Law Commons^™

Debtors Beware: The Expanding Universe Of Non-Assumable/Non-Assignable Contracts In Bankruptcy, Michelle M. Harner, Carl E. Black, Eric R. Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Copyright Norms And The Problem Of Private Censorship, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Copyright policy must resolve intelligently the tension between upstream and downstream creators, between incentives to create and incentives to use. Downstream at1thors who copy and transform others' images or words as an input to new creativity have. obvious free speech concerns. So do simple copiers in those many instances where even non-creative copying is essential for expressing one's ideas or allegiances.

Part of the tension is economic. Because virtually every author :needs access to predecessor texts, a legislature that increases copyright protection for ·today's creators simultaneously increases tomorrow's costs of creation ¹ or use. But the issue goes far beyond …

Do Patents Facilitate Financing In The Software Industry?, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is the first part of a wide study of the role of intellectual property in the software industry. Unlike previous papers that focus primarily on software patents – which generally are held by firms that are not software firms – this Article provides a thorough and contextually grounded description of the role that patents play in the software industry itself.

The bulk of the Article considers the pros and cons of patents in the software industry. The Article starts by emphasizing the difficulties that prerevenue startups face in obtaining any value from patents. Litigation to enforce patents is …

Even Non-Extremists Get The Blues: The Rhetoric Of Copyright, Wendy J. Gordon, Lois Wasoff

Faculty Scholarship

The participants in this dialogue are Wendy Gordon and Lois Wasoff. Each is an intellectual property expert who has immersed herself in copyright law and policy for over twenty years. Neither sits at an extreme end of the policy spectrum, yet the two disagree over a wide range of issues. The editors of this volume thought their discussions could prove useful to others struggling with copyright dilemmas. Accordingly, Gordon and Wasoff sat down with a tape recorder for us. In edited form, their dialogue follows here.

A Brief History Of Bioperl, Colin Crossman, Arti K. Rai

Faculty Scholarship

Large-scale open-source projects face a litany of pitfalls and difficulties. Problems of contribution quality, credit for contributions, project coordination, funding, and mission-creep are ever-present. Of these, long-term funding and project coordination can interact to form a particularly difficult problem for open-source projects in an academic environment.

BioPerl was chosen as an example of a successful academic open-source project. Several of the roadblocks and hurdles encountered and overcome in the development of BioPerl are examined through the telling of the history of the project. Along the way, key points of open-source law are explained, such as license choice and copyright.

The …

The Vanishing Public Domain: Antibiotic Resistance, Pharmaceutical Innovation And Global Public Health, Kevin Outterson

Faculty Scholarship

Penicillin and other antibiotics were the original wonder drugs and laid the foundation of the modern pharmaceutical industry. Human health significantly improved with the introduction of antibiotics. By 1967, the US Surgeon General declared victory over infectious diseases in the US. But pride goes before a fall. The evolutionary pressure of antibiotic use selects for resistant strains with the least fitness cost. Effective drugs should be used. But when they are used, no matter how carefully, evolutionary pressure for resistance is created. The problem is not limited to antibiotics. Variants of the human immunodeficiency (AIDS) virus develop resistance to anti-retroviral …