Revisiting the License v. Sale Conundrum

This Article seeks to answer a question that has become increasingly more important as commerce moves from the tangible to the intangible—to what extent may a business use a contract to control the use of a fully paid product? The characterization of a transaction as a license or a sale determines what may be done with a product, who controls how the product may be used, and what happens in the event of a dispute. The past generation has seen a seismic shift in the way businesses distribute their products to consumers. Businesses often “license” rather than “sell” their products, and view consumers as licensees, rather than owners, of the products they buy. Customers own their print copies of books, movies, and music but merely license the same content when they purchase it in digital form. The marketplace transition from sale to license has far and wide ripple effects affecting a range of issues from innovation to the environment. The rapid emergence of the Internet of Things adds to the urgency and importance of the question— are goods licensed or sold? The question of whether a digital product is licensed or sold is often conflated with the question of whether a product should be licensed or sold. The problem lies, in large part, with the well-intentioned but misguided turn that contract law has taken away from the intent of the parties and toward a narrow vision of efficiency. When it comes to commercial transactions, the narrow efficiency view prioritizes quantity of completed transactions over quality, ignoring consumer expectations and the way in which distrust creates uncertainty in the marketplace. This Article proposes a methodology for resolving the license v. sale conundrum that promotes a more expansive view of efficiency and brings more predictability and fairness to an increasingly muddled area of the law

Paterno v. Laser Spine Institute: Did the New York Court of Appeals\u27 Misapplication of Unjustified Policy Fears Lead to A Miscarriage of Justice and the Creation of Inadequate Precedent for the Proper Use of the Empire State’s Long-Arm Statute?

This article discusses CPLR section 302(a)(1) as applied by the New York State Court of Appeals in Paterno v. Laser Spine Institute. The Paterno Court failed to properly apply a statutory jurisdictional analysis by conflating it with a due process inquiry. Also, the Court unnecessarily balanced the interests of the Empire State\u27s citizens in having a forum for access to justice with unjustified policy fears of potential costs to the state from assertions of in personam jurisdiction. Furthermore, the Court\u27s policy focus4 on the protection of medical doctors from lawsuits and the prevention of “floodgate” litigation which would adversely affect the medical profession was not justified by the record and created poor precedent for subsequent judicial application of the state\u27s long-arm statute. This article will examine CPLR section 302(a)(1), under Paterno v. Laser Spine Institute and some of its predecessors, to demonstrate that sometimes overarching policy concerns get in the way of a strict statutory analysis under CPLR section 302(a)(1). We analyze how the Court of Appeals in Paterno conflated the jurisdictional basis and due process analyses and determine that the Court, based on a faulty statutory analysis, erroneously decided that there was no statutory jurisdiction. Our article is divided into six parts. Part II briefly discusses the history of the CPLR and the manner of obtaining jurisdiction through Sections 301 and 302, focusing mainly on long-arm jurisdiction. Part III discusses and analyzes leading cases, which involve the application of CPLR 302 in obtaining personal jurisdiction. Part IV discusses a recent case, Paterno v. Laser Spine Institute, in great detail, and Part V engages in a critical analysis of Paterno with reference to a similar case, Grimaldi v. Guinn. Part VI addresses policy considerations and Part VII concludes with a discussion of how the Paterno Court entangled its jurisdictional analysis and where the Court may be headed with its future application of CPLR section 302(a)(1)

Terrorism and Universal Jurisdiction: Opening a Pandora\u27s Box?

The relationship between terrorism and international criminal law has provoked a good deal of discussion in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York City and at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. A particularly challenging issue pertains to whether terrorism is an international crime or a transnational crime, and if and in what context offenders and offenses, to which we affix the label of terrorist and terrorism, should or can be subject to the limited jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and other international and national criminal tribunals

Terrorism and Universal Jurisdiction: Opening a Pandora\u27s Box?

The relationship between terrorism and international criminal law has provoked a good deal of discussion in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York City and at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. A particularly challenging issue pertains to whether terrorism is an international crime or a transnational crime, and if and in what context offenders and offenses, to which we affix the label of terrorist and terrorism, should or can be subject to the limited jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and other international and national criminal tribunals

3D Printing and intellectual property futures

This report contains socio-legal research conducted on the relationship between 3D printing and intellectual property (IP) at the current point in time and in potential future scenarios, through the use of horizon-scanning methods in six countries—China, France, India, Russia, Singapore and the UK - to build a rich picture of this issue, comprising both developed and emerging economies

Black Box Allegories of Gulf Futurism:The Irreducible Other of Computational Capital

Given the prospect of post-oil futures, this chapter historically situates contemporary Gulf Futurism within cybernetic and logistical aspirations underlying the current global trend of the smartness mandate. Working through the complex visuality that the cybernetic black box animates, the chapter revisits Fredric Jameson’s cognitive mapping as an allegorical model for the inherent frictions of computational capital. To this end, it discusses Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri’s artistic practice that reclaims a right to speculate while condensing material reality and imaginative threads, thereby going beyond a mere gesture of unveiling or mapping.Özgün Eylül İşcen, ‘Black Box Allegories of Gulf Futurism: The Irreducible Other of Computational Capital’, in The Case for Reduction, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger, Cultural Inquiry, 25 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 91-115 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-25_05

Matters of Concern: A Critical Investigation of Bioplastics, 3D Printing, and the Maker Movement

This research proposes practice-based models for examining the perceptions of 3D printing as entrepreneurial, accessible and environmentally sustainable. The dissertation and practice-based research argue that these popular perceptions limit the potential of 3D printing, and maker culture more generally, because of their overemphasis of human agency in maker culture. The research contends that such perceptions have arisen because of misunderstandings about the agency of the materials and technologies engaged in 3D printing networks, the failure of maker culture to make 3D printing accessible to an audience beyond the typical readership of maker magazines, and the failure to account for the significant environmental dangers of the plastic filament that construct 3D printed objects. Tracing maker culture’s initial commitment to anti-consumerist principles that no longer prevail – DIY culture of the 1960s and 70s and hacker culture of the 1980s and 90s – the practice of 3D printing has instead become a black box. In this research, I define black boxes as objects, systems, or processes whose inner workings become hidden because of their own success and so, black boxes are typically understood by their inputs and outputs. To open up the black box of 3D printing, the research reflects on a series of material experiments with 3D printing that are informed by critical making, co-design and speculative critical design within an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) framework. Through the ANT concept of generalised symmetry the research argues for the importance of ascribing agency to the more-than human actants in the maker practice networks of 3D printing, and provides documentation of the critical making project titled Dissolvable Furniture as a model. An investigation of contemporary challenges to participating in maker culture, framed within the ANT concept of translation, was conducted through online co-design workshops on 3D printing and identified barriers to inclusive maker culture. Subsequent to the workshops further investigation of the agency of 3D printing materials, titled Co-created Ceramic Objects, provides a model for the disposal of PLA through incineration in a kiln. The final exploration of a model for un-black boxing 3D printing, specifically addressing claims that PLA is environmentally sustainable, demanded a provocation that unsettled complacency about the dangers of plastic. Based on extensive research on the waste management practices of plastics the research documents the practice-based model of the speculative critical design titled Biorecycling Machine. These projects address the long-term implications of entrepreneurial, accessible and environmentally sustainable practices of maker culture and interrupt the individualism at the core of much debate in maker movement groups by reframing maker practices as material–semiotic constellations of interactions of human and more-than-human actants that are constantly in flux. The research concludes with recommendations for areas requiring further study, including the need for better protection of the intellectual property of makers, the necessity of creating more accessible maker cultures, and the urgent need to address the environmental dangers of 3D printing materials

Conflicts, integration, hybridization of subcultures: An ecological approach to the case of queercore

This paper investigates the case study of queercore, providing a socio-historical analysis of its subcultural production, in the terms of what Michel Foucault has called archaeology of knowledge (1969). In particular, we will focus on: the self-definition of the movement; the conflicts between the two merged worlds of punk and queer culture; the \u201cinternal-subcultural\u201d conflicts between both queercore and punk, and between queercore and gay\lesbian music culture; the political aspects of differentiation. In the conclusion, we will offer an innovative theoretical proposal about the interpretation of subcultures in ecological and semiotic terms, combining the contribution of the American sociologist Andrew Abbot and of the Russian semiologist Jurij Michajlovi\u10d Lotma