Law Commons^™

Fixing Frand: A Pseudo-Pool Approach To Standards-Based Patent Licensing, Jorge Contreras

Jorge L Contreras

Technical interoperability standards are critical elements of mobile telephones, laptop computers, digital files, and thousands of other products in the modern networked economy. Most such standards are developed in so-called voluntary standards-development organizations (SDOs) that require participants to license patents essential to the standard on terms that are “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” (FRAND). FRAND commitments are thought to avoid the problem of patent hold-up: the imposition of excessive royalty demands after a standard has been widely adopted in the market. While, at first blush, FRAND commitments seem to assure product vendors that patents will not obstruct the manufacture and sale …

Limits On The Perfect Preventive State, Michael L. Rich

Michael L Rich

Traditional methods of crime prevention—the punishment of the culpable and the preventive restraint of the dangerous—are slowly being supplemented and supplanted by technologies that seek to perfectly prevent crime by making criminal conduct practically impossible. For instance, the federal government is developing in-car technology that would prevent vehicle operation when a driver has a blood alcohol level in excess of the legal limit. Less directly, the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 2000 try to prevent copyright infringement by eliminating technologies that enable such infringement. Such structural regulation of private conduct is not new, but few scholars …

Desktop Piracy Factories: Will Existing Law Be Enough?, Andrew J. Daddono

Andrew J Daddono

A brief essay on how the disruptive technology found in 3D printing will affect the future of our existing legal regimes for intellectual property, what foreseeable problems there are, and possible ways that we may address them.

Contextual Expectations Of Privacy, Andrew Selbst

Andrew Selbst

Fourth Amendment search jurisprudence is nominally based on a “reasonable expectation of privacy,” but actual doctrine is detached from society’s conception of privacy. Courts rely on various binary distinctions: Is a piece of information secret or not? Was the observed conduct inside or outside? While often convenient, none of these binary distinctions can adequately capture the complicated range of ideas encompassed by “privacy.” Privacy theorists have begun to understand that a consideration of social context is essential to a full understanding of privacy. Helen Nissenbaum’s theory of contextual integrity, which characterizes a right to privacy as the preservation of expected …

Copyright Freeconomics, John M. Newman

John M. Newman

Innovation has wreaked creative destruction on traditional content platforms. During the decade following Napster’s rise and fall, industry organizations launched litigation campaigns to combat the dramatic downward pricing pressure created by the advent of zero-price, copyright-infringing content. These campaigns attracted a torrent of debate, still ongoing, among scholars and stakeholders—but this debate has missed the forest for the trees. Industry organizations have abandoned litigation efforts, and many copyright owners now compete directly with infringing products by offering licit content at a price of $0.

This sea change has ushered in an era of “copyright freeconomics.” Drawing on an emerging body …

The Game Of Clones, Hyun G. Lee

Hyun G Lee

This paper examines whether expressions closely related to game mechanics should enjoy copyright law protection. In particular, this paper examines two recent cases, Tetris Holdings v. Xio Interactive and Spry Fox v. LOLApps, that seem to support the expansion of copyright protection to this area, particularly in game level design.