Intellectual Property Rights in Data?

The international intellectual property system founded on the Paris and Berne Conventions in the late nineteenth century has been dominated by the patent and copyright paradigms, which articulate the legal protection of technological inventions and of literary and artistic works, respectively. Although this patent-copyright dichotomy was never as strictly observed abroad as in the United States, it nonetheless charted a relatively clear theoretical line of demarcation between legal incentives to create and the public interest in free competition. Any publicly disclosed technologies or information products that failed to meet the eligibility requirements of the domestic patent and copyright laws became public domain matter that anyone could freely appropriate. By the end of the twentieth century, in contrast, this line of demarcation had empirically broken down. The developed market economies, including the United States, enacted numerous special purpose intellectual property laws to protect industrial designs, plant varieties, integrated circuit designs, and other matter that typically failed to meet the eligibility requirements of either the patent or copyright models. The latest, and arguably most deviant, examples of this trend toward sui generis intellectual property rights are the European - and United States-sponsored initiatives in both national and international forums calling for creation of a new form of legal protection for the contents of databases. These initiatives aim to rescue database producers from the threat of market-destructive appropriations by free-riding competitors who contributed nothing to the costs of collecting or distributing the relevant data

Legal regulation in empirical research in the Information Systems Basket of 8 Journals:a systematic literature review

Abstract. The core content of the paper lies in exploring how studies in information systems research address the topic of legal regulation. This study intends to fill the main gap in knowledge by aiming at the empirical studies within the basket of 8 journals that studies legal regulation. The results of this study provide perspectives on specific legal regulations, the research methodologies employed in empirical studies, and the theoretical foundations of the policy cycle stages to which these studies belong. This research identifies and presents a general overview of the trends in the information systems domain. This thesis utilizes a systematic literature review to discover, examine, and extract empirical studies relevant to legal regulation from a basket of eight journals. The data were obtained from the SCOPUS database, resulting in 351 studies. Through the inclusion/exclusion criteria, 33 primary studies were identified that were relevant to the focus of the study. These primary studies focused on various legal regulations and were subsequently classified into four themes: impact, implementation, compliance, and policies. These themes allow for the identification of trends and the scope of the primary studies that investigate legal regulations. Furthermore, these themes are further analyzed and classified into sub-categories to provide a more detailed analysis of the primary studies. The results of the study indicate that many primary studies within the empirical research follow qualitative research methodology. Among these primary studies, the legal regulations most frequently examined are from the United States. Several studies focus on regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, High-Frequency Trading Act, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Following the United States, the study finds that primary studies also explore legal regulations in Europe, with a notable emphasis on the General Data Protection Regulation and the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive. However, the results also highlight that many primary studies belong to the implementation phase of the policy cycle stage, while none specifically focus on the problem identification stage. The findings of the study broaden the opportunity to investigate how legal regulation has been addressed in journals beyond the selected basket of eight. Additionally, since this paper focuses solely on empirical evidence, most primary studies relied on qualitative research methodologies. This suggests the potential for exploring other studies that utilize methodologies such as design science or theoretical analysis

Copyright and the Jurisprudence of Self-Help

The proposed draft of Article 2B grants broad rights to enforce electronically contract provisions governing access to and use of digital works. Purveyors of digital works may engage in electronic self-help following breach of contract, and may also elect to foreclose unauthorized uses ex ante, via electronic “regulation of performance.” This Article examines these provisions in light of existing law authorizing self-help repossession of tangible chattels, leading academic justifications for self-help repossession, and federal copyright law and policy. It concludes that the provisions authorize an unprecedented degree of intrusion into private homes and offices, that they lack a sound theoretical basis, and that their adoption would threaten constitutionally-mandated limits on copyright protection. It concludes, further, that the law should afford users of digital works rights of electronic self-help where necessary to preserve the copyright balance