New Books: Technology and the Law

The book provides an up-to-date, comprehensive, and critical explanation of digital commons in China. It aims to reshape the theoretical discussion of digital commons, stressing the significance of digital mode of production and power division structure between government and digital platforms--both characters shed light on how China has developed its digital economy and maintained a relatively innovative cyberspace during the past 20 years. This book could serve as a foundational analysis for future studies on China's Internet. The book will appeal to scholars, entrepreneurs, and policymakers interested in digital commons, governance of cyberspace, and China's political economy.

Lerong Lu examines the biggest change in modern financial industry - the Fintech (financial technology) revolution - that denotes the close interaction between the financial services industry and latest information technologies such as big data, cloud computing, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. The three areas of banking institutions, online lending marketplaces, and money and payment systems are explored to assess how financial innovations affect the traditional financial industry, what kinds of regulatory challenges arise, and how global policymakers react to such challenges. With in-depth and international case studies on Fintech, including app-based banking services, mobile payments, P2P lending, and cryptocurrencies, the global Fintech hubs in six continents are assessed. The complex, dynamic, and multidimensional Fintech ecosystem is also investigated including its key players (such as regulatory strategy, regulatory sandbox, and RegTech) and Fintech corporations (including financial holding companies, Fintech unicorns, BigTech firms, and Metaverse platforms). Lu highlights the enormous benefits for financial institutions and their consumers and argues that Fintech contributes to a more equal, democratic, inclusive, and sustainable financial system. However, he also considers the risks and multiple legal, ethical, and regulatory challenges for policy-makers and financial authorities that Fintech has posed.

This book explores the metamorphosis of fundamental social interactions and communal experiences, fuelled by technologies such as artificial intelligence, immersive online environments, augmented reality, blockchain, crypto and FinTech. It examines the competitors, regulators and governments who are locked in a struggle to control the economic and social future shaped by these technologies. Jon M. Garon tracks the evolution of the internet, video games, AI and emerging technologies as they converge into the transformative communications and commercial platform now known as the metaverse. He explains how each transformation in media influences and reshapes culture, and proposes ways in which metaverse platforms could operate in the public sphere. The book also discusses the efforts of governments across China, Europe and the United States to regulate the multinational companies responsible for these technologies, as well as comparing the conflicting views among states on what the metaverse should be. Providing practical guidance on the adoption of regulations in employment and educational settings, this book is essential reading for students, scholars and practitioners of antitrust and competition law, cyberspace law, finance and banking law, internet studies, and regulation and governance.

Can the law keep up with AI? This book examines liability and regulation for artificial intelligence causing serious physical harm, both now and in the future. While AI moves quickly, regulation follows more slowly - an increasing problem for an evolutionary, fast-paced emerging technology. AI has the potential to save lives, but in doing so will have the potential to take them as well. How do we future-proof law and regulation to incentivise life-saving innovation as safely as possible? This book details how to regulate AI in high-risk civil applications (for example, automated vehicles and medicine), addressing both liability and regulatory structure. It highlights crucial liability themes for technology governance; provides tools to bridge the gap between regulators and technologists; examines jurisdictional approaches to AI regulation in the EU, UK, USA, and Singapore; and ultimately suggests a jurisdiction-agnostic blueprint for regulation.

The processes of convergence and digitalization have altered the technological conditions in which the press operates. More than that, they have altered the environment in which the press stakes its claim to freedom and strives to protect its turf from other media players. The advent of internet-based services and applications has blurred the technological boundaries between the press, broadcasting, and telecommunications, challenging their regulatory silos.Press Freedom and Regulation in a Digital Era: A Comparative Study assesses the extent to which the emergent regulatory model for online news media is shaped by analogies from the past, or rather by a newly prevalent culture of control. By interweaving two distinct strands of analysis - the concepts of press freedom and regulation, and the phenomena of convergence and digitalization - this book examines the key implications of digitalization and assesses the challenges for press freedom in the nascent digital news ecosystem. Drawing upon decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), as well as from cases in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, this comparative work comprehensively explores the regulation of the press in the digital era and the impact of the proliferating media laws, policies, and jurisprudence on press freedom. Irini Katsirea identifies the regulatory ruptures that persist and makes concrete and timely recommendations for the evolving online news ecosystem.

In Reproductive Labor and Innovation, Jennifer Denbow examines how the push toward technoscientific innovation in contemporary American life often comes at the expense of the care work and reproductive labor that is necessary for society to function. Noting that the gutting of social welfare programs has shifted the burden of solving problems to individuals, Denbow argues that the aggrandizement of innovation and the degradation of reproductive labor are intertwined facets of neoliberalism. She shows that the construction of innovation as a panacea to social ills justifies the accumulation of wealth for corporate innovators and the impoverishment of those feminized and racialized people who do the bulk of reproductive labor. Moreover, even innovative technology aimed at reproduction--such as digital care work platforms and noninvasive prenatal testing--obscure structural injustices and further devalue reproductive labor. By drawing connections between innovation discourse, the rise of neoliberalism, financialized capitalism, and the social and political degradation of reproductive labor, Denbow illustrates what needs to be done to destabilize the overvaluation of innovation and to offer collective support for reproduction.