For our project, Mike M and I decided to write a paper about source code disclosure in software patents. Specifically, we wanted to explore whether or not the law as it stood required source code disclosure, and, if not, whether or not it should do so. Our paper attacks the issue from many angles, and includes a look at both the normative and legal issues surround the question, as well as an in-depth analysis of one particular software patent in light of this topic. You can read our paper, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License, here.
In the course of our research, there were a few court cases which seemed particularly important to our topic, and none of them had Wikipedia articles. Being good citizens of the internet, we figured we’d go ahead and write articles on them. You can find our three articles here, here, and here. We both really enjoyed this class, and wish everyone else a great summer!
Our group wanted to figure out the state of Open Access (OA) at Yale, and what it would take to improve it. Our project basically consisted of three phases:
Research to figure out what the norm is at other universities and with what, exactly, Yale should be compared.
Research among Yale faculty; we spoke with seventeen different professors and got their opinions about OA, and found out their concerns and whether they would support a university-wide OA mandate in the style of Harvard and MIT’s recent policies.
Compilation and presentation, including a draft of an OA proposal.
We read about OA, finding some really excellent resources (SPARC, Peter Suber, OASIS) in the process. Then we talked to seventeen professors (none of the administrators we tried to talk to were available, unfortunately). We listened to some of their concerns about OA (mostly arising from misconceptions about the peer-review process for OA journals), heard their opinions, found out what the general perception is. To summarize: we found that most of them had some sort of idea what OA was about. Several were enthusiastic, most were willing to give it a try, and only a few were skeptical. This is intended to go beyond a simple class project: we’d like to extend it to an effort to get an actual organized OA campaign going here. That shouldn’t be too hard; professors didn’t mind the idea, and there are enough people high up willing to listen (and enough people down low willing to talk) that we could get something really moving.
EDIT: Okay, the link works now. It doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, and I blame Apache for that. I’ll redo the server setup and fix it before converting this from “class project” to actual “project”.
-Ben
For our final project, my group (which consists of myself, Tyce, Danny, and David) decided to investigate the different structures of reputation economies online, and their social and legal implications. You can check out our website here:
Our group decided to probe into intellectual property issues outside the United States. While there are myriad issues that are both relevant and interesting, we decided to focus on pharmaceutical patents and cultural works. The goal of our project was to synthesize what we have learned and supplemented with additional research over the semester in the form of a debate. Our arguments were put together from case studies and class readings/discussion. The goal was to present both sides of the argument while coming to a middle ground at the end. This came in the form of proposed changes to the current legal system that would be fair to both sides. Our proposed changes are what we believed would create a more balanced patent/copyright system while also being feasible.
Check out our website at http://web.me.com/ipdigitalage/Project/ . Watch the videos, read the transcripts and add your voice to this vibrant debate by commenting right here on the class blog.
The viewpoints expressed do not necessarily represent our personal views on the matter. The purpose of this project is to present different views on generic drugs and cultural works for the sake of dialogue and debate.
This is my final presentation on webcomics. The first half of the presentation is a recap of what I discussed in class, and the latter half is various qualitative considerations I use to argue that the current setup for how webcomics make revenue is implicitly dependent on a permissive approach to IP. Theres a lot more interesting work on this topic, and I think I’ll do thusly over the summer, see the end of my presentation for a few ideas for what to do next.
[note: the last video segment has bad quality for resasons that I'm not able to determine or fix]
A low-quality version of the documentary can be found here (long load time).
Our documentary sought to explore both the contributions Yale has made to various open source projects as well as how Yale employs the results of open- and community-sourced projects. We did so primarily by looking at CAS (Central Authentication Service), uPortal, Sakai, and Horde, all projects which have been partially developed or used by the Yale community.
With four interviews (three video and one audio), we explored open source’s impact at Yale, talking to Andy Newman (outgoing Director of Yale University ITS Technology and Planning), Paul Hudak (a principal developer of the community-created language Haskell), Shawn Bayern (a principal developer of CAS and professor of law at Duke), and Susan Bramhall (a Senior Research Programmer for Technology and Planning and a board member of JA-SIG, a community-source educational software organization).
This project was incredibly timely, as the Technology and Planning Department, the arm of ITS responsible for Yale’s open source development and contributions, was very recently disbanded as part of recession streamlining, and so this documentary examines the projected future impacts of Yale withdrawing somewhat from the open source community.
Enjoy the documentary, thanks for a great class, and have a good summer!
Robert Baskin, Patrick Dewechter, Matthew Du Pont, Lauren Henry
