Law Commons^™

Project Khepri: Asteroid Mining Project. Final Policy Report, Aaron Groh, Brieanna Miklaucic, Valerie Oosterveld, Elizabeth Steyn

Institute for Earth and Space Exploration White Papers

Much like outer space, our legal system consists of many unknowns. This is especially true for new developments in emerging technologies, particularly those related to the exploration, exploitation, and utilization of space resources. The recently developed technical feasibility of space mining has advanced ahead of existing international space treaties. While certain articles of the major UN treaties can be interpreted to adapt to the utilization of space resources, most of these provisions were not originally designed to be applied to a space mining regime.

Keeping in mind this context, this paper sets out the current international law landscape, including the …

An Ontology For Autonomic License Management, Qian Zhao, Mark Perry

Computer Science Publications

The license agreement can be seen as the knowledge source for a license management system. As such, it may be referenced by the system each time a new process is initiated. To facilitate access, a machine readable representation of the license agreement is highly desirable, but at the same time we do not want to sacrifice too much readability of such agreements by human beings. Creating an ontology as a formal knowledge representation of licensing not only meets the representation requirements, but also offers improvements to knowledge reusability owing to the inherent sharing nature of such representations. Furthermore, the XML-based …

A Framework For Automatic Sla Creation, Halina Kaminski, Mark Perry

Computer Science Publications

Negotiation is fundamental to business. Increased automation of business to business or business to customer interaction is demanding efficient but flexible systems that can manage the negotiation process with minimal direct human intervention. Industries that provide online services rely on Service Level Agreements as the basis for their contractual relationship. Here we look at a means for generating these with a negotiating tool (SLA Negotiation Manager) that complies with e-negotiation rules and creates the agreements from existing business objectives.

Agent Design Of Smart License Management System Using Gaia Methodology, Qian Zhao, Yu Zhou, Mark Perry

Computer Science Publications

Modern software services and data centers require a license management system to regulate the agreements that have been reached between subscriber and provider. License management helps to track usage and protect service from abuse. License agreements provide the basis for enforcement and regulation. The automation of license agreements is desired by providers and subscribers to improve transaction efficiency, give flexibility, and minimize unwanted cost.

We have proposed a framework, called SmArt (Semantic Agreement) system, that enables agreement automation in the autonomic computing context using ontology and agent technologies. This paper applies the SmArt system to the domain of license management …

Open Source Software Licensing Patterns, Halina Kaminski, Mark Perry

Computer Science Publications

No abstract provided.

Performance Rights For Software, Mark Perry, Stephen M. Watt

Law Publications

As we use software in increasingly varied contexts, the concept of a software license has become progressively more complex. Software is embedded in devices that do not obviously resemble computers. Web services make software on one computer available to anyone with internet access. An individual may use several computers over the course of the day so the concept of a node locked or individual license is no longer clear. How should time based and single use and consumptive licenses be governed and interact? This paper examines how these and other issues in software licensing can be seen as instances of …

Verifiable Electronic Voting System: An Open Source Solution, Halina Kaminski, Mark Perry

Computer Science Publications

Elections, referenda and polls are vital processes for the operation of a modern democracy. They form the mechanism for transferring power from citizens to their representatives. Although some commentators claim that the pencil-and-paper systems used in countries such as Canada and UK are still the best method of avoiding voterigging, recent election problems, and the need for faster, better, cheaper vote counting, have stimulated great interest in managing the election process through the use of electronic voting systems. While computer scientists, for the most part, have been warning of the possible perils of such action, vendors have forged ahead with …

Floss As Democratic Principle, Mark Perry, Brian Fitzgerald

Law Publications

No abstract provided.

Who Counts Your Votes?, Halina Kaminski, Lila Kari, Mark Perry

Computer Science Publications

Open and fair elections are paramount to modern democracy. Although some people claim that the penciland- paper systems used in countries such as Canada and UK are still the best method of avoiding vote rigging, recent election problems have sparked great interest in managing the election process through the use of electronic voting systems. It is a goal of this paper to describe a voting system that is secret and secure as well as verifiable and useable over an existing computer network. We have designed and implemented an electronic voting system – Verifiable E-Voting (VEV) – with an underlying protocol …