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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

The Convergence Of Broadcasting And Telephony: Legal And Regulatory Implications, Christopher S. Yoo Dec 2009

The Convergence Of Broadcasting And Telephony: Legal And Regulatory Implications, Christopher S. Yoo

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This article, written for the inaugural issue of a new journal, analyzes the extent to which the convergence of broadcasting and telephony induced by the digitization of communications technologies is forcing policymakers to rethink their basic approach to regulating these industries. Now that voice and video are becoming available through every transmission technology, policymakers can no longer define the scope of regulatory obligations in terms of the mode of transmission. In addition, jurisdictions that employ separate agencies to regulate broadcasting and telephony must reform their institutional structures to bring both within the ambit of a single regulatory agency. The emergence …


Future Generations: A Prioritarian View, Matthew D. Adler Sep 2009

Future Generations: A Prioritarian View, Matthew D. Adler

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Should we remain neutral between our interests and those of future generations? Or are we ethically permitted or even required to depart from neutrality and engage in some measure of intergenerational discounting? This Article addresses the problem of intergenerational discounting by drawing on two different intellectual traditions: the social welfare function (“SWF”) tradition in welfare economics, and scholarship on “prioritarianism” in moral philosophy. Unlike utilitarians, prioritarians are sensitive to the distribution of well-being. They give greater weight to well-being changes affecting worse-off individuals. Prioritarianism can be captured, formally, through an SWF which sums a concave transformation of individual utility, rather …


Network Neutrality After Comcast: Toward A Case-By-Case Approach To Reasonable Network Management, Christopher S. Yoo Feb 2009

Network Neutrality After Comcast: Toward A Case-By-Case Approach To Reasonable Network Management, Christopher S. Yoo

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The Federal Communications Commission’s recent Comcast decision has rejected categorical, ex ante restrictions on Internet providers’ ability to manage their networks in favor of a more flexible approach that examines each dispute on a case-by-case basis, as I have long advocated. This book chapter, written for a conference held in February 2009, discusses the considerations that a case-by-case approach should take into account. First, allowing the network to evolve will promote innovation by allowing the emergence of applications that depend on a fundamentally different network architecture. Indeed, as the universe of Internet users and applications becomes more heterogeneous, it is …


Beyond Fair Use, Gideon Parchomovsky, Philip J. Weiser Jan 2009

Beyond Fair Use, Gideon Parchomovsky, Philip J. Weiser

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For centuries, the fair use doctrine has been the main - if not the exclusive - bastion of user rights. Originating in the English court of equity, the doctrine permitted users under appropriate circumstances to employ copyrighted content without consent from the rightsholder. In the current digital media environment, however, the uncertainty that shrouds fair use and the proliferation of technological protection measures undermine the doctrine and its role in copyright policy. Notably, the enactment of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the circumvention of such measures even for fair use purposes, has diminished the ability of fair use …


Lessons Learned: Transferring The European Union's Experience With Energy Efficiency Policy To China, Shelley Welton Jan 2009

Lessons Learned: Transferring The European Union's Experience With Energy Efficiency Policy To China, Shelley Welton

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The European Union (EU) has been at the vanguard of passing forward-thinking energy efficiency policies over the past two decades, although it is still grappling with achieving full implementation of these policies. More recently, China has also been active in making energy efficiency a part of its national energy strategy. However, China has struggled to craft effective energy efficiency laws and to achieve implementation of these laws throughout the country. If successful, the potential for improvements and energy savings in China is tremendous. China has begun to decouple its GDP and its growth in energy consumption over the past twenty …