Future Law: Challenges for Law, Technology and Culture

Future Frontiers of Law and Technology, Volume 1Technologies, Data and People

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Published 28 February 2027

About this book

Critical perspectives on new and emerging technologies and the important challenges

  • Provides in depth coverage of new, emerging & future technologies and the law, including recent developments that have occurred since 2020
  • This includes coverage of developments in the Internet of Things and cyber-physical technologies and the experience of life and death in a digital world
  • It also provides coverage of developments in Generative AI, consumer focussed healthtech, such as Femtech, along with the use of Biometrics, and Cybercrime, including Image Based Abuse and technology facilitated Intimate Partner Abuse, as well as the Metaverse and sex with robots
  • Offers critical perspectives on issues raised by new and emerging technologies from emerging and established scholars across multiple jurisdictions
  • Offers critical perspectives on emerging technologies and the future of the protection of intellectual property rights
  • Offers diverse perspectives on approaches to governance and regulation of technologies
  • Brings together scholars based in or writing about aspects of the law in the following jurisdictions: Scotland; New Zealand; India; Hong Kong; the Republic of Ireland; USA; Mexico; Canada; China; the UK; Australia; the Netherlands; Germany; France; and the EU

In the past three decades, significant developments in computing technology have revolutionised the way we live and work and many of these technologies represent both future risks and benefits. Bringing together a range of perspectives on new and emerging technologies and their regulation, this book presents a variety of perspectives on key technological challenges in a global context. It will assist scholars, practitioners, students and policymakers in understanding cutting edge technologies and the challenges they represent for society and the law. It should assist with furthering debate on significant issues and improving governance of specific technologies.

It brings together a comprehensive and unique collection of emerging and established scholars across multiple jurisdictions including New Zealand, India, Hong Kong, Mexico, the Republic of Ireland, the UK, France, Australia, the Netherlands and Germany. The book focuses on issues related to privacy and data protection, autonomy, safety, cyber security and cybercrime, contract and consumer protection, competition, intellectual property and criminal law. Coverage includes developments in the Internet of Things, cyber-physical technologies, the experience of life and death in a digital world, developments in Generative AI, the use of Biometrics, cybercrime and the future of the protection of intellectual property rights. The collection also acknowledges that technologies are not neutral and several of the contributors also discuss the historical development of specific technologies.

This book is the first volume in a collection of two books. The second volume is entitled Future Frontiers of Law and Technology, Volume 2: Regulation and Governance in an Age of Future Risk. Together, these books explore the future frontiers of law and technology. They address themes of privacy and data protection, the exercise of autonomy, the impacts of technologies, and their regulation and governance, which are then further divided into important subthemes.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements
Dedication
List of Contributors
Table of Abbreviations

Part 1: My Home is No Longer My Castle: Legal Foundations for Governing a Data Driven World

1. Introduction to Future Frontiers of Law and Technology
Andelka M. Phillips, Claudio Lombardi, and Edina Harbinja

  1. Introduction to the Future Frontiers of Law and Technology collection
  2. Technology in an Age of Future Risk
  3. Future Frontiers of Law and Technology, Volume 1: Technologies, Data and People

2. The Expansion of Privacy Torts in the Common Law World
Róisín Á Costello

  1. Introduction
  2. From Property to Personality-based privacy torts
  3. Expanding Tort Law to Recognise ‘The Right to Privacy’
  4. Conclusion: An Ever Expanding Action?

3. Let’s Get (Cyber) Physical: Australian legal implications
Kayleen Manwaring and Annabelle Lee

  1. Introduction
  2. Understanding Cyber-Physical Technologies: The Concept of an 'eObject'
  3. Key Challenges Arising from Cyber-Physical Technologies
  4. Cyber security
  5. Data collection and use
  6. Conclusion and Future Directions

4. Pipe Dreams. From Second Life and Google Glass to Twitter and the Metaverse, why technological fantasies persist and (almost) always end in failure
Paul Bernal

  1. Introduction
  2. ‘Ev’rybody wants to be a cat
    …because a cat’s the only cat who knows where it’s at'
  3. Google Glass and related technology
  4. Brave New World
  5. Winning social media: Musk and Twitter
  6. What works, and what doesn’t?

5. Comparative Assessment of Non-Personal Data Access Frameworks
Vikas Kathuria

  1. Introduction
  2. Nature of Data Access Rights
  3. From Ownership to Data Access Rights of Users in the EU
  4. Frameworks to Accord Data Access Rights
  5. Comparative Assessment of Different Frameworks
  6. Conclusion

6. Incident Response and Data Protection Law
Andrew Nicholas Cormack

  1. Introduction
  2. Importance of Incident Response
  3. Incident Response and GDPR
  4. Stages of Incident Response
  5. Legal Bugs
  6. Other Mutually-Beneficial Applications


Part 2: All Our Data Will Be Held Against Us – Privacy, Safety, Autonomy, & Property in a Data Driven World

Part 2.1 Hacking everything. How Can We be Safe in a Cyber Physical World?

7. Parallel lines: why anti-doping is like cybersecurity
Wendy Grossman and Jon Crowcroft

  1. Parallels
  2. Threat models
  3. Incentives
  4. Alternatives
  5. Lessons

8. Technology-facilitated violence: wrongs against persons and the realm of criminal law in the digital age
Marthe Goudsmit Samaritter

  1. Introduction
  2. Capturing non-physical wrongs against persons: the criminalisation of image-based sexual abuse
  3. The challenge: wrongfulness of non-physical violence
  4. Understanding the infringed: personhood as a theoretical foundation for criminal law
  5. The digital age unveils our relational nature
  6. Personhood effects on criminal law: the wrongness of non-physical infringements
  7. Concluding remarks

9.Combatting Technology-Facilitated Abuse in the Smart Home Through Corporate Digital Responsibility
Rebecca Owens and Jehana Copilah-Ali

  1. Introduction
  2. What are Smart Home Devices?
  3. The Unintended Consequences of Smart Home Devices
  4. Issues with the UK's Current Legislative Response
  5. Towards a Corporate Digital Responsibility Framework
  6. Concluding Thoughts

10. Hyper-Collection and Identity Crime: How the Need for Data Feeds Technology-based Offending
Brendan Walker-Munro

  1. Introduction
  2. What is Identity Crime?
  3. Hyper-Collection and Identity Crime
  4. Conclusion

11. Respect For Contextual Integrity: A Framework for Designing Safe and Age-Appropriate Digital Environments for Children
Joseph Savirimuthu

  1. Introduction
  2. The Age-Appropriate Design Code: An overview
  3. Contextual Integrity: A New Analytical Framework for Children's Lifeworlds
  4. Conclusion


Part 2.2 Owning Everything. How Can We Protect People, Privacy, and Autonomy in a Cyber Physical World?

12. Femtech: Intimate Biodata and Bodily Autonomy
Helen Oliver

  1. Introduction
  2. Background
  3. The Quantified Woman V The Law
  4. Data as an Exploitable Commodity in the US
  5. Post-Dobbs Efforts at Regulation in the US
  6. Conclusion

13. The Use of Prenatal Testing Technologies to Select Against Disability: Recent Developments, and Future Directions
Heloise Robinson

  1. Introduction
  2. The Conflict Model, and the Expressivist Argument
  3. The Expressivist Argument and the Law
  4. Future Directions: Technologies and Pregnancy

14. The Regulation of Biometric Information in New Zealand – A Case Study
Kylie Jackson-Cox

  1. Introduction
  2. Biometric Information
  3. Privacy Act 2020
  4. Development of the Biometric Code
  5. The Biometric Code
  6. Future Directions
  7. Conclusion

15. Techno-legal Determinism in EU Law: Accuracy in Biometrics
Margaret Warthon

  1. Introduction
  2. From indexed cards to Agentic biometrics
  3. Accuracy, neutrality, and the deterministic narrative
  4. Techno-legal determinism in EU law: The GDPR, the AI Act, and the limits of technical transparency
  5. An Illustration, XAI and Legal Transparency Requirements
  6. Concluding remarks: accuracy as the central problem

16. The politics of postmortem privacy
Mauricio Figueroa

  1. Introduction
  2. The emergence of postmortem privacy
  3. Postmortem privacy: a defying principle.
  4. Three loci of tensions
  5. Reflections on heterogeneity
  6. Conclusion

17. Sexbots and the Law: Criminal & Privacy Perspectives
Madi McCarthy

  1. Introduction
  2. Criminal Law
  3. Privacy Law
  4. Conclusion


Part 2.3. Future Frontiers of Creation. Intellectual Property, Competition Law & Beyond in an AI world.

18. Competition and Innovation in Developing Countries
Thomas Cheng

  1. Introduction
  2. Innovation in Developing Countries
  3. Competition and Innovation in Developing Countries
  4. Conclusion

19. Automated enforcement of copyrighted works in digital scenarios: New perspectives derived from Artificial Intelligence
Jesus Manuel Niebla Zatarain, Virginia Berenice Niebla Zatarain and Gonzalo Armienta Hernandez

  1. Introduction
  2. New Artificial Intelligence and the arrival of generative technology in copyright law
  3. Copyright implications of artificial generation of artistic works
  4. Conclusions

20. Spectrum of transparency and secrecy in the AI-assisted public sector decision-making in the European Union
Ida Varošanec

  1. Introduction
  2. Nuances of transparency
  3. Nuances of secrecy
  4. Transparency and secrecy in EU law and beyond
  5. Transparency and secrecy on a spectrum through the lens of trust
  6. Conclusion

21. Distributed Ledger Technology-empowered gaming spaces: Copyright, Virtual Property, and Gaming Governance
Salvatore Fasciana

  1. Introduction
  2. Features of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)
  3. DLT as Digital Right Management 2.0 for gaming performance
  4. DLT as catalyst for virtual property
  5. DAO as decentralized governance for game spaces
  6. Regulation of Gaming Spaces and future directions


Index

About the contributors

Andelka M. Phillips

Andelka M. Phillips is Associate Professor, School of Law, University of Leicester, UK, and Academic Affiliate, HeLEX Centre, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, and Affiliate, Bioethics Institute Ghent, Ghent University, Belgium. Andelka is also now an Associate Member of the Centre for Commercial Law at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.

Claudio Lombardi

Claudio Lombardi is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Aberdeen.

Edina Harbinja

Edina Harbinja is Associate Professor in Law at the University of Birmingham

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