Creation and Commercial Value: Copyright Protection of Works of Information

In 1899, Augustine Birrell, a Victorian barrister, lamented: The question of copyright has, in these latter days, with so many other things, descended into the market-place, and joined the wrangle of contending interests and rival greedinesses. Birrell\u27s remark conveys distaste for those authors who would realise the commercial value of their wares. But the question of copyright has always been joined with that of commercial value. Indeed, by affording authors limited monopoly protection for their writings, our Constitution relies on wrangling greed to promote the advancement of both creativity and profit. Nonetheless, the distinction Birrell implies between copyrightworthy works of authorship and mere commercial wares pervades much modem copyright law. Modem copyright comfortably embraces works manifesting a personal authorial presence. Protection depends on whether the work manifests authorial personality, not whether that personality demonstrates either taste or talent. On the other hand, modem copyright encounters far more difficulty accommodating works at once high in commercial value but low in personal authorship. The paradigm for this kind of work and its attendant problems is a compilation of factual information. This Article examines the application of copyright law to personality-deprived information compilations such as directories, indexes, and data bases – endeavors I shall collectively dub works of low authorship. I argue that the problems surrounding the inclusion of these works within the subject matter of copyright and the delineation of their appropriate scope of protection reflect a misguided – and increasingly untenable – attempt in United States copyright law to impose a unitary, personality-based concept of copyright. Itself a product of the late nineteenth century, the personality concept of copyright continues – often subconsciously, but certainly pervasively – to inform our ideas about copyright today, too often to the exclusion of competing models of copyright. But a unitary concept of copyright is neither faithful to earlier copyright history, nor well adapted to contemporary technologies of creation and copying of informational works

Birrell's Distributed Reference Listing Revisited

The Java RMI collector is arguably the most widely used distributed garbage collector. Its distributed reference listing algorithm was introduced by Birrell in the context of Network Objects, where the description was informal and heavily biased toward implementation. In this paper, we formalise this algorithm in an implementation-independent manner, which allows us to clarify weaknesses of the initial presentation. In particular, we discover cases critical to the correctness of the algorithm that are not accounted for by Birrell. We use our formalisation to derive an invariant-based proof of correctness of the algorithm that avoids notoriously difficult temporal reasoning. Furthermore, we offer a novel graphical representation of the state transition diagram, which we use to provide intuitive explanations of the algorithm and to investigate its tolerance to faults in a systematic manner. Finally, we examine how the algorithm may be optimised, either by placing constraints on message channels or by tightening the coupling between application program and distributed garbage collector

Proliferation of different building procurement systems and their appropriate application : a case of Tanzania

Bibliography: leaves 150-156.The term ''Building Procurement System" has become a fashionable term within the Tanzanian building industry in recent years. It is a term that is surrounded by controversy and evokes strongly held opinions by both practitioners and researchers. This thesis attempts to analyse what these procurement systems have to offer and to match them to the objectives of the client and characteristics of the project

The view from the backbench : Irish Nationalist MPs and their work, 1910-1914

Available from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DXN065144 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

Birrell's distributed reference listing revisited

Includes bibliographical referencesSIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:8723. 2885(no 8-03) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Inclusions and exclusions in the Irish literary canon in the mid-twentieth century

This thesis explores how a variety of political, religious and social determinants counterbalanced each other to legitimise a new canon, or canons, in post-Treaty Ireland. 'Participants' to be discussed in the making of the Irish canon included members of the Educational Board, university faculties, clerics, textbook editors and anthologists, historians, creative writers, literary critics, politicians, censors, and so on. The different traditions and perspectives they represent complicate the formulation of the canon through which many antagonistic ideologies give shape to the various versions of Irishness. The thesis also examines how and why some writers did not attract critical attention in mid-twentieth century Ireland, and what kinds of writing were deemed most 'canonical', when political and religious ideologies were more influential than other factors. To demonstrate how the formation of the Irish nation had impacts on the making of an Irish canon, this thesis will discuss relevant issues at institutional and textual levels. The institutional, as the first three chapters will elaborate, will focus on Irish education from primary to tertiary levels. These three chapters will reveal how the teaching of Irish literature might have significantly de-Anglicised Irish pupils, and how it sought to secure an Irish national identity. The latter four chapters, following the demonstration of the success and failure, of educational de-Anglicisation, will draw attention to literary works per se, to see why certain choices of themes would be admitted to, or left out of, the canon, and under what circumstances. Although both anthologists and many creative writers were interested in the topics of Irish history, the latter seemed to be more capable of introducing historical subjects from non-nationalistic or sometimes comic or feminist perspectives -- which caused some of their works to be dismissed from the nationalistic canon. The writers to be discussed in this thesis include Daniel Corkery, J. Q Farrell, Denis Johnston, Mary Lavin, Iris Murdoch, Kate O'Brien, Frank O'Connor, Liam O'Flaherty, and James Plunkett