The FTC issues remedy order in the Rambus matter

The FTC ordered compulsory licensing at fixed royalty ratesof the computer memory products developer's SDRAM and DDR SDRAMtechnologies, also ordering Rambus to desist from lying to standard-settingorganizations (SSOs) regarding its patents and patent applications.     

Teacher education and feminism

In this article I argue that recent years have seen a steady “reform” of teacher education. In the latest of a long line of initiatives, teaching is being restructured via a framework of National Professional Qualifications and Standards. These both centrally define the activity of teaching at various stages of the teaching “career” and establish new modes of progression for teachers. I argue that the framework neglects teachers' responsibilities in relation to social justice in ways that are particularly worrying for feminists. In addition, I argue that the masculinist nature of the standards, the managerialist restructuring of the social relations within schools, and the drive to recruit more men into teaching all connect to the international epidemic of concern about the “underachievement” of boys. The article draws evidence from two externally funded projects undertaken with Ian Hextall between 1995–1999.     

FRANDly fire: are industry standards doing more harm than good?

Legal context: The role of IP rights in standards; the meaning of the obligationimposed by many standards bodies on essential patent holdersto licence on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (‘FRAND’)terms; the example of IPR policy of the European TelecommunicationsStandards Institute; recent US developments. Key points: Industry standards are of key commercial and technical significance.Yet many standards are currently burdened by litigation betweenessential patent holders and licensees. Such standards bodieshave been slow to give guidance on the meaning of the obligationsimposed on essential patent holders. This article takes theexample of the obligation to licence essential patents on FRANDterms, analysing the obligation in the context of European competitionlaw. The article concludes with some suggestions for pointsfor companies to include in their internal policies on licensingstandards essential patents. Practical significance: The meaning of the obligation to licence on FRAND terms is veryimportant for licensors and licensees alike. This article putsthe obligation in context and discusses the various approacheswhich may be taken in practice.     

Official Discourse

This paper analyses two Official Reports on law and order. They confront legitimation deficits, seeking discursively to redeem them by denial of their material geneses. This denial establishes an absence in the discourse. This absence, the Other, is the silence of a world constituted by material relations whose reality cannot be appropriated by a mode of normative argument which speaks to and from its own self-image via an idealised conception of justice. The paper discusses first the Reports' discursive problems, secondly, the disparate jurisprudential knowledges realised by the texts, and lastly the discursive presentation of these knowledges.     

Discrimination of 1990s original automotive paint systems: a collaborative study of black nonmetallic base coat/clear coat finishes using infrared spectroscopy

The 1990s saw the introduction of significantly new types of paint binder chemistries into the automotive finish coat market. Considering the pronounced changes in the binders that can now be found in automotive paints and their potential use in a wide variety of finishes worldwide, the Paint Subgroup of the Scientific Working Group for Materials (SWGMAT) initiated a validation study to investigate the ability of commonly accepted methods of forensic paint examination to differentiate between these newer types of paints. Nine automotive paint systems typical of original equipment applications were acquired from General Motors Corporation in 1992. They consisted of steel panels coated with typical electrocoat primers and/or primer surfacers followed by a black nonmetallic base coat and clear coat. The primary purpose of this study was to evaluate the discrimination power of common forensic techniques when applied to the newer generation original automotive finishes. The second purpose was to evaluate interlaboratory reproducibility of automotive paint spectra collected on a variety of Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectrometers and accessories normally used for forensic paint examinations. The results demonstrate that infrared spectroscopy is an effective tool for discriminating between the major automotive paint manufacturers' formulation types which are currently used in original finishes. Furthermore, and equally important, the results illustrate that the mid-infrared spectra of these finishes are generally quite reproducible even when comparing data from different laboratories, commercial FT-IR instruments, and accessories in a "real world," mostly uncontrolled, environment.