Positive Copyright and Open Content Licences: How to Make a Marriage Work by Empowering Authors to Disseminate Their Creations

Positive copyright appears to have been progressively turned away from its normative function of ensuring a fair and efficient transmission of human knowledge. The private sector is seeking to counterbalance this phenomenon by adopting legal tools that expand the public domain of knowledge, such as web-based licences modelled on the "open access" approach. The increasing world-wide preference for Creative Commons licences confirms their aptness to transform copyright law into a tool flexible enough to serve authors' several purposes. Such a spontaneous counterbalance experiences many difficulties though, because of the structure that positive copyright has adopted over the last few years. The current situation is an excellent point from which to look back at how authors used to disseminate their works before the advent of the Internet. From a historical view-point copyright has always accomplished the twin functions of economically rewarding authors and enabling communication of their creations to the public. The latter goal is achieved by means of statutory mechanisms limiting the freedom of contract between authors and their counterparts (intermediaries in a broad sense), in order to enforce the authors' capacity to spread their works. In the current digital environment, however, these mechanisms are not likely to accomplish their original functions. This paper seeks to explore an adjustment that will permit authors to take advantage of all the new means of commercial exploitation and non-commercial dissemination of their works offered by the Internet. Such an adjustment aims also at realigning positive and normative copyright by encompassing the use of open content licensing within the current copyright framework

High frequency electro-optic measurement of strained silicon racetrack resonators

The observation of the electro-optic effect in strained silicon waveguides has been considered as a direct manifestation of an induced $\chi^{(2)}$ non-linearity in the material. In this work, we perform high frequency measurements on strained silicon racetrack resonators. Strain is controlled by a mechanical deformation of the waveguide. It is shown that any optical modulation vanishes independently of the applied strain when the applied voltage varies much faster than the carrier effective lifetime, and that the DC modulation is also largely independent of the applied strain. This demonstrates that plasma carrier dispersion is responsible for the observed electro-optic effect. After normalizing out free carrier effects, our results set an upper limit of $8\,pm/V$ to the induced high-speed $\chi^{(2)}_{eff,zzz}$ tensor element at an applied stress of $-0.5\,GPa$. This upper limit is about one order of magnitude lower than the previously reported values for static electro-optic measurements

A CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTAL ANALYSIS OF STRATEGIC MATERIALS TOWARDS ENERGY TRANSITION

Global consumption of materials is rising rapidly leading to an increase in environmental impacts associated with the supply chain. Similar issues also affect a set of materials strategic for the transition towards a sustainable energy production and distribution system: i.e. materials employed in renewable energy (wind turbines and photovoltaic panels), energy storage, electrolysers, electricity distribution networks and electric vehicle charging infrastructure. The analysis identifies, maps and de-fines a priority hierarchy for the environmental risks generated along the life-cycle of strategic raw materials. Standard construction material such as iron, steel and concrete showed the lowest environmental risks whereas platinum and iridium presented by far the highest impacts (respectively about 24.100 and 14.700 kg CO2 eq, 354.000 and 216.000 MJ, and 140 and 83 m3 of water for 1 kg of raw material). Recycled materials have shown to enable the lowering of the environmental risk associated with some raw material production processes (i.e. copper, lead, aluminium, nickel, manganese), whereas specific materials (i.e. platinum, iridium, indium, dysprosium) and related applications will need to be monitored to guarantee a sustainable transition towards renewable energies

Words as social tools: flexibility, situatedness, language and sociality in abstract concepts. Reply to comments on “Words as social tools: language, sociality and inner grounding in abstract concepts”

The article is a reply to comments by other authors on the topic of abstract concepts