203 research outputs found
The Philosophical Foundations of Investment-Driven IP: On Reason, Faith, and Pluralism
No full textIt seems, once again, that intellectual property law is shifting beneath our feet. As Robert Merges put it a decade ago, if IP were a city, then the old city centre is today ‘surrounded by new buildings and new neighbourhoods, knots of urban growth, budding in every direction, far off into the distance’.1 That old city centre was built during the nineteenth-century age of possessive individualism.2 Ideologies of the romantic author and sole inventor helped erect the city’s foundational principle that one deserves ownership in the products of mental labour.3 Yet, in the early twentieth century, US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis could still write that ‘the general rule of law is, that the noblest of human production – knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas – become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use’.4 A century later, that general rule rings less true.5 Investment-driven rights, and investment-driven extensions to old rights, have helped expand the city’s boundaries. What started out as a small cadre of related rights, sui generis rights, and quasi-IP rights now contribute to an urban sprawl of new neighbourhoods spreading as far as the eye can see. New denizens – the trivially creative and insignificantly innovative goods explored in this volume – now are protected inside the city’s walls. What was the city of Intellectual Property has become the city of Investment Property
Protecting Information Privacy
No full textThis report for the Equality and Human Rights Commission (the Commission) examines the threats to information privacy that have emerged in recent years, focusing on the activities of the state. It argues that current privacy laws and regulation do not adequately uphold human rights, and that fundamental reform is required. It identifies two principal areas of concern: the state’s handling of personal data, and the use of surveillance by public bodies. The central finding of this report is that the existing approach to the protection of information privacy in the UK is fundamentally flawed, and that there is a pressing need for widespread legislative reform in order to ensure that the rights contained in Article 8 are respected. The report argues for the establishment of a number of key ‘privacy principles’ that can be used to guide future legal reforms and the development of sector-specific regulation. The right to privacy is at risk of being eroded by the growing demand for information by government and the private sector. Unless we start to reform the law and build a regulatory system capable of protecting information privacy, we may soon find that it is a thing of the past
Philippines: justice for Morong 43: A victory for the National Union of People's Lawyers, as Michael Goold reports…
No full textInternational Differences in the Size and Roles of Corporate Headquarters: An Empirical Examination
No full textThis paper examines differences in the size and roles of corporate headquarters around the world. Based on a survey of over 600 multibusiness corporations in seven countries (France, Germany, Holland, UK, Japan, US, and Chile) the paper describes the differences among countries, and then applies a model of the factors determining the size of corporate headquarters (Young, Collis, and Goold, 2003) to systematically examine those differences. The data shows that there are significant differences among countries in the size and role of corporate headquarters, and strongly suggests the existence of a developing country model, a European model, a US model, and a Japanese model of corporate headquarters. Contrary to popular expectations, corporate headquarters in the US are about twice the size of European counterparts. Headquarters there exert a higher level of functional influence and have larger staffs in certain key areas, such as IT and R&D. US managers are generally more satisfied than their European counterparts with their larger more powerful headquarters which suggests that, at least in the US context, large corporate headquarters can create value. Japanese headquarters, as might have been expected, are substantially larger than elsewhere – a factor of four times larger than in Europe. However, those headquarters are becoming smaller because of dissatisfaction with their performance. It is clear that having headquarters the size of the Japanese firms in the survey is not conducive to value creation. More specifically, the evidence cannot refute a hypothesis that the slope of the relationship between firm size and the size of corporate headquarters is the same across all countries, but that there are significant differences in the intercept for Chile, the US, Japan, and the European countries. What the data indicates is that at a firm employing 20,000, a European corporate headquarters would on average employ 124 individuals, a US headquarters would have 255 employees, and Japan 467 employees. The paper also examines differences between countries in the extent to which they perform the two key corporate tasks of control and coordination. The US and Chile chose to be somewhat more interventionist in the traditional tools and processes used to monitor and control business units – setting strategy, budgets, and administering capital budgets. However, there was a significant difference in the degree of influence in operational affairs between countries. The US and Japan exerted far more influence than the other countries over every activity from IT and purchasing, to marketing, R&D and HR issues. The US was also found to have significantly larger legal, tax, and treasury functions than the common European model, perhaps reflecting a more legalistic institutional structure. Japan also has significantly larger tax, treasury, and corporate management functions, but overall was not that much larger than the common European model. While the causes of these observed differences cannot be directly determined from the research, suggestions are made that the institutional infrastructure, the size and homogeneity of the domestic market, and cultural factors within countries are important underlying drivers.
Powering an autonomous clock with quantum electromechanics
No full textWe theoretically analyse an autonomous clock comprising a
nanoelectromechanical system, which undergoes self-oscillations driven by
electron tunnelling. The periodic mechanical motion behaves as the clockwork,
similar to the swinging of a pendulum, while induced oscillations in the
electrical current can be used to read out the ticks. We simulate the dynamics
of the system in the quasi-adiabatic limit of slow mechanical motion, allowing
us to infer statistical properties of the clock's ticks from the current
auto-correlation function. The distribution of individual ticks exhibits a
tradeoff between accuracy, resolution, and dissipation, as expected from
previous literature. Going beyond the distribution of individual ticks, we
investigate how clock accuracy varies over different integration times by
computing the Allan variance. We observe non-monotonic features in the Allan
variance as a function of time and applied voltage, which can be explained by
the presence of temporal correlations between ticks. These correlations are
shown to yield a precision advantage for timekeeping over the timescales that
the correlations persist. Our results illustrate the non-trivial features of
the tick series produced by nanoscale clocks, and pave the way for experimental
investigation of clock thermodynamics using nanoelectromechanical systems.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure
Review of C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (play)
No full textSteven Beebe: Review of: C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Starring Sally Dexter, Carly Bawden, Rebecca Benson, Philip Labey, and Jonny Weldon. Adapted for the stage by Rupert Goold. Directed by Rubert Goold and Michael Fentiman. Performed at The Threesixty Theater in Kensington Gardens, London, 19 May 2012
New threat to the right to protest: Stephen Knight on the new arrest tactic to include legal observers and Michael Goold and Emily Elliott on an important victory in the High Court against the Met police and its kettling actions
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Corrective Justice and Copyright Infringement
No full textThis article demonstrates that one crucially important function of copyright infringement cases is corrective justice. However, because scholars and lawmakers often conceive of copyright in solely economic terms, this goal is often overlooked and demonstrable unfairness occurs as a result.
The article uses tort law theory to make three points. Firstly, the economic theory of copyright is incomplete. This theory states that copyright is a tool for providing authors with incentives to create new works. However, this goal does not explain the legal relationship between the author and the infringer. If all we want to do is give authors incentives, then all we need to do is reward creation. Government subsidies and prizes are examples of methods for incentivizing creation without requiring the author to sue the infringer.
Secondly, corrective justice is a function of copyright infringement cases. This explains the author-infringer relationship. Corrective justice maintains equality between people. People are equally entitled to their rights. When someone does not respect the rights of others they cause an inequality. The wrongdoer gains something and the victim loses something. By making the wrongdoer compensate the victim, the law removes the gain and loss and restores the antecedent equality. This is one basic function of copyright infringement cases. Copyright is provided for a mix of reasons (some economic, some based on natural rights). Thereafter, when someone infringes copyright, they cause an inequality to arise: the infringer gains the ability to copy without paying a license fee, while the author loses the work’s market value. Making the infringer compensate the author removes the gains and losses and restores the equality between the parties.
Finally, this important goal it is often overlooked. The article will demonstrate three cases where the law does not adequately restore the equality between author and infringer, and which are accordingly unfair. The examples are: statutory damages for wilful infringement, litigation fees, and mass copyright infringement suits
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