Law Commons^™

International Law And Ungoverned Space, Matthew Hoisington

Matthew Hoisington

Ungoverned spaces, strictly defined as “spaces not effectively governed by the state” exist all over the world, presenting particular difficulties to public international law, which is historically premised on sovereignty and state control. Examples of such spaces include cyberspace, south-central Somalia and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border. These spaces destabilize the international system in novel ways—and they might also be dangerous. Many of the terrorism plots from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century emanated from “safe havens” afforded by ungoverned spaces. The lack of governance over certain spaces also raises concerns over development, including the …

Copyright, Neuroscience, And Creativity, Erez Reuveni

Erez Reuveni

It is said that copyright law’s primary purpose is to encourage creativity by providing economic incentives to create. Accepting this premise, the primary disagreement among copyright stakeholders today concerns to what extent strong copyrights in fact provide efficient economic incentives. This focus on economic incentives obscures what is perhaps copyright doctrine’s greatest weakness—although the primary purpose of copyright law is to encourage creativity, copyright doctrine lacks even a rudimentary understanding of how creativity functions on a neurobiological level. The absence of a cohesive understanding of the science of creativity means that much of copyright theory is premised on antiquated assumptions …

Innovation And Development In The Age Of Climate Change Adaptation: Open Or Closed?, Dannie Jost

Dannie Jost

In a time of rapid convergence of technologies, goods, services, hardware, software, the traditional classifications that informed past treaties fail to remove legal uncertainty, or advance welfare and innovation. As a result, we turn our attention to the role and needs of the public domain at the interface of existing intellectual property rights and new modes of creation, production and distribution of goods and services.

The concept of open culture would have it that knowledge should be spread freely and its growth should come from further developing existing works on the basis of sharing and collaboration without the shackles of …

International Law And Ungoverned Space, Matthew Hoisington

Matthew Hoisington

Ungoverned spaces, strictly defined as “spaces not effectively governed by the state” exist all over the world, presenting particular difficulties to public international law, which is historically premised on sovereignty and state control. Examples of such spaces include cyberspace, south-central Somalia and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border. These spaces destabilize the international system in novel ways—and they might also be dangerous. Many of the terrorism plots from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century emanated from “safe havens” afforded by ungoverned spaces. The lack of governance over certain spaces also raises concerns over development, including the …

Obesity Prevention Policies At The Local Level: Tobacco's Lessons, Paul A. Diller

Paul Diller

No abstract provided.

Data Protection By Design And Technology Neutral Law, Mireille Hildebrandt, Laura Tielemans

Mireille Hildebrandt

This article argues that to achieve a technology neutral law, technology specific law is sometimes required. To explain this we discriminate between three objectives, often implied in the literature on technological neutrality of law. The first we call the compensation objective, which refers to the need to have technology specific law in place whenever specific technological designs threated the substance of human rights. The second we call the innovation objective, referring to the need to prevent legal rules from privileging or discriminating specific technological designs in ways that would stifle innovation. The third we call the sustainability objective, which refers …

Intellectual Property And Public Health – A White Paper, Ryan G. Vacca, Jim Chen, Jay Dratler Jr., Tom Folsom, Timothy Hall, Yaniv Heled, Frank Pasquale, Elizabeth Reilly, Jeff Samuels, Kathy Strandburg, Kara Swanson, Andrew Torrance, Katharine Van Tassel

Ryan G. Vacca

On October 26, 2012, the University of Akron School of Law’s Center for Intellectual Property and Technology hosted its Sixth Annual IP Scholars Forum. In attendance were thirteen legal scholars with expertise and an interest in IP and public health who met to discuss problems and potential solutions at the intersection of these fields. This report summarizes this discussion by describing the problems raised, areas of agreement and disagreement between the participants, suggestions and solutions made by participants and the subsequent evaluations of these suggestions and solutions.

Led by the moderator, participants at the Forum focused generally on three broad …