budding virtual reality hardware and software industry. This means that many other companies including Sony and HTC are also trying to develop virtual reality headsets and software. Virtual reality is clearly a hot topic right now, but what does it have to do with law? The most obvious relationship would be that virtual environments can be used to facilitate real crimes, such as people using computers to steal sensitive personal information. Although these issues need to be addressed further, the more interesting issue is about crimes committed within the virtual space without any intent of causing harm in the real world. Most of the virtual reality headsets coming out today aim to fully immerse their users into a completely new but realistic universe. If a virtual environment is very realistic, a range of crimes happening in the real world can also happen in the virtual world. For example, someone may steal something valuable in a virtual world. Or a criminal may bomb a house in a virtual world and cause virtual damage to its residents. The more a virtual world feels like reality, the more crimes can happen in the virtual world.
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 By Nayeon Kim
Nayeon Kim is a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. Last April, Margrethe Vestager, the European Union’s antitrust chief, formally accused Google of manipulating search results in favor of its other businesses. For example, she argued that Google intentionally displayed its shopping site on the front when people searched for products, diverting traffic from the sites of its competitors. Although there could be some political motives behind the actions of European regulators, the existence of this conflict itself attests to the immense amount of power Google has over the online search market and informs us of how things may go wrong when a single company virtually dominates an industry. Not only has Google faced antitrust investigations in Europe, but in the US as well; however, the US investigation did not ultimately result in a formal charge. In 2013, the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, concluded its two-year investigation on whether Google violated any US antitrust regulations. The FTC stated that it would not file a lawsuit against Google because it could not find sufficient evidence of the company breaking the law. [1]  Nayeon Kim is a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania.
When you shops at Amazon, you would probably assume that the price of the same product from the same seller would be the same for everyone. Of course, certain groups of customers, such as Amazon Prime members may be able to buy things at discounted prices, but if there is no clear reason for being offered a discount, it seems natural that everyone should pay the same price for the same product. This is, at least, how pricing works in most stores we know. However, since companies are now able to gather more and more data on customers, each buyer may be charged a different price for the same product based on his or her browsing history or the number of items in his or her cart. Amazon conducted a price experiment in 2000 by offering random prices for the same product and suffered from bad publicity because some customers discovered that they were being charged different prices for the same product. Although Amazon claimed to have not used demographic information to determine the amount of discounts, a study in 2013 about Netflix by Benjamin Shiller showed that factoring in demographic information and web browsing data may be an extremely attractive option for companies looking for ways to increase profit. [1] He found that using demographic information to approximate a buyer’s willingness to pay and offering a price based on that calculation raised profits by about 0.14% and using web browsing data increased profits by as much as 1.4% relative to the profit generated from offering discounts to customers who buy a large quantity of items, which is already a standard practice in almost all industries. His research also demonstrated that using many kinds of data about a customer can accurately predict his or her behavior. For example, he noted that the probability of a generic customer subscribing to Netflix is 16%, but when he used variables related to detailed web behavior such as whether a user previously visited Wikipedia or IMDb, he could predict a user’s probability of subscribing from nearly zero to 91%.  By Nayeon Kim
Nayeon Kim is a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. This October, Harvard Law School announced that it would digitize the vast collection of legal books in its library, which includes almost all documentations of judicial decisions made at the state and federal levels since the colonial era. [1] The school plans to scan the collection, which amounts to some 40 million pages, and distribute it on the Internet for free. Many legal experts tout this decision as a landmark in improving access to the legal system because it would make primary legal documents readily available for all, helping public defenders who may not be able to afford commercial information retrieval services to find the information they need. Although Harvard Law’s decision to open up its legal resources is certainly not a small one, the school’s action is a part of a movement to democratize the practice of law with the help of digital and information technology. Ever since the Internet changed how legal discovery is done, from flipping through the pages of thick case books to finding information online, information technology has been a force seeking to standardize and systemize legal service which has been tailored to the needs of individual clients. [2] For example, legal documents have been prepared by lower-level associates without using any pre-existing, standard format. However, recently a number of legal startups are offering document preparation services involving standardized forms and self-service document creation. For instance, Fairdoc aims to decrease the cost of preparing legal documents by letting clients fill data into pre-existing forms and make some custom adjustments without substantive involvement of legal professionals. Not only standardizing rather routine tasks such as legal discovery and document preparation, information technology is also aiming to influence the analytical core of a lawyer’s work. Ravel, a legal startup focusing on visualizing the relationship between legal cases, which partnered with Harvard to digitize the library, is likely to drive down legal costs by making drawing connections between legal cases easier and more efficient. More experimental projects such as the Hammurabi, the goal of which is to codify certain parts of U.S. law into machine-readable form, also has the potential to make the legal system more accessible by enabling non-professionals to determine on their own what they are required to do according to the law.  By Nayeon Kim
Nayeon Kim is a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. One of U.S. legal system’s central issues is that it is not sufficiently accessible to people or entities who cannot afford the high legal fees needed to advance their position in the courtroom. Lawyers are generally out of reach from ordinary people, and more wealth can result in a strategic advantage even in legal disputes between corporations. In fact, some corporations drag along the trial process in order to dry up their opponents’ resources while a significant number of large corporations often do not pursue meritorious and potentially winnable cases due to financial considerations. As a result, investors have started to delve into the field of litigation finance. Litigation finance, or legal financing, is a relatively new way of funding legal proceedings. Investors unrelated to the case provide funding to litigants--usually the plaintiff--in exchange for a portion of any financial recovery resulting from the lawsuit. However, litigation finance is different from a loan in that the plaintiff does not have to pay the investors back if he or she loses the case. Litigation finance was originally used to fund personal injury cases, but the practice is expanding to commercial lawsuits as well.  By Nayeon Kim
Nayeon Kim is a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. The recent theft of sensitive data from the Office of Personnel Management that supposedly originated from China has raised concerns about the vulnerabilities of cyber security in the U.S. government and further strained the relationship between China and the U.S. Referring to the increased number of cyber attacks perpetrated by China and other nations, President Obama stated that there would be a point where the U.S. would consider these breaches “a core national security threat” and noted the possibility of retaliation. [1] Although the Office of Personnel Management case is one of the largest breaches of sensitive personal data, it is not the only attack suspected to be carried out by China. China, which is responsible for a startling 70% of all global intellectual property theft, is one of the major perpetrators of the crime. [2] U.S. security officials believe that the Chinese government is behind many attacks on U.S. commercial data and often shares these data with Chinese companies. [3] Such a strategy predates even the Internet as a comprehensive and detailed book on Chinese industrial espionage suggests that China has long maintained a policy of utilizing and sometimes illegally obtaining Western technology to drive growth in key technological areas. [4] Even though China repeatedly denies its relation to intellectual property theft, the U.S. believes that China puts extraordinary effort in acquiring valuable foreign technology. |
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