Digital Commons Network^™

Patents For Sharing, Toshiko Takenaka

Michigan Technology Law Review

Spurred by the Internet, emerging technologies have changed the way commercial firms innovate and have made it possible for individuals to play an important role in that innovation. Producers in the Information Communication Technologies (ICT), and other sectors dealing with complex technologies with many separately patentable components, find it increasingly difficult to make products without infringing on patents held by others. Numerous overlapping patents often cover such products. Producers have developed a new way to use patents: as inclusive rights for sharing their technologies with others through cross-licensing and other private ordering arrangements in order to ensure the freedom to …

Cracking The Copyright Dilemma In Software Preservation: Protecting Digital Culture Through Fair Use Consensus, Peter Jaszi, Patricia Aufderheide, Brandon Butler, Krista L. Cox

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Copyright problems may inhibit the crucially important work of preserving legacy software. Such software is worthy of study in its own right because it is critical to accessing digital culture and expression. Preservation work is essential for communicating across boundaries of the past and present in a digital era. Software preservationists in the United States have addressed their copyright problems by developing a code of best practices in employing fair use. Their work is an example of how collective action by users of law changes the norms and beliefs about law, which can in turn change the law itself insofar …

Will Artificial Intelligence Eat The Law? The Rise Of Hybrid Social-Ordering Systems, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Software has partially or fully displaced many former human activities, such as catching speeders or flying airplanes, and proven itself able to surpass humans in certain contests, like Chess and Jeopardy. What are the prospects for the displacement of human courts as the centerpiece of legal decision-making? Based on the case study of hate speech control on major tech platforms, particularly on Twitter and Facebook, this Essay suggests displacement of human courts remains a distant prospect, but suggests that hybrid machine – human systems are the predictable future of legal adjudication, and that there lies some hope in that combination, …

Internet Of Infringing Things: The Effect Of Computer Interface Copyrights On Technology Standards, Charles Duan

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

You connect to the Internet via your Wi-Fi access point. You surf the Web using a browser and send emails through your email server. You probably use some USB peripherals-say a mouse, keyboard, or printer. Maybe you even watch cable or broadcast television.

Under current case law, each of those computer systems and devices may very well be copyright-infringing contraband. This is through no fault of your own-you need not be pirating music or streaming illegal movies to infringe a copyright. The infringement simply exists, hard-wired within each of those devices and many more that you use, a result of …