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Full-Text Articles in Law

Separation Of Ownership And The Authorization To Use Personal Computers: Unintended Effects Of Eu And U.S. Law On It Security, Lukas Feiler Jul 2010

Separation Of Ownership And The Authorization To Use Personal Computers: Unintended Effects Of Eu And U.S. Law On It Security, Lukas Feiler

Lukas Feiler

It used to be that owners of personal computers typically had full and exclusive authorization to use their computers. This was primarily due to the open architecture introduced with the IBM Personal Computer in the 1980s and proliferated in the 1990s. Recent developments bear evidence of an increasing disconnection between the concept of ownership and that of authorization to use a personal computer (including mobile devices such as notebooks, sub-notebooks, cell phones, smartphones, and PDAs): interference with the closed architecture employed by Apple’s iPhone is claimed to constitute a violation under 17 U.S.C. § 1201; the EULA for Windows 7 …


Beyond Fair Use, Gideon Parchomovsky, Philip J. Weiser Jan 2010

Beyond Fair Use, Gideon Parchomovsky, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

For centuries, the fair use doctrine has been the main--if not the exclusive--bastion of user rights. Originating in the English courts of equity, the doctrine permitted users, under appropriate circumstances, to employ copyrighted content without the rightsholder's consent. 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 technological protection measures even for fair use purposes, has diminished the ability of fair use to counterbalance a copyright …


Cooling-Off And Secondary Markets: Consumer Choice In The Digital Domain, Michael Mattioli Jan 2010

Cooling-Off And Secondary Markets: Consumer Choice In The Digital Domain, Michael Mattioli

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This article studies the law and economics of cooling-off periods and secondary markets for online media. The discussion is fueled by a current debate: In July 2009, the online retail juggernaut, Amazon.com, remotely deleted literary classics from consumers’ portable “Kindle” reading devices. The public outcry and class-action lawsuit that followed have reinvigorated an ongoing debate about how much control digital media distributors should wield. Pundits and plaintiffs argue that too often, digital distributors like Amazon impair consumer freedom by misusing Digital Rights Management (DRM) software systems. However, these same systems could also provide significant benefits that have largely gone ignored. …