Given the recent surge of ransomware attacks and escalating conflict with Russia, assessing a cyber insurance policy’s war/terrorism exclusion has never been more important. The cyber war exclusion, used by insurers to insulate against catastrophic risk, has been a considerable topic of discussion due to its overly broad language and potential for misapplication. Nearly all… Read More »
Racial disparities in the traditional small business credit market are a well-documented phenomenon in the U.S. With the recent development of more automated and anonymized lending technologies comes a natural question: do fintech lenders serve minority-owned businesses who are in the blind spots of traditional lenders? In our recent project, we investigate whether minority borrowers are more likely to use… Read More »
In 2021, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, disclosed how the company’s machine-learning-powered services have been exploiting the personal data of millions of users. According to internal documents collected by Haugen during her time at Facebook, the tech giant has intentionally collected consumers’ personal data and misused its artificial intelligence (AI) systems to boost corporate profits, and it has done so… Read More »
This post also appears on Duke Law’s Lawfire blog In the wake of the U.S. and its allies imposing unprecedented economic and financial sanctions on Russia, there has been a number of articles about the role cryptocurrency may play in undermining these sanctions (see here, here, and here). While the situation is fluid and defies easy predictions, western… Read More »
Last April, I wrote about Wyoming’s ongoing effort to roll out the red carpet for cryptocurrency firms by passing a number of bills favorable to the sector. Most notably, the state created an entirely new type of bank charter – the Special Purpose Depository Institution (SPDI) charter – to assist “blockchain innovators” in accessing “secure and reliable… Read More »
The emergence of both BigTech digital platforms and BigFinTechs (BFTs) over the past 20 years reflects fundamental changes in economies and societies around the world. Driving this change is the impact of digitization and datafication, two processes that sit at the heart of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Digitization and datafication offer tremendous potential for network… Read More »
In recent months, cyber insurance has found itself in the headlines for arguably the wrong reasons. Lloyd’s of London reportedly discouraged certain syndicates from offering cyber insurance because of mounting losses, and then later published contractual language that can be used to exclude coverage for cyber war and even “cyber operations.” Many information security (InfoSec) practitioners interpret these news… Read More »
Injunctions are among the costliest remedies available during patent litigation, as alleged infringers are prohibited to make, use, or sell an item that infringes on a covered patent. Injunctions can result in a devastating impact on a firm when the affected product is important to its business. As patent litigation—and threatened injunctions—has increased dramatically since the 1990s,… Read More »
In November 2021, the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets (PWG) issued a report analyzing the rapid expansion and growing risks of the stablecoin market.[1] Stablecoins are digital assets that claim to maintain a “stable” value with reference to a designated currency (typically the U.S. dollar) or some other asset, index, or formula. PWG’s report concluded that… Read More »
Everyone seems to be a fan of transparency, these days. Politicians of every stripe are keen to preach their belief in it, and transparency has become a watchword for everything from marketing, to healthcare, to journalism. In debates around content moderation, calls for transparency are a ubiquitous feature. Online platforms, for their part, are keen to tout their own belief in the importance of… Read More »
