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Full-Text Articles in Law
Rethinking Anticircumvention's Interoperability Policy, Aaron K. Perzanowski
Rethinking Anticircumvention's Interoperability Policy, Aaron K. Perzanowski
Faculty Publications
Interoperability is widely touted for its ability to spur incremental innovation, increase competition and consumer choice, and decrease barriers to accessibility. In light of these attributes, intellectual property law generally permits follow-on innovators to create products that interoperate with existing systems, even without permission. The anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") represent a troubling departure from this policy, resulting in patent-like rights to exclude technologies that interoperate with protected platforms. Although the DMCA contains internal safeguards to preserve interoperability, judicial misinterpretation and narrow statutory text render those safeguards largely ineffective.
One approach to counteracting the DMCA's restrictions …
The Magnificence Of The Disaster: Reconstructing The Sony Bmg Rootkit Incident, Deirdre Mulligan, Aaron K. Perzanowski
The Magnificence Of The Disaster: Reconstructing The Sony Bmg Rootkit Incident, Deirdre Mulligan, Aaron K. Perzanowski
Faculty Publications
Late in 2005, Sony BMG released millions of Compact Discs containing digital rights management technologies that threatened the security of its customers' computers and the integrity of the information infrastructure more broadly. This Article aims to identify the market, technological, and legal factors that appear to have led a presumably rational actor toward a strategy that in retrospect appears obviously and fundamentally misguided.
The Article first addresses the market-based rationales that likely influenced Sony BMG's deployment of these DRM systems and reveals that even the most charitable interpretation of Sony BMG's internal strategizing demonstrates a failure to adequately value security …