Computer Law Commons^™

Forum-Selection Clauses In Consumer Clickwrap And Browsewrap Agreements And The "Reasonably Communicated" Test, Kaustuv M. Das

Washington Law Review

Although forum-selection clauses in clickwrap and browsewrap agreements have been addressed in only a limited number of decisions, they are likely to become increasingly relevant with the growth of e-commerce. Courts that have enforced forum-selection clauses in click-wrap and browsewrap agreements have often done so without determining whether the consumer received notice of the clause. When courts have addressed notice, they have not used any uniform standard for determining adequacy of notice. Forum-selection clauses in dlickwrap and browsewrap agreements further the policies underlying the Supreme Court's decisions in MIS Bremen v. Zapata Off-Shore Co. and Carnival Cruise Lines, Inc. v. …

De-Bugging Open Source Software Licensing, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

Articles

Home computer users and businesses often rely on software developed by unconventional programmers known as "hackers." Hackers claim that the code they develop is superior in quality to the code developed by commercial software firms because hackers freely share the code they develop. This code sharing enables a multitude of programmers from around the world to rapidly find and fix bugs. The legal mechanism that enables hackers to deploy this worldwide team of de-buggers is a license agreement or, to be more precise,an assortment of license agreements known as "open source" licenses.

Although open source software developers may regularly fix …

Legal Protection For Software: Still A Work In Progress, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

Articles

Software began as geekware-something written by programmers for programmers. Now, software is a business and consumer staple. Cryptic character-based user interfaces have given way to friendly graphical ones; multi-media is everywhere; people own multiple computers of varying sizes; computers are connected to one another across the globe; email and instant electronic messages have replaced letters and telephone calls for many people.

The issue of whether the law should protect software seems quaint to us now. Over the past twenty-five years, legislatures and courts have concluded that copyright, patent, trade secret, trademark, and contract law all can be used to protect …