Digital Cinema : Opportunities and Challenges

This paper considers how the film industry might effect the transition from film to digital product. Using public sources to predict the eventual technological solutions which will prevail is problematic as no independent academic analysis appears to have been carried out. Technology companies are clearly wedded to their own solutions, pointing out flaws in competing technologies while downplaying the shortcomings of their own. Industry wide bodies that have been set up to promote d-cinema or establish standards, understandably tend to avoid taking sides and promote all solutions equally[i]. Rather than contributing further to the debate about the qualities of competing technologies or the creative merits or demerits of digital product, this paper will focus on the search for new business models in an industry wedded for over one hundred years to an analogue process. In the sections which follow it will consider- the strategies of the companies at the forefront of the technology; the financial implications associated with change; and how different territories might adapt in order to accommodate this transition. [i] Anna Wilde Mathews, Digital cinema's time is nearing. Detailed specifications are supposed to be ready early next year. The Wall Street Journal, May 25 2003

The Internet of Hackable Things

The Internet of Things makes possible to connect each everyday object to the Internet, making computing pervasive like never before. From a security and privacy perspective, this tsunami of connectivity represents a disaster, which makes each object remotely hackable. We claim that, in order to tackle this issue, we need to address a new challenge in security: education

Harnessing Openness to Transform American Health Care

The Digital Connections Council (DCC) of the Committee for Economic Development (CED) has been developing the concept of openness in a series of reports. It has analyzed information and processes to determine their openness based on qualities of "accessibility" and "responsiveness." If information is not available or available only under restrictive conditions it is less accessible and therefore less "open." If information can be modified, repurposed, and redistributed freely it is more responsive, and therefore more "open." This report looks at how "openness" is being or might usefully be employed in the healthcare arena. This area, which now constitutes approximately 16-17 percent of GDP, has long frustrated policymakers, practitioners, and patients. Bringing greater openness to different parts of the healthcare production chain can lead to substantial benefits by stimulating innovation, lowering costs, reducing errors, and closing the gap between discovery and treatment delivery. The report is not exhaustive; it focuses on biomedical research and the disclosure of research findings, processes of evaluating drugs and devices, the emergence of electronic health records, the development and implementation of treatment regimes by caregivers and patients, and the interdependence of the global public health system and data sharing and worldwide collaboration

Online Music Joint Ventures: Taken for a Song

In 2001 the five major record companies, controlling more than 80 percent of prerecorded music sales in the United States, announced the formation of two joint ventures to distribute music over the Internet. The Department of Justice opened an antitrust investigation into these ventures even before the ventures began their operations. Two and one-half years later the Department announced that it had closed the investigation because its theoretical concerns ultimately were not supported by the evidence. The Department\u27s investigation, however, focused on the ventures\u27 licensing practices rather than on their formation. This paper focuses on the formation of the online music joint ventures. The paper begins with a description of the business and legal environment in which the joint ventures were formed and traces developments in both since the ventures\u27 formation. Included in this description is the effort by the industry to suppress widespread copyright infringement and the entry of a number of new companies into the online music market. The paper\u27s antitrust analysis examines the predicted anticompetitive effects of the formation of the ventures and, drawing on the Supreme Court\u27s decision in Broadcast Music, Inc. v. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. and the history of performing rights organizations, argues that the efficiency justifications for the online music joint ventures were quite modest. The paper concludes that the formation of the ventures was anticompetitive, without regard to the ventures\u27 licensing practices, and that the appropriate remedy would have been either to unwind the two ventures or divest the record companies\u27 ownership of them. Although the online music industry did not develop as might have been predicted when the ventures were formed, we owe these positive developments to the inability of the music industry to control the widespread infringement of their copyrights. Had the record industry\u27s campaign been successful, the competitive structure in the online music market would likely have been quite different and the proposed antitrust remedies would have been necessary to bring competition to the market for online music

Platitudes about Product Stewardship in Torts: Continuing Drug Research and Education

This Article focuses on one emerging aspect of tort litigation against pharmaceutical manufacturers that, if it gained traction, portends a dramatic (and potentially counterproductive) expansion in the prescription drug industry\u27s exposure to liability. The traditional theories of products liability--mismanufacture, defective design, and inadequate warnings--no longer exhaust the potential obligations of sellers. In addition to increasingly popular claims of misrepresentation and negligent marketing, which seem more like extensions of the three defect categories than entirely novel theories, a growing chorus of commentators would impose on pharmaceutical manufacturers a broader duty to test and educate (aspects of what they call an obligation of product stewardship ). Frustrated by the inherent limitations of preapproval clinical trials, the failure of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to demand rigorous postapproval testing, and the minimal information communicated directly to patients, these commentators have urged judges to draw on the common law tradition in order to remedy these and other alleged failings of the regulatory system