Alternatives to March-In Rights

The Bayh-Dole Act is an inspired piece of legislation. But its march-in provisions are too often a source of confusion and fear for private-sector companies that want to do business with the US government--despite the fact that the government has never exercised its march-in rights. Are there alternatives to march-in rights that would effectively serve the government\u27s public policy needs while eliminating this perceived threat to private intellectual property rights? This Article describes march-in rights in theory and practice, and then weighs several alternatives to traditional Bayh-Dole march-in rights

Non-Fungible Tokens: A Solution to the Challenges of Using Blockchain Bills of Lading in the International Sales of Goods

The non-fungible token (NFT) has emerged as a way of authenticating unique digital assets. Thus artists have started selling digital artwork authenticated by NFTs, gaming companies can sell unique in-game products, and athletic leagues have started selling digital “cards” depicting key moments in sporting events. Like cryptocurrencies, NFTs are applications of blockchain technology. A blockchain is a series of cryptographically linked records. The blockchain itself is “public” in the sense that every transaction is visible to all participants. But an encrypted block cannot be changed without altering all prior blocks – and alerting all other users in the blockchain. Cryptocurrencies and NFTs differ in a critical respect. A unit of cryptocurrency is a fungible token, meaning it is identical to any other unit of cryptocurrency. In the same way that one Euro is equal to any other Euro, one Bitcoin has the same value and same characteristics as any other Bitcoin. An NFT, by contrast, is uniquely identified in the blockchain. So while one NFT may have the same market value as another NFT, no two NFTs are the same. This means NFTs are not useful as currency, but are valuable as incorruptible identifiers. NFTs have other useful attributes. For example, they inherently include ownership information. This means that the NFT itself indicates who owns it—when it was created and by whom, who controls it now, and every transaction leading from the original to the current owner—at all times. Also, they are “extensible.” This means that NFTs can be added together or merged in order to create a new NFT in a traceable way. There are, of course, other digital representations of physical assets. Goods already are stamped with bar or QR codes, expensive products typically have serial numbers or other unique identifiers, and software often is accompanied by one- time-only passwords. But none of these are cryptographically secure in the way NFTs are, and none of them combine proof of authenticity and proof of ownership in a single instrument. The bill of lading is a venerable institution in international trade. Evolving over centuries and well developed by the time of the medieval lex mercatoria, the bill of lading is a paper form specifically contemplated and described in the key treaties enabling modern cross-border sales of goods—the Vienna Convention, the Hague- Visby Rules, and the U.S. Carriage of Goods by Sea Act. It indicates ownership of goods in transit, evidences the terms of the contract of carriage, and shows where, when, and to whom the goods were conveyed at every step between origin and ultimate destination. As a paper document, however, the bill of lading (often in multiple counterparts) is a critical bottleneck and source of risk. Proposals to update paper bills of lading with an electronic equivalent have circulated for many years. And with the development of blockchain technology a decade ago, more recent proposals have discussed putting bills of lading on a blockchain. But these proposals are incomplete, because the blockchain is merely a ledger. An NFT on a blockchain, however, is the ideal replacement for bills of lading and other documents reflecting passage of title. Each change of ownership of an NFT is publicly documented in the NFT’s blockchain ledger. Done right, the NFT itself, in each block, contains both an incorruptible copy of the bill of lading and a complete chain of custody. And the fact that NFTs are extensible means a business can verify both components and finished goods. This paper will discuss using NFTs as a substitute for traditional bills of lading

Tunable photonic band gaps with coherently driven atoms in optical lattices

Optical lattice loaded with cold atoms can exhibit a tunable photonic band gap for a weak probe field under the conditions of electromagnetically induced transparency. This system possesses a number of advantageous properties, including reduced relaxation of Raman coherence and the associated probe absorption, and simultaneous enhancement of the index modulation and the resulting reflectivity of the medium. This flexible system has a potential to serve as a testbed of various designs for the linear and nonlinear photonic band gap materials at a very low light level and can be employed for realizing deterministic entanglement between weak quantum fields

The Bloch-Okounkov correlation functions of classical type

Bloch and Okounkov introduced an n-point correlation function on the infinite wedge space and found an elegant closed formula in terms of theta functions. This function has connections to Gromov-Witten theory, Hilbert schemes, symmetric groups, etc, and it can also be interpreted as correlation functions on integrable gl_\infty-modules of level one. Such gl_\infty-correlation functions at higher levels were then calculated by Cheng and Wang. In this paper, generalizing the type A results, we formulate and determine the n-point correlation functions in the sense of Bloch-Okounkov on integrable modules over classical Lie subalgebras of gl_\infty of type B,C,D at arbitrary levels. As byproducts, we obtain new q-dimension formulas for integrable modules of type B,C,D and some fermionic type q-identities.Comment: v2, very minor changes, Latex, 41 pages, to appear in Commun. Math. Phy

The Bloch-Okounkov correlation functions, a classical half-integral case

Bloch and Okounkov's correlation function on the infinite wedge space has connections to Gromov-Witten theory, Hilbert schemes, symmetric groups, and certain character functions of \hgl_\infty-modules of level one. Recent works have calculated these character functions for higher levels for \hgl_\infty and its Lie subalgebras of classical type. Here we obtain these functions for the subalgebra of type $D$ of half-integral levels and as a byproduct, obtain $q$-dimension formulas for integral modules of type $D$ at half-integral level.Comment: v2: minor changes to the introduction; accepted for publication in Letters in Mathematical Physic