The role of standardization and interoperability in copyright protection of computer software

Copyright protection for computer software often presents a contradiction between law and the desired public policy that is the law's inspiration. The law provides incentives to individuals to create intellectual property by protecting authors through monopolistic controls on copying and distributing the authors' work. Conferring too much protection, however, may reduce incentives to create competitive products in the same market, defeating the law's constitutional purpose of encouraging the “Progress of Science and the useful Arts.” Two characteristics of computer software, technical standards and interoperability, compound this contradiction. Using economic literature on standards and the recent line of Lotus v. Borland cases, this article examines the role of standardization and interoperability in copyright protection of computer software, and suggests a part for the fair‐use defense in such cases.     

A Prescription for Violence: The Legacy of Colonization in Contemporary Forensic Mental Health and the Production of Difference

In this paper I will argue, through the example of the “treatment” of racialized minorities diagnosed with mental illness, that the mental health system (including its unique laws, production of different identity categories and ruling disciplines), with its dogmatic adherence to and reliance on alleged expert opinion and internal inquiry, allows for the erasure of subaltern voices. Often we hear about a tragic incident as reported by the media about someone diagnosed with a mental illness who has committed a crime. These representations routinely present the person as violent, aggressive, uncontrollable, and unpredictable. Repeatedly the voice of the accused is not represented; his or her social, historical, and political contexts are not considered relevant. The technologies of the criminal justice and mental health system’s use of physical or chemical restraint, coercive treatment, or practices such as deportation are also not reported, thus reproducing systems of harm. We don’t get to look inside the asylum. Patients’ voices are excluded from the discursive practices, disciplinary hegemony or dominant regimes of truth within the mental health system. This creates a system impermeable to criticism, where violence continues to prevail. Through a discussion of the disproportionate criminalization and deportation of the mentally ill, the false associations between mental illness and violence, the colonial ancestry of internal inquiry, and example cases from the media, this paper reviews how these particular technologies of violence owe their inheritance to the orientalising, discursive practices and disciplinary hegemony developed during colonization that when ignored, reproduce the dehumanizing outcomes upon which they were built.     

Letter to the editor

Summary The above points are by no means exhaustive of major policy developments which should concern the policy community and academics who teach students or who do research. We therefore make two recommendations: first, that the Ford Foundation or some other group consider convening a meeting drawing together people who have worked on the above problems and who have taught at the second and third tier schools which are more closely related to these problems; second, we would hope that your journal would undertake to do something to effectively redress the academic imbalance in our premier schools as reflected in the Yates report of the Ford Conference. Perhaps you could announce that the king(s) is naked.     

FrostWire P2P forensic examinations

FrostWire is a peer-to-peer (P2P) application derived from the open source code of Limewire. Frostwire was first released in February of 2005 as a Gnutella P2P client. As interest in the Gnutella network waned, FrostWire switched in later versions to becoming a torrent client. Since the United States government shut Limewire down, FrostWire has become more popular and is seen more often in criminal investigations. This paper describes the different components of FrostWire and the useful information which can be obtained in a digital forensic examination.