Making Sense Of Software Ecosystems: A Critical Review

Visualizing software as ecosystems has been an emergent phenomenon. The objective of this paper is to analyze the field of software ecosystems (SECO) and provide a critical review of the existing literature. This research identifies domains and peripheries of a SECO; highlights architectural challenges; examines design and control mechanisms and discusses some of the learning’s from other popular paradigms that can be applied to address the key challenges in the SECO paradigm. This paper also aims to recommend future research directions for software ecosystems and its role in the broader context of information systems research

Nota Bene, October 1, 2008

https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/nota_bene_2008/1004/thumbnail.jp

Building Universal Digital Libraries: An Agenda for Copyright Reform

This article proposes a series of copyright reforms to pave the way for digital library projects like Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and Google Print, which promise to make much of the world\u27s knowledge easily searchable and accessible from anywhere. Existing law frustrates digital library growth and development by granting overlapping, overbroad, and near-perpetual copyrights in books, art, audiovisual works, and digital content. Digital libraries would benefit from an expanded public domain, revitalized fair use doctrine and originality requirement, rationalized systems for copyright registration and transfer, and a new framework for compensating copyright owners for online infringement without imposing derivative copyright liability on technologists. This article\u27s case for reform begins with rolling back the copyright term extensions of recent years, which were upheld by the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Reno. Indefinitely renewable copyrights threaten to marginalize Internet publishing and online libraries by entangling them in endless disputes regarding the rights to decades- or centuries-old works. Similarly, digital library projects are becoming unnecessarily complicated and expensive to undertake due to the assertion by libraries and copyright holding companies of exclusive rights over unoriginal reproductions of public domain works, and the demands of authors that courts block all productive digital uses of their already published but often out-of-print works. Courts should refuse to allow the markets in digital reproductions to be monopolized in this way, and Congress must introduce greater certainty into copyright licensing by requiring more frequent registration and recordation of rights. Courts should also consider the digitizing of copyrighted works for the benefit of the public to be fair use, particularly where only excerpts of the works are posted online for public perusal. A digital library like Google Print needs a degree of certainty - which existing law does not provide - that it will not be punished for making miles of printed matter instantly searchable in the comfort of one\u27s home, or for rescuing orphan works from obscurity or letting consumers preview a few pages of a book before buying it. Finally, the Supreme Court\u27s recognition of liability for inducement of digital copyright infringement in the Grokster case may have profoundly negative consequences for digital library technology. The article discusses how recent proposals for statutory file-sharing licenses may reduce the bandwidth and storage costs of digital libraries, and thereby make them more comprehensive and accessible

Antitrust and Platform Monopoly

Are large digital platforms that deal directly with consumers “winner take all,” or natural monopoly, firms? That question is surprisingly complex and does not produce the same answer for every platform. The closer one looks at digital platforms the less they seem to be winner-take-all. As a result, competition can be made to work in most of them. Further, antitrust enforcement, with its accommodation of firm variety, is generally superior to any form of statutory regulation that generalizes over large numbers. Assuming that an antitrust violation is found, what should be the remedy? Breaking up large firms subject to extensive scale economies or positive network effects is sure to be costly. In the past, structural relief of this type has led to lower output and higher prices or business firm failure. One likely exception is acquisitions of small firms that threaten to grow into substantial rivals. If breakup is not the answer, then what are the best antitrust remedies? Sometimes the best way to deal with platform monopoly is to break up ownership and management rather than assets. Leaving the platform intact as a production entity but making ownership more competitive could actually increase output, benefitting consumers, labor, and suppliers. The history of antitrust law is replete with firms that are organized as single entities for many legal purposes but that also function as combinations and can be treated that way by antitrust law. A second possibility is forced interoperability or pooling of important information, which can make markets more competitive while actually increasing the value of positive network externalities. Finally, this paper examines the problem of platform acquisition of nascent firms, where the biggest threat is not from horizontal mergers but rather from acquisitions of complements or differentiated technologies. For these, the tools we currently use in merger law are poorly suited. Here I offer some suggestions

Building Universal Digital Libraries: An Agenda for Copyright Reform

This article proposes a series of copyright reforms to pave the way for digital library projects like Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and Google Print, which promise to make much of the world’s knowledge easily searchable and accessible from anywhere. Existing law frustrates digital library growth and development by granting overlapping, overbroad, and near-perpetual copyrights in books, art, audiovisual works, and digital content. Digital libraries would benefit from an expanded public domain, revitalized fair use doctrine and originality requirement, rationalized systems for copyright registration and transfer, and a new framework for compensating copyright owners for online infringement without imposing derivative copyright liability on technologists. This article’s case for reform begins with rolling back the copyright term extensions of recent years, which were upheld by the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Reno. Indefinitely renewable copyrights threaten to marginalize Internet publishing and online libraries by entangling them in endless disputes regarding the rights to decades- or centuries-old works. Similarly, digital library projects are becoming unnecessarily complicated and expensive to undertake due to the assertion by library and copyright holding companies of exclusive rights over unoriginal reproductions of public domain works, and the demands of authors that courts block all productive digital uses of their already published but often out-of-print works. Courts should refuse to allow the markets in digital reproductions to be monopolized in this way, and Congress must introduce greater certainty into copyright licensing by requiring more frequent registration and recordation of rights. Courts should also consider the digitizing of copyrighted works for the benefit of the public to be fair use, particularly where only excerpts of the works are posted online for public perusal. A digital library like Google Print needs a degree of certainty that existing law does not provide that it will not be punished for making miles of printed matter instantly searchable in the comfort of one’s home, or for rescuing orphan works from obscurity or letting consumers preview a few pages of a book before buying it. Finally, the Supreme Court’s recognition of liability for inducement of digital copyright infringement in the Grokster case may have profoundly negative consequences for digital library technology. The article discusses how recent proposals for statutory file-sharing licenses may reduce the bandwidth and storage costs of digital libraries, and thereby make them more comprehensive and accessible

The Ticker, September 8, 2008

The Ticker is the student newspaper of Baruch College. It has been published continuously since 1932, when the Baruch College campus was the School of Business and Civic Administration of the City College of New York

Is Open Source Software the New Lex Mercatoria?

Early Internet scholars proclaimed that the transnational nature of the Internet rendered it inherently unregulable by conventional governments. Instead, the Internet would be governed by customs and practices established by the end user community in a manner reminiscent of the lex mercatoria, which spontaneously emerged during medieval times to resolve international trade disputes independently and autonomously from national law. Subsequent events have revealed these claims to have been overly optimistic, as national governments have evinced both the inclination and the ability to exert influence, if not outright control, over the physical infrastructure, the domain name system, and the content flowing across the network. These failures have done little to lessen the allure of Internet self-governance. In particular, some scholars have suggested that more widespread use of open source software would increase the Internet’s ability to resist governmental control. This Essay explores whether more widespread use of open source software might provide the basis for the type of bottom-up ordering associated with the lex mercatoria. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a system of self-governance based on open source implicates the same questions of spontaneity, universality, and autonomy that surround the lex mercatoria

The Cowl - v. 71 - n. 9 - Oct 26, 2006

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Volume 71 - Number 9 -October 26, 2006. 28 pages

The Magnificence of the Disaster: Reconstructing the Sony BMG Rootkit Incident

Late in 2005, Sony BMG released millions of Compact Discs containing digital rights management technologies that threatened the security of its customers\u27 computers and the integrity of the information infrastructure more broadly. This Article aims to identify the market, technological, and legal factors that appear to have led a presumably rational actor toward a strategy that in retrospect appears obviously and fundamentally misguided. The Article first addresses the market-based rationales that likely influenced Sony BMG\u27s deployment of these DRM systems and reveals that even the most charitable interpretation of Sony BMG\u27s internal strategizing demonstrates a failure to adequately value security and privacy. After taking stock of the then-existing technological environment that both encouraged and enabled the distribution of these protection measures, the Article examines law, the third vector of influence on Sony BMG\u27s decision to release flawed protection measures into the wild, and argues that existing doctrine in the fields of contract, intellectual property, and consumer protection law fails to adequately counter the technological and market forces that allowed a self-interested actor to inflict these harms on the public. The Article concludes with two recommendations aimed at reducing the likelihood of companies deploying protection measures with known security vulnerabilities in the consumer marketplace. First, Congress should alter the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by creating permanent exemptions from its anti-circumvention and antitrafficking provisions that enable security research and the dissemination of tools to remove harmful protection measures. Second, the Federal Trade Commission should leverage insights from the field of human computer interaction security (HCI-Sec) to develop a stronger framework for user control over the security and privacy aspects of computers