The advance of technology and the newfound buzzword of "artificial intelligence" has been greeted with equal parts optimism and concern. While most recognize the value of artificial intelligence for its ability to automate time- and labor-intensive tasks, it is widely acknowledged that AI carries risks. Though tamer than the grim futures presented by movies such as Terminator and the Matrix, AI has already presented a number of potential issues in need of resolution. This opens up two closely-related conversations concerning regulation and liability. The former is relevant for business owners, governments, and other organizations looking to leverage AI in their operations.

Despite efforts to curb online piracy, some estimates suggest that pirate websites secured around 190 billion visits in 2018, affecting industries spanning TV, movies, music, publishing, and software. According to a recent report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, digital video piracy alone results in nearly $30 billion in lost revenue annually in the U.S. Against this backdrop, Smart Protection is working to help brands and rightsholders identify online hubs that host illegal streams, downloads, and other types of content infringement. Founded out of Madrid, Spain in 2015, Smart Protection uses machine learning and big data processing -- in concert with natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, keyword searches, and more -- to find the hubs hosting piracy and counterfeit content. By scanning the web, Smart Protection effectively builds a huge database of URLs, and it then applies its various machine learning algorithms that have been tailored to each content type and classifies the URLs based on the likelihood that they are hosting illicit content. "Typically, we eliminate approximately 98% [of the URLs], and it is from the remaining 2% that counterfeits, piracy, or brand abuse are hosted," Javier Perea, CEO and cofounder of Smart Protection, told VentureBeat.

Counterfeiting continues to be a global concern for brands. Indeed, trade in counterfeit and pirated goods has risen steadily in the last few years -- even as overall trade volumes stagnated -- and now stands at 3.3% of global trade, according to a new report by the OECD and the EU's Intellectual Property Office[1]. Brands keep spending a significant amount of money trying to fight counterfeiters but so far it seems to be a losing fight. For several reasons, brands must react. It has been proven that counterfeit consumer goods do destroy a brand reputation, negatively affect consumer confidence or result in claims and damages against manufacturers.

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There is currently keen interest amongst tech companies, investors, and research institutes in both artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies. The buzz has reached corporations and financial institutions looking to tailor these technologies for their own businesses in order to keep pace in our increasingly digitized economy.-- This excitement has implications for securing patent protection -- Canada and the United States (as well as many other countries) operate on a "first to file" basis.-- That means you will want to file a patent application before other inventors monopolize protection for the technology in your area, potentially curtailing your competitive business advantage. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued revised guidelines on what constitutes subject-matter that is eligible for patent protection (under 35 U.S.C. -- 101), effective January 7, 2019.

In the United States, it seems we never have to go more than a few weeks without hearing about another mass shooting. With each new incident comes renewed calls to strengthen gun control laws, expand federal background checks, and get rid of assault rifles. Though the opposing faction promptly dismisses each appeal by citing 2nd Amendment rights, other discussions of practicality often emerge. Specifically, the efficacy of such laws is often called into question. How do we know which laws work and which ones don't?

With mass tort style litigations reaching new highs in 2019, insurance and reinsurance companies should increasingly be thinking about how to capitalise on this emerging opportunity, according to Robert Reville, CEO of insurtech risk modelling and analytics firm Praedicat. Speaking at the Reinsurance Rendezvous event in Monte Carlo, Reville explained that a number of factors had come together to drive the increase in mass litigation activity this year. For example, hedge funds and other sources of capital are now helping to finance litigation in the US, making it possible for the plaintiff's to continue to drive very expensive forms of litigation. What's more, Praedicat believes there is a sense that the jury pool in the US is increasingly suspicious of corporations, and are more willing to accept that they could have been involved in nefarious actions. Finally – and of most relevance to the re/insurance industry – is the decades of accumulated science that is being brought to bear to describe what corporations are selling and doing that could potentially cause bodily or property damage, or environmental damage.

ImageNet will remove 600,000 images of people stored on its database after an art project exposed racial bias in the program's artificial intelligence system. Created in 2009 by researchers at Princeton and Stanford, the online image database has been widely used by machine learning projects. The program has pulled more than 14 million images from across the web, which have been categorized by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers -- a crowdsourcing platform through which people can earn money performing small tasks for third parties. According to the results of an online project by AI researcher Kate Crawford and artist Trevor Paglen, prejudices in that labor pool appear to have biased the machine learning data. Training Humans -- an exhibition that opened last week at the Prada Foundation in Milan -- unveiled the duo's findings to the public, but part of their experiment also lives online at ImageNet Roulette, a website where users can upload their own photographs to see how the database might categorize them.

In recent years, our fascination with the potential of AI has taken a more starry-eyed turn, as shown in the 2013 sci-fi drama "Her," where the main character falls in love with a virtual assistant. In reality, artificial intelligence (AI) technology is quickly permeating every aspect of our lives. From Amazon's voice-activated Alexa to writing technology that helps managers craft job postings, AI is in our hearts, homes and workplaces. And it's only going to become a bigger part of our lives: Experts call the rise of AI the driving force behind the fourth industrial revolution. On a recent afternoon at the NVIDIA robotics research lab in Seattle's University District, researchers use a simulated kitchen to test robots' ability to perform simple tasks such as grabbing objects.

The digital, always-connected world has created a new kind of client that bristles at the prospect of waiting and demands convenience. Live chats apps expedite your first contact with potential clients that visit your website and reassure them that you are available at all hours. Live chat apps also allow you to engage with and capture more information on your website visitors. That being said, integrating AI powered live chat apps into your law firm's website can give your firm a competitive advantage. If your law firm is successful at driving traffic, live chat apps can assist in converting those visitors into qualified prospects for your firm. In this blog post, we compare some of the best live chat apps for lawyers.