May 2014

How Far is Too Far?: Some Patents Border on the Absurd

May 16, 2014
Intellectual Property, Patents

Michael Burke, MJLST Staff

Most people are not up to date on the latest and greatest patents. Most wait for the idea to be reported in the media, or see the idea’s physical manifestation at their favorite technology store. But this past week, Stephen Colbert made a point to inform his late night audience–and the public at large–about the latest patent filed by Amazon: taking photos against a white background. On March 18th, The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded Amazon with their “Studio Arrangement” patent numbered U.S. 8,676,045. Amazon’s filing essentially gives the company the intellectual rights to taking any picture in front of seamless white backgrounds.

Michael S. Mireles, Jr.’s book review, The United States Patent Reform Quagmire: A Balanced Proposal, helps to provide a framework of why weak patent ideas unfortunately receive the blessing of the United States government, and how patent reform efforts can help resolve this problem. Mireles provides a two-tiered approach to solving the problems of the patent system by attacking the current system at its weakest points: the issuance of weak patent grants from the USPTO and the liberal upholding of the validity of weak patents.

Allowing weak patents to exist undermines the genuine purpose of assigning ownership of intellectual property. The result has been a “dangerous and expensive arms’ race, which now undermines rather than fosters the crucial process of technological innovations.” Most certainly, someone needs to develop and implement a quality idea for change. Who knows, under the current system, maybe he or she could patent it?

Are Warrantless Cell Phone Searches Constitutional?

May 16, 2014
Criminal Law, Law Enforecement

Jennifer Warfield, MJLST Staff

In “Constitutionalizing Email Privacy by Information Access” from Volume 9, Issue 1 of the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science, & Technology, Manish Kumar discussed the unique Fourth Amendment issues raised by governmental access to electronic communications, specifically emails. Similar privacy issues are now being analyzed and reviewed by the Supreme Court in the context of warrantless searches of cell phones by law enforcement in two cases: Riley v. California, No. 13-132 and United States v. Wurie, No. 13-212.

The courts have traditionally allowed warrantless searches pursuant to the Search of Person Incident to Arrest (SPIA) exception to the Fourth Amendment. Under this doctrine a police officer may search an arrestee’s person incident to the arrest and seize and search any personal property in his or her possession at the time of the arrest. Such searches are justified under the theory that they protect officers by allowing them to search for weapons and preserve evidence. The Fourth, Fifth, Seventh, and Tenth Circuits have upheld warrantless searches of cell phones under the SPIA doctrine on the grounds that a cell phone is analogous to a container like a backpack or wallet, which the Supreme Court has long deemed searchable. Other courts have held that modern cell phones cannot be compared to traditional containers given the vast amount of sensitive data contained within them, and that less intrusive measures can be used in the name of data preservation such as Faraday Bags or “airplane mode,” which both prevent internet signals from reaching a phone to prevent remote wiping.

The specific issues before the Supreme Court in Riley and Wurie are respectively: 1) whether the Defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated when he was convicted for attempted murder based on the police’s search of his smartphone after he was pulled over for having an expired auto registration; and 2) whether evidence gathered after the police inspected a drug dealer’s call log should have been thrown out by the federal appeals court in Boston. These cases provide the Supreme Court an opportunity to clarify the meaning of the Fourth Amendment in the age of smartphones, and will shed light on how similar devices like tablets and laptops will be treated by courts and police officers in the future.

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