Open Access in E-Commerce: Money, Commerce, Consumers
In recent months, there has been growing interest in the area of open source software (OSS) and free software (FS) as an alternative management and economic model. However, the success of the OSS mindshare and collaborative online experience has wider implications to many other fields of human endeavour than the mere licensing of computer programmes. The OSS philosophy is prompting a paradigm shift in the way in which small businesses, individual researchers, educational organisations and public institutions disseminate information. There are a growing number of institutions interested in using OSS licensing schemes to distribute creative works, scientific research and even to publish online journals.
Recent Submissions
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Trouble with Prime Numbers: DeCSS, DVD and the Protection of Proprietary Encryption Tools
(Universities of Warwick and Strathclyde, 2002)This essay deals with the cracking of DVD encryption and its further diffusion as a computer programme named DeCSS, which has been made available over the Internet in various formats, including t-shirts and a numerical ... -
Legal Challenges to Open Source Licenses
(AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law, 2005)This paper will concentrate on presenting a legal analysis of two of the main challenges to open source software: SCO’s litigation and software patents. The paper discusses the validity of such challenges, their possible ... -
The Software Patent Debate
(Oxford University Press, 2006)The paper discusses the proposed European Directive on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions and the subsequent debate that followed. Do software patents - as argued by policymakers' - result in increased ... -
Viral contracts or unenforcable documents? Contractual validity of copyleft licenses.
(Sweet and Maxwell, 2004)This paper asks the question of whether copyleft free software licences constitute valid legal contracts, in particular with regards to the fact that it may create obligations through a distribution chain. There is increasing ... -
PayPal: The Legal Status of P2P Payment Systems
(Elsevier, 2004)The paper discusses one of the most successful examples of the Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) model, found in consumer friendly payment systems such as PayPal. People who are exchanging goods through internet auctions need ... -
The new sharing ethic in Cyberspace
(Chigaco-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology, 2002)The Internet is a new medium that allows every person who is connected to it to become a publisher and to be able to share ideas and information. This is a phenomenon that I call the “New Sharing Ethic”. This new sharing ... -
Open Science: Open source licenses in scientific research
(University of North Carolina School of Law, 2006)The article examines the validity of OSS (open source software) licenses for scientific, as opposed to creative works. It draws on examples of OSS licenses to consider their suitability for the scientific community and ... -
Electronic Money: A Viable Payment System?
(Badojoz: Formatex, 2003)This paper explores some of the legal and practical issues related to the implementation of electronic money placed in smart cards as a viable online payment system. This is a subject of particular importance as many there ... -
Collaboration in the Semantic Grid: A Basis for e-Learning
(Taylor & Francis, 2005)The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for the Semantic Grid. This paper presents an overview of the hypertext and knowledge based tools which have been deployed to ... -
Preserving piece-wise linearity in fuzzy interpolation.
(2005)Fuzzy interpolative reasoning serves as an important role in fuzzy modelling as it does not only help reduce rule number but also provides an inference mechanisn for sparse rule bases
