Posts Tagged ‘tech’
Anniversary Event – September 7!
Brand protection in the fashion industry relies not only on sharp legal skills but also on cutting-edge technological measures that can distinguish real from fake, track products through the supply chain, catch counterfeiters, and analyze knockoff merchandise. Join us during New York Fashion Week for the Fashion Law Institute’s 8th anniversary and an expert discussion of how AI, blockchain, DNA, and other science-based initiatives can help you “Know Your Faux: New Tactics and Tech for Fighting Fakes.”
DATE: Friday, September 7, 2018
TIME: 9:30-10:45am (breakfast 9am)
LOCATION: Fordham Law School, 150 W. 62nd Street, NYC (Bateman Room, 2nd floor)
CLE: 1.5 New York State CLE credits, professional practice, transitional and non-transitional
Speakers include:
- Joseph Giblin, Foreign Service Officer, U.S. Department of State
- Catherine Malkova, Innovation Labs Leader, Global Business Services North America, IBM
- Derek Morales, Brand Protection Counsel, Ralph Lauren
- Clay Shorrock, General and Intellectual Property Counsel, Applied DNA Sciences
- Vidyuth Srinivasan, Co-Founder and CEO, Entrupy
Facing the Future of Wearable Tech
Louis Vuitton has announced its new Tambour Horizon smartwatch with Android Wear. Wearables, of course, are only one part of the fashion tech world, but they are perhaps the most conspicuous symbol of how technology is once again poised to remake not just design aesthetics, but law and social norms.
We’ll be discussing this in greater depth in our upcoming Silicon Valley Fashion Law Bootcamp, but for now I want to focus on what this highlights about what Professor Scafidi memorably referred to as “fashion as information technology.” Fashion has always been in the information business, from expressing the identity of both designer and wearer to the revolutionary role played by the Jacquard loom in laying the groundwork for modern computing. While collecting information has always been an essential element of design and commerce, the new fashion tech embodied in wearables and smart textiles connects the brand itself to the creator/wearer nexus. Clothes that once stopped communicating with companies upon leaving the shop now provide a continual pipeline of data, making fashion a quintessential information business.
With information equity rising in significance alongside goodwill and real estate, the potential for transformative change rivals that of early industrial machinery. We’re already seeing far greater potential for a net positive impact on the environment and health, a far cry from the world that gave rise to Dickensian deterioration and Marxist manifestos. Even with benign change, however, we can expect that the unprecedented access to data will give rise to new demands for regulation, which, like the aesthetic approach to technological design, will require an artful response.
Recharging Wearables: Fabric as Power
For more on fashion law and tech, check out Fashion Law Bootcamp: Special Edition in Silicon Valley!
As we become ever more dependent on smartphones, tablets, and digital watches, recharging our batteries has gone from a metaphorical refresher to an all too literal imperative. Researchers at UC-San Diego, however, are pointing to a new way of addressing this problem beyond endlessly looking for outlets in all the wrong places: powering devices with your own sweat.
From the abstract in the latest issue of Energy and Environmental Science:
This article describes the fabrication, characterization, and real-life application of a soft, stretchable electronic-skin-based biofuel cell (E-BFC) that exhibits an open circuit voltage of 0.5 V and a power density of nearly 1.2 mW cm−2 at 0.2 V, representing the highest power density recorded by a wearable biofuel cell to date…. When applied directly to the skin of human subjects, the E-BFC generates ∼1 mW during exercise. The E-BFC is able to power conventional electronic devices, such as a light emitting diode and a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radio. This is the first example of powering a BLE radio by a wearable biofuel cell. Successful generation of high power density under practical conditions and powering of conventional energy-intense electronic devices represents a major step forward in the field of soft, stretchable, wearable energy harvesting devices.
As one of the researchers explained to New Scientist, “We’re now getting really impressive power levels. If you were out for a run, you would be able to power a mobile device.” What’s more, this could also make be used to power wearable sensors to gather and send health data. As fabric technology continues to advance, we could see activewear textiles valued not just for their capacity to evaporate sweat, but to harness it.
Of course, with great power comes great responsibility, and the legal ramifications of recharging through wearable fabric run from skin interactions, FDA regulation, and data security to more tangential risks of litigation. And this just touches the surface as to the ramifications of textile tech — we’ll be exploring these issues and more at our upcoming Fashion Law Bootcamp: Special Edition in San Francisco and Cupertino!
