David Koepsell

Much of the discussion regarding nanotechnology centers around perceived and prosphesied harms and risks. While there are real risks that could emerge from futuristic nanotechnology, there are other current risks involved with its development, not involving physical harms, that could prevent its full promise from being realized. Transitional forms of the technology, involving “microfab,” or localized, sometimes desk-top, manufacture, pose a good opportunity for case study. How can we develop legal and regulatory institutions, specifically centered around the problems of intellectual property, that both stimulate innovation, and make the best possible use of what will eventually be a market in “types” rather than “tokens”? This paper argues that this is the most critical, current issues facing nanotechnology, and suggests a manner to approach it.

The emergence of the new information economy hascomplicated jurisdictional issues in commerce andcrime. Many of these difficulties are simplyextensions of problems that arose due to other media.Telephones and fax machines had already complicatedjurists'' determinations of applicable laws. Evenbefore the Internet, contracts were often negotiatedwithout any face-to-face contact – entirely bytelephone and fax. Where is such a contractnegotiated? The answer to this question is critical toany litigation that may arise over such contracts. Thelaws of contract are often quite different from onejurisdiction to the next.The Internet has brought with it new forms ofcommunication which make determining the loci of actseven more complicated. Where are contracts negotiatedwhen they are negotiated in cyberspace? Business isbeing conducted in chat rooms, on web sites, andthrough e-mail. Each of these is technically distinctfrom telephones and fax machines. More importantly,these tools seem ontologically different, in varyingdegrees, from traditional methods of communication.The question is, are these ontological differencessufficient to warrant new legal notions ofjurisdiction in cyberspace?Only a thorough ontological analysis of the parts ofcyberspace and acts ``in'''' it can reveal the answers tothe legal questions posed by this new medium.Traditional legal analyses have relied, in part, on acrude legal ontology. That is, courts have grappledwith notions of the topology and mereology of theworld and legal objects when considering questions ofjurisdiction. There is a simpler, theoretically soundmethod for determining legal jurisdiction which isbased upon the notion of ``purposeful direction,'''' andwhich treats computer-mediated transactions as justanother form of communication. I will explore thatmethod below.

Human research ethics has developed in both theory and practice mostly from experiences in medical research. Human participants, however, are used in a much broader range of research than ethics committees oversee, including both basic and applied research at technical universities. Although mandated in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, non-medical research involving humans need not receive ethics review in much of Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Our survey of the top 50 technical universities in the world shows that, where not specifically mandated by law, most technical universities do not employ ethics committees to review human studies. As the domains of basic and applied sciences expand, ethics committees are increasingly needed to guide and oversee all such research regardless of legal requirements. We offer as examples, from our experience as an ethics committee in a major European technical university, ways in which such a committee provides needed services and can help ensure more ethical studies involving humans outside the standard medical context. We provide some arguments for creating such committees, and in our supplemental article, we provide specific examples of cases and concerns that may confront technical, engineering, and design research, as well as outline the general framework we have used in creating our committee.