The New Legal Landscape for Text Mining and Machine Learning

Now that the dust has settled on the Authors Guild cases, this Article takes stock of the legal context for TDM research in the United States. This reappraisal begins in Part I with an assessment of exactly what the Authors Guild cases did and did not establish with respect to the fair use status of text mining. Those cases held unambiguously that reproducing copyrighted works as one step in the process of knowledge discovery through text data mining was transformative, and thus ultimately a fair use of those works. Part I explains why those rulings followed inexorably from copyright\u27s most fundamental principles. It also explains why the precedent set in the Authors Guild cases is likely to remain settled law in the United States. Parts II and III address legal considerations for would-be text miners and their supporting institutions beyond the core holding of the Authors Guild cases. The Google Books and HathiTrust cases held, in effect, that copying expressive works for non-expressive purposes was justified as fair use. This addresses the most significant issue for the legality of text data mining research in the United States; however, the legality of non-expressive use is far from the only legal issue that researchers and their supporting institutions must confront if they are to realize the full potential of these technologies. Neither case addressed issues arising under contract law, laws prohibiting computer hacking, laws prohibiting the circumvention of technological protection measures (i.e., encryption and other digital locks), or cross-border copyright issues. Furthermore, although Google Books addressed the display of snippets of text as part of the communication of search results, and both Authors Guild cases addressed security issues that might bear upon the fair use claim, those holdings were a product of the particular factual circumstances of those cases and can only be extended cautiously to other contexts. Specifically, Part II surveys the legal status of TDM research in other important jurisdictions and explains some of the key differences between the law in the United States and the law in the European Union. It also explains how researchers can predict which law will apply in different situations. Part III sets out a four-stage model of the lifecycle of text data mining research and uses this model to identify and explain the relevant legal issues beyond the core holdings of the Authors Guild cases in relation to TDM as a non-expressive use

Pluralism and its Perils: Navigating the Tension between Gay Rights and Religious Expression

The conflict between gay equality claims and religious liberty claims permeates debates over marriage equality and LGBT civil rights. Using as its centerpiece a decision that forced Georgetown University to provide benefits for a gay student organization, this article examines both the doctrinal underpinnings of how courts resolve the tension between gay rights and religion and the principles of pluralism that are at stake. The Georgetown case is rightly understood as an exemplar of judicial minimalism. This article argues that the values of learning things undecided, while real, may be outweighed by lost opportunities for advancing principles that also foster respect for competing norms and promote affirmative values rather than simple suppression of conflict. In particular, the article argues for adoption of three premises, all of which contribute new insights to this continuing debate: that obedience to antidiscrimination law is not inherently expressive; that disagreement with antidiscrimination law must be fully protected; and that the framing of antidiscrimination norms should be de-moralized. Some scholars believe that pluralism requires treating religious authority as equivalent to law. This article argues that, in situations such as the Georgetown case, when seemingly irreconcilable value systems collide, the proper role of courts in a pluralistic democracy is to provide the secular authority that ultimately resolves such a case, if not the volatile cultural dispute underlying it

Hybrid IP Rights For Software, APIs, and GUIs: Understanding Copyright\u27s Paradigm Shift

The non-literal scope of protection for software is intricate legally and is intricate technical. Thus, despite literally decades of court decisions and a mountain of legal scholar written on the subject in that time, it appears that there is still no consistent agreement about it, as evidenced by the Google v. Oracle which has percolated in the courts for nearly a decade and is now being heard by the US Supreme Court (oral argument was on October 7, 2020). However, the thesis of this article that a legal construct is capable of being formulated that is analytically consistent and that explains some of decisions that reach contrary outcomes (or dicta expressing some contrary views)

Erik Bergman, cosmopolitanism and the transformation of musical geography

Modernism is haunted by its disavowal of what Homi Bhabha calls ‘the location of culture’. Making a dogma out of the universalism of the Enlightenment, it has largely denied cultural difference. However, as theorists, such as Fredric Jameson and Edward Said, have pointed out, modernism can itself be seen as a product of colonialism and imperialism with which it is largely coterminous. This is perceptible notably in the cultural geography of centre and periphery which is one of modernism’s hallmarks. Witness for instance how Theodor W. Adorno, in his Philosophy of New Music, is so troubled by music from ‘the periphery’ – that of Janáček and Bartók – that he posits an essential asynchronicity, whereby this music represents a different stage of development. This transformation of space into time, which is characteristic of the cultural geography of musical modernism, relates closely to the ‘time lag’ between metropolis and colony that Bhabha decries as an essential feature of colonialism. Since it is a largely hidden aspect, the cultural geography of musical modernism and the transformations it underwent from modernism’s inception during the hey-day of imperialism to its late, ‘post-colonialist’ phase is rarely discussed. While it is beyond the scope of this contribution to study the totality of the intricate intersections between musical modernism and cultural geography, I will illustrate some aspects with the work of a composer who was both subject to and continuously sought to evade the dynamics of centre and periphery, the Finland-Swede Erik Bergman (1911-2006). Coming from the periphery of musical modernism, Bergman was unusual in rejecting romantic nationalism, associating himself instead with the international avant-garde. However, he quickly contrasted this form of universalist internationalism with a deep interest in and compositional engagement with non-Western music, long before the American and European avant-gardes discovered ‘the orient’. This form of ‘globalism’ is in turn complemented by Bergman’s rediscovery of the local, the sounds and musical cultures of his native environment. In so doing, Bergman is however not interested in the self-exoticising characteristic of nationalism, but in uncovering the strangeness within the self. In my contribution, I will seek to relate Bergman’s compositional choices both to its various historical contexts and to recent discourses in the social sciences and humanities, notably the critical reconceptualization of cosmopolitanism currently undertaken

Balancing the thin line between political and ecological protest, A Study of the Shies Protest

Postponed access: the file will be accessible after 2022-08-16MasteroppgåveSAMPOL350MASV-SAP

Argobots: A Lightweight Low-Level Threading and Tasking Framework

In the past few decades, a number of user-level threading and tasking models have been proposed in the literature to address the shortcomings of OS-level threads, primarily with respect to cost and flexibility. Current state-of-the-art user-level threading and tasking models, however, either are too specific to applications or architectures or are not as powerful or flexible. In this paper, we present Argobots, a lightweight, low-level threading and tasking framework that is designed as a portable and performant substrate for high-level programming models or runtime systems. Argobots offers a carefully designed execution model that balances generality of functionality with providing a rich set of controls to allow specialization by end users or high-level programming models. We describe the design, implementation, and performance characterization of Argobots and present integrations with three high-level models: OpenMP, MPI, and colocated I/O services. Evaluations show that (1) Argobots, while providing richer capabilities, is competitive with existing simpler generic threading runtimes; (2) our OpenMP runtime offers more efficient interoperability capabilities than production OpenMP runtimes do; (3) when MPI interoperates with Argobots instead of Pthreads, it enjoys reduced synchronization costs and better latency-hiding capabilities; and (4) I/O services with Argobots reduce interference with colocated applications while achieving performance competitive with that of a Pthreads approach

Yelling Fire and Hacking: Why the First Amendment Does Not Permit Distributing DVD Decryption Technology?

One of the consequences of the black-hole "no-hair" theorem in general relativity (GR) is that gravitational radiation (quasi-normal modes) from a perturbed Kerr black hole is uniquely determined by its mass and spin. Thus, the spectrum of quasi-normal mode frequencies have to be all consistent with the same value of the mass and spin. Similarly, the gravitational radiation from a coalescing binary black hole system is uniquely determined by a small number of parameters (masses and spins of the black holes and orbital parameters). Thus, consistency between different spherical harmonic modes of the radiation is a powerful test that the observed system is a binary black hole predicted by GR. We formulate such a test, develop a Bayesian implementation, demonstrate its performance on simulated data and investigate the possibility of performing such a test using previous and upcoming gravitational wave observations