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Full-Text Articles in Law
Can Permissionless Blockchains Avoid Governance And The Law?, Eric Alston, Wilson Law, Ilia Murtazashvili, Martin Weiss
Can Permissionless Blockchains Avoid Governance And The Law?, Eric Alston, Wilson Law, Ilia Murtazashvili, Martin Weiss
Notre Dame Journal on Emerging Technologies
Permissionless (or public) blockchain networks are a new form of decentralized private governance in the digital sphere. Though legal scholars recognize the significance of law in the use of blockchain, existing research using legal and institutional perspectives leaves blockchain governance as something of a black box. We provide a more granular analysis, finding that blockchain governance operates on four distinct levels. Governance at the protocol layer involves discrete institutional design choices intended to constrain network members’ incentives in an ongoing sense. Subsidiary governance arises from the need for communities to draft protocol updates and from the fact that governance protocol …
Claiming Design, Mark Mckenna
Claiming Design, Mark Mckenna
Journal Articles
Design stands out among intellectual property subject matter in terms of the extent of overlapping protection available. Different forms of intellectual property usually protect different aspects of a product. In the design context, however, precisely the same features are often subject to design patent, trademark, and copyright protection-and parties commonly claim more than one of those forms. Yet, as we show, the claiming regimes of these three forms of design protection differ in significant ways: the timing of claims; claim format (particularly whether the claims are visual or verbal); the multiplicity of claims (whether and how one can make multiple …
Trademarks And Digital Goods, Mark Mckenna, Lucas S. Osborn
Trademarks And Digital Goods, Mark Mckenna, Lucas S. Osborn
Journal Articles
Technology increasingly allows for digital distribution of goods that once might once have been offered in physical form, radically separating the design and production processes. That separation has potentially destabilizing consequences for trademark law, which overwhelmingly has been oriented toward indications of the origin of physical goods. For one thing, digitization brings much more of trademark law into contact with the Supreme Court's Dastar decision, raising difficult questions about whether, and under what circumstances, digital files count as “goods” for Lanham Act purposes. More broadly, a world of increasing digitization implicates concerns about the boundaries of trademark law vis-à-vis other …