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Full-Text Articles in Law
The "Uberization" Of Healthcare: The Forthcoming Legal Storm Over Mobile Health Technology's Impact On The Medical Profession, Fazal Khan
Fazal Khan
The nascent field of mobile health technology is still very small but is predicted to grow exponentially as major technology companies such as Apple, Google, Samsung, and even Facebook have announced mobile health initiatives alongside influential healthcare provider networks. Given the highly regulated nature of healthcare, significant legal barriers stand in the way of mobile health’s potential ascension. I contend that the most difficult legal challenges facing this industry will be restrictive professional licensing and scope of practice laws. The primary reason is that mobile health threatens to disrupt historical power dynamics within the healthcare profession that have legally enshrined …
What Do We Worry About When We Worry About Price Discrimination? The Law And Ethics Of Using Personal Information For Pricing, Akiva A. Miller
What Do We Worry About When We Worry About Price Discrimination? The Law And Ethics Of Using Personal Information For Pricing, Akiva A. Miller
Akiva A Miller
New information technologies have dramatically increased sellers’ ability to engage in retail price discrimination. Debates over using personal information for price discrimination frequently treat it as a single problem, and are not sufficiently sensitive to the variety of price discrimination practices, the different kinds of information they require in order to succeed, and the different ethical concerns they raise. This paper explores the ethical and legal debate over regulating price discrimination facilitated by consumers’ personal information. Various kinds of “privacy remedies”—self-regulation, technological fixes, state regulation, and legislating private causes of legal action—each have their place. By drawing distinctions between various …
Patent Trolls Among Us, Kent R. Acheson
Patent Trolls Among Us, Kent R. Acheson
Kent R Acheson
As Acheson (2012) suggested in A Study of the Need to Change United States Patent Policy, software should not be patented, but the Intellectual Property Rights should be protected in another manner that does not entail a Copyright, Trademark, or secrecy. A new form of protection should be created based on certain criteria, such as useful life of a patent, incremental innovation, value to society, and or value to life.
Fixing Frand: A Pseudo-Pool Approach To Standards-Based Patent Licensing, Jorge Contreras
Fixing Frand: A Pseudo-Pool Approach To Standards-Based Patent Licensing, Jorge Contreras
Jorge L Contreras
Technical interoperability standards are critical elements of mobile telephones, laptop computers, digital files, and thousands of other products in the modern networked economy. Most such standards are developed in so-called voluntary standards-development organizations (SDOs) that require participants to license patents essential to the standard on terms that are “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” (FRAND). FRAND commitments are thought to avoid the problem of patent hold-up: the imposition of excessive royalty demands after a standard has been widely adopted in the market. While, at first blush, FRAND commitments seem to assure product vendors that patents will not obstruct the manufacture and sale …
Game Over For First Sale, Stephen J. Mcintyre
Game Over For First Sale, Stephen J. Mcintyre
Stephen J McIntyre
Video game companies have long considered secondhand game retailers a threat to their bottom lines. With the next generation of gaming consoles on the horizon, some companies are experimenting with technological tools to discourage and even prevent gamers from buying and selling used games. Most significantly, a recent patent application describes a system for suppressing secondhand sales by permanently identifying game discs with a single video game console. This technology flies in the face of copyright law’s “first sale” doctrine, which gives lawful purchasers the right to sell, lease, and lend DVDs, CDs, and other media. This Article answers a …
Viral Open Source: Competition Vs. Synergy, Michal Gal
Viral Open Source: Competition Vs. Synergy, Michal Gal
Michal Gal
The creation of free and open source software (FOSS) through social networks has been celebrated as one of the most interesting and inspiring developments of the information age. The main legal platform selected for facilitating this collaborative creation is the GNU General Public License (GPL). Software released under the GPL enables anyone to use, modify, and distribute the code. Yet, these rights are contingent upon virality: every copy or work based on the original code must also be subject to such terms and conditions. This article analyzes the interesting and intricate effects of virality on welfare and innovation. Virality increases …
Of Mice And Men: Why An Anticommons Has Not Emerged In The Biotechnological Realm, Chester J. Shiu
Of Mice And Men: Why An Anticommons Has Not Emerged In The Biotechnological Realm, Chester J. Shiu
Chester J Shiu
In 1998 Michael Heller and Rebecca Eisenberg posited that excessive patenting of fundamental biomedical innovations might create a “tragedy of the anticommons.” A decade later, their dire predictions have not come to pass, an outcome which calls much of the legal scholarship on the topic into question. This Article proposes that legal commentators’ theoretical arguments have largely ignored two very important factors. First, the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—the single most important actor in the biomedical research industry—has played an active role in keeping the biomedical research domain open. In particular, regardless of what the current patent regime may theoretically …