(Image: Nook)
HEARD the one about the lawyer and the teleporter? The machine malfunctioned: the guy lost his suit, but thankfully not his briefs.
The joke may be terrible but there is a serious point: if we do start teleporting ourselves about in the distant future, who will be legally responsible when things go wrong?
Such accidents tend to be brushed over in science fiction. But if a person disappears altogether, wouldn’t it be manslaughter? Even peskier legal problems are sure to follow: since teleportation would probably break down a person atom-by-atom and resurrect them somewhere else, there could be issues with privacy and data-protection law. After all, if your entire “self” was stored somewhere en route, it could be stolen and copied. Or, horror of horrors, that data could be employed to spam you with the ultimate in personalised adverts for weight loss products and Viagra. One thing is certain: before you step into a teleporter, you will need to sign the mother of all disclaimer forms.
Worrying about teleportation law may seem rather premature, yet it’s a legitimate area of attention for one group of lawyers. This band of future-gazers meet regularly to debate the legal implications of technologies that are set to appear in the next century and beyond.
In their day jobs, they advise governments, publish in weighty journals and wrestle with the minutiae of copyright and contract law. But once a year, they let their hair down and apply their legal minds to everything from robot injury liability to virtual property. They consider the impact of drones on privacy law, …
