Criminal Defenses to Anti-Circumvention Charges for Modifying Video Game Consoles

In United States v. Crippen, Matthew Crippen was charged with modifying Xbox 360 consoles for others for a fee. His modifications allowed the consoles to run unlicensed software in violation of the anti-circumvention provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In the first criminal trial arising from these provisions, the United States District Court for the Central District of California granted a motion in limine allowing the government to exclude evidence of fair use, holding that the DMCA provisions contained no fair use exception. After the prosecution abruptly dropped the case in December 2010, several questions remain unanswered: What rights do consumers have to modify video game consoles they purchase legitimately? What role does fair use play in DMCA criminal cases? And what criminal defenses are available in the context of the DMCA? This Article will focus specifically on the DMCA in the criminal law context, while also investigating the background of the Crippen case

Equilibrium problems for Raney densities

The Raney numbers are a class of combinatorial numbers generalising the Fuss--Catalan numbers. They are indexed by a pair of positive real numbers $(p,r)$ with $p>1$ and $0 < r \le p$, and form the moments of a probability density function. For certain $(p,r)$ the latter has the interpretation as the density of squared singular values for certain random matrix ensembles, and in this context equilibrium problems characterising the Raney densities for $(p,r) = (\theta +1,1)$ and $(\theta/2+1,1/2)$ have recently been proposed. Using two different techniques --- one based on the Wiener--Hopf method for the solution of integral equations and the other on an analysis of the algebraic equation satisfied by the Green's function --- we establish the validity of the equilibrium problems for general $\theta > 0$ and similarly use both methods to identify the equilibrium problem for $(p,r) = (\theta/q+1,1/q)$, $\theta > 0$ and $q \in \mathbb Z^+$. The Wiener--Hopf method is used to extend the latter to parameters $(p,r) = (\theta/q + 1, m+ 1/q)$ for $m$ a non-negative integer, and also to identify the equilibrium problem for a family of densities with moments given by certain binomial coefficients.Comment: 13 page

Using repeated cross-sections to explore movements in and out of poverty

Movements in and out of poverty are of core interest to both policymakers and economists. Yet the panel data needed to analyze such movements are rare. In this paper, the authors build on the methodology used to construct poverty maps to show how repeated cross-sections of household survey data can allow inferences to be made about movements in and out of poverty. They illustrate that the method permits the estimation of bounds on mobility, and provide non-parametric and parametric approaches to obtaining these bounds. They test how well the method works on data sets for Vietnam and Indonesia where we are able to compare our method to true panel estimates. The results are sufficiently encouraging to offer the prospect of some limited, basic, insights into mobility and poverty duration in settings where historically it was judged that the data necessary for such analysis were unavailable.Rural Poverty Reduction,Regional Economic Development,Statistical&Mathematical Sciences,Achieving Shared Growth

Robot learning of everyday object manipulations via human demonstration

We deal with the problem of teaching a robot to manipulate everyday objects through human demonstration. We first design a task descriptor which encapsulates important elements of a task. The design originates from observations that manipulations involved in many everyday object tasks can be considered as a series of sequential rotations and translations, which we call manipulation primitives. We then propose a method that enables a robot to decompose a demonstrated task into sequential manipulation primitives and construct a task descriptor. We also show how to transfer a task descriptor learned from one object to similar objects. In the end, we argue that this framework is highly generic. Particularly, it can be used to construct a robot task database that serves as a manipulation knowledge base for a robot to succeed in manipulating everyday objects

Robot learning of everyday object manipulations via human demonstration

We deal with the problem of teaching a robot to manipulate everyday objects through human demonstration. We first design a task descriptor which encapsulates important elements of a task. The design originates from observations that manipulations involved in many everyday object tasks can be considered as a series of sequential rotations and translations, which we call manipulation primitives. We then propose a method that enables a robot to decompose a demonstrated task into sequential manipulation primitives and construct a task descriptor. We also show how to transfer a task descriptor learned from one object to similar objects. In the end, we argue that this framework is highly generic. Particularly, it can be used to construct a robot task database that serves as a manipulation knowledge base for a robot to succeed in manipulating everyday objects