The American Assembly: Art, Technology, and Intellectual Property

Examines intellectual property issues as the arts sector joins other sectors in the race to deal with an increasingly information-driven economy

CRIBs (Climate Relevant Innovation-system Builders): an effective way forward for international climate technology policy

National systems of innovation (NSIs) provide the context within which all processes of technology development, transfer and uptake occur - they refer to the network of actors (e.g. firms, universities, research institutes, government departments, NGOs) within which innovation occurs, and the strength and nature of the relationships between them. Nurturing NSIs in relation to climate technologies provides a powerful new focus for international policy with potential to underpin more sustained and widespread development and transfer of climate technologies. This working paper builds on an invited presentation by one of the authors at a workshop on NSIs convened by the Technology Executive Committee (TEC) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It identifies policy recommendations for consideration of the TEC. The intention is both to inform possible recommendations by the TEC to the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP) and to highlight potential areas for future work that the TEC could undertake on this issue

Energy pathways in low-carbon development

No description supplie

The Beginnings and Prospective Ending of “End-to-End”: An Evolutionary Perspective On the Internet’s Architecture

The technology of “the Internet” is not static. Although its “end-to- end” architecture has made this “connection-less” communications system readily “extensible,” and highly encouraging to innovation both in hardware and software applications, there are strong pressures for engineering changes. Some of these are wanted to support novel transport services (e.g. voice telephony, real-time video); others would address drawbacks that appeared with opening of the Internet to public and commercial traffic - e.g., the difficulties of blocking delivery of offensive content, suppressing malicious actions (e.g. “denial of service” attacks), pricing bandwidth usage to reduce congestion. The expected gains from making “improvements” in the core of the network should be weighed against the loss of the social and economic benefits that derive from the “end-to-end” architectural design. Even where technological “fixes” can be placed at the networks’ edges, the option remains to search for alternative, institutional mechanisms of governing conduct in cyberspace.