"Clone Wars": Episode II - The Next Generation: The Copyright Implications relating to 3D Printing and Computer-Aided Design (CAD) Files

The future market potential of 3D printing will rest on the dissemination of Computer Aided Design (CAD) files. Without clear instructions from a CAD file, a 3D printer will not function. In fact, “a 3D printer without an attached computer and a good design file is as useless as an iPod without music”. The importance of CAD-based design files, therefore, cannot be underestimated. Drawing on UK and EU copyright laws and their application to 3D printing and CAD files, this paper will, first, question whether CAD files can be protected by copyright law before considering the copyright implications thrown up by the modification of CAD files as a result of scanning and the use of online tools. Highlighting some of the challenges for rights holders and users existent in the present law the paper advocates new business models over a premature call for stringent intellectual property laws before concluding with some recommendations for the future

The L&E of Intellectual Property – Do we get maximum innovation with the current regime?

Innovation is crucial to economic growth – the essential path for lifting much of the world population out of dire poverty and for maintaining the living standard of those who already have. To stimulate innovation, the legal system has to support the means through which innovators seek to get rewarded for their efforts. Amongst these means, some, such as the first mover advantage or 'lead time,' are not directly legal; but secrets and intellectual property rights are legal institutions supported for the specific purpose of stimulating innovation. Whilst the protection of secrets has not changed very much over recent years, intellectual property (or IP) has. IP borrows some features from ordinary property rights, but is also distinct, in that, unlike physical goods, information, the object of IP, is not inherently scarce; indeed as information and communication technologies expand, the creation and distribution of information is becoming ever cheaper and in many circumstances abundant, so that selection is of the essence ('on the internet, point of view is everything'). Where rights on information extend too far, their monopolising effect may hamper innovation. The paper investigates the underlying structure of IP rights and surveys what we know empirically about the incentive effects of IP as about industries that flourish without formal IP

Balancing, Proportionality, and Constitutional Rights

In the theory and practice of constitutional adjudication, proportionality review plays a crucial role. At a theoretical level, it lies at core of the debate on rights adjudication; in judicial practice, it is a widespread decision-making model characterizing the action of constitutional, supra-national and international courts. Despite its circulation and centrality in contemporary legal discourse, proportionality in rights-adjudication is still extremely controversial. It raises normative questions—concerning its justification and limits—and descriptive questions—regarding its nature and distinctive features. The chapter addresses both orders of questions. Part I centres on the justification of proportionality review, the connection between proportionality, balancing and theories of rights and the critical aspects of this connection. Part II identifies and analyses the different forms of proportionality both in review, as a template for rights-adjudication, and of review, as a way of defining the scope and limits of adjudication

Borehole cylindrical noise during hole-surface and hole-hole resistivity measurements.

Drilled boreholes generally are the only feasible means to access the subsurface for the emplacement of downhole electrodes for most hole–hole and hole–surface resistivity experiments. However, the very existence of the borehole itself creates the potential for significant noise due to the inevitable conductivity contrast that develops between the borehole walls and the formation. Borehole cylindrical noise develops whenever a current source is placed in a drilled borehole. Borehole geometries may range from nearly perfect cylinders to highly, irregular, rugose holes in consolidated rock, to relatively minor, collapsed, disturbed zones in caving sediments. Boreholes in non-caving formations generally are filled with artificial, conductive materials to afford crucial, electrical continuity between downhole electrodes and the borehole walls. Filled boreholes form cylindrically shaped heterogeneities that create significant noise due to preferential current flow up and down the conductive columns. Selected conditions are simulated with a finite difference model to illustrate the significance of borehole cylindrical noise on hole–hole and hole–surface mise-à-la-masse electrical potentials near a current electrode. Mise-à-la-masse electrical potentials measured during a field tracer experiment also are presented. These measurements are used to illustrate significant errors may develop in the interpretation of apparent resistivity estimates out to a distance of several meters from the current source if borehole cylindrical noise is not recognized and accounted for in the analysis of electrical potential data

On the Robust PCA and Weiszfeld’s Algorithm

The principal component analysis (PCA) is a powerful standard tool for reducing the dimensionality of data. Unfortunately, it is sensitive to outliers so that various robust PCA variants were proposed in the literature. This paper addresses the robust PCA by successively determining the directions of lines having minimal Euclidean distances from the data points. The corresponding energy functional is non-differentiable at a finite number of directions which we call anchor directions. We derive a Weiszfeld-like algorithm for minimizing the energy functional which has several advantages over existing algorithms. Special attention is paid to carefully handling the anchor directions, where the relation between local minima and one-sided derivatives of Lipschitz continuous functions on submanifolds of Rd is taken into account. Using ideas for stabilizing the classical Weiszfeld algorithm at anchor points and the Kurdyka–Łojasiewicz property of the energy functional, we prove global convergence of the whole sequence of iterates generated by the algorithm to a critical point of the energy functional. Numerical examples demonstrate the very good performance of our algorithm