Publications

This article examines three recent topics in copyright policy from an economic perspective: (i) term extensions, (ii) the orphan works problem, and (iii) mass digitization projects. Copyright term extensions will make it even more difficult to locate rights holders in the future than it is at present; however there are some recent legislative proposals to address this problem. Term extensions…

People often implicitly ascribe the quality of peer

Open source has changed the intellectual property landscape of the software industry.

I had the opportunity to offer closing comments at the recent forum on

According to researchers and managers in the media industry, content reutilization represents a promising management concept to reduce production costs and to generate additional revenue streams. The article compares content reutilization practices of German and U.S. book publishers and explores potential sources of differences in the reutilization behavior. Presently, almost two out of three…

Geoffrey Nunberg breaks new ground with this fierce and funny narrative of how the political right has ushered in a new world order, aided unwittingly by the liberal media. Democrats are well known for their "lousy bumper stickers," as Joe Klein puts it. As liberals wade through the semantics of "social security lockbox," "single payer," and other wonky locutions, the right has become harder,…

This essay considers positive, normative and political reasons for creating a map of the public domain and contiguous terrains. For far too many years, the public domain has either been invisible or been viewed in a negative way. By positively describing the contents of the public domain, it is possible to articulate normative reasons why the public domain is valuable to society. And by…

We propose an electronic voting machine architecture in which the voting user interface is prerendered and published before election day. The prerendered user interface is a verifiable artifact-an electronic sample ballot-enabling public participation in the review, verification, usability testing, and accessibility testing of the ballot. Preparing the user interface outside of the voting machine…

We propose a service differentiated peer selection mechanism for peer-to-peer media streaming systems. The mechanism provides flexibility and choice in peer selection to the contributors of the system, resulting in high quality streaming sessions. Free-riders are given limited options in peer selection, if any, and hence receive low quality streaming. The proposed incentive mechanism follows the…

Should standards be eligible for copyright protection?

In recent years, there has been increased interest in the market potential of rural communities in the developing world. In the developing world, the lack of information and communications infrastructure has left companies with manual paper-based information methods as the only means of analyzing and aggregating data. This primitive approach to rural supply chain management creates a barrier to…

Implementing successful rural computing applications requires addressing a number of significant challenges. Recent advances in mobile phone computing capabilities make this device a likely candidate to address the client hardware constraints. Long battery life, wireless connectivity, solid-state memory, low price and immediate utility all make it better suited to rural conditions than a PC.…