A balance of benefits and burdens: academia in a digital copyright context

Most academics can agree that intellectual property warrants legal protection, especially in an educational context where their own publications are often traded for promotion and tenure. However, academics would also agree that they require a reliable exemption allowing them to use copyright protected work for educational purposes. Copyright law has historically satisfied both these needs by protecting academic publications from unauthorized use, and by providing an educational exemption that allows educators access to copyright protected work in their classes without first gaining permission or paying a royalty.;In attempting to update current copyright law to match technological advances and to harmonize with international copyright law, the United States Congress recently passed a body of legislation that weakens the educational exemption and impedes educational access to copyright protected work. Academic organizations protested the unfairness of this legislation. The reasons they cite relate directly to the erosion of the educational exemption, impeded access to creative works for teaching purposes, and a diminishing cultural commons. They share the view that recent legislation has ignored the educational stakeholder, insofar as this legislation seems to have increased burdens for classroom applications, while the benefits of copyright appear to remain few. If what the aformentioned organizations charge is true, then the balance of burdens and benefits has shifted for educators and students in the classroom environment. This shift in balance undermines Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, which implies that the reason for establishing copyright law is to benefit all stakeholders.;This work focuses on recent changes in copyright protection of digital intellectual property. To understand, more specifically, how digital copyright legislation burdens academic authors and audiences, this dissertation analyzes the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and selected text representing academic positions on recent digital copyright legislation

An energy description of wear mechanisms and its applications to oscillating sliding contacts

To quantify wear rates, the Archard approach is classically applied. It relates the wear volume to the product of the sliding distance and the normal load. A wear coefficient is then extrapolated and is supposed to establish the wear resistance of the studied material. This synthesis shows that this approach does not work when the friction coefficient is not constant. It appears to be much more relevant to consider the interfacial shear work as a significant wear parameter. This approach is applied to study the wear response of different steels and then extended to different hard TiN, TiC coatings under reciprocating sliding conditions. By identifying wear energy coefficients the wear quantification can be rationalized and the wear resistance of the studied tribosystems can be classified. This also appears to be a convenient approach to interpret the different wear mechanisms. Metallic materials involving plastic strain are analyzed from FEM computations. The energy balance confirms that a minor part of the dissipated energy is consumed by plasticity, whereas the major part participates in the heat and debris flow through the interface. When a load energy approach is introduced an accumulated density of the dissipated energy variable is considered to quantify the TTS (Tribologically Transformed Structure) formation. A wear ”scenario” of metallic structures is then discussed. This energy wear approach is applied to analyze hard coating wear mechanisms focusing on abrasion and oxidation phenomena. The local wear energy analysis is transposed, thus allowing the lifetime of hard coatings to be quantified

Quantitative analysis of mixed niobium-titanium carbonitride solubility in HSLA steels based on atom probe tomography and electrical resistivity measurements

Solubility of mixed niobium-titanium carbonitrides in commercially relevant High Strength Low-Alloy (HSLA) steel was investigated by combined use of electrical re sistivity measurements and APT after interrupted quenching from soaking temperatures between 950 and 1250 C. Increasing electrical resistivity of the bulk material towards higher soaking temperatures was proportional to the nominal niobium addition which was varied between 0.002 and 0.022e0.043e0.085 wt.-%. Correlative APT analysis of the solutes in the steel matrix showed good agreement with electrical resistivity. Investigating numerous precipitate particles, APT also derived a precise composition for mixed niobium titanium-carbonitrides which constitute the steel microstructure after casting/before soaking. The scavenging of microalloy elements by insoluble titanium nitrides was cor rected by means of combined APT analysis of such precipitate and a quantitative image analysis for the estimation of the total volume fraction of titanium nitrides. For the first time, solute and precipitate composition together were used for solubility calculations of such mixed carbonitrides to derive an experimental solubility product. This was compared to solubility products of well-established simple carbides and nitrides and theoretical calculations of the solubility of multicomponent carbonitrides. The large discrepancy between experimentally derived and modelled solubility emphasizes the ne cessity of a robust methodology for the quantification of microalloy precipitation in HSLA steels

Utility of a fretting device working under free displacement

Relative movements of low amplitudes between two materials in contact are generally reproduced on fretting devices with imposed displacement or imposed tangential force. The damage kinetics observed (cracking, wear) is established under such conditions. In this article, a fretting device working under free displacement is used to characterize the damages generated by seizure and wear. The conditions of seizure are analyzed from the total sliding distance and the discussion is focused on a correlation established with Dupre's work of adhesion. The wear behavior of materials has been characterized from an energetic wear coefficient taking into account the wear volume of contact, the total sliding distance and the dissipated energy

Tracing Microalloy Precipitation in Nb-Ti HSLA Steel during Austenite Conditioning

The microalloying with niobium (Nb) and titanium (Ti) is standardly applied in low carbon steel high-strength low-alloy (HSLA) steels and enables austenite conditioning during thermo-mechanical controlled processing (TMCP), which results in pronounced grain refinement in the finished steel. In that respect, it is important to better understand the precipitation kinetics as well as the precipitation sequence in a typical Nb-Ti-microalloyed steel. Various characterization methods were utilized in this study for tracing microalloy precipitation after simulating different austenite TMCP conditions in a Gleeble thermo-mechanical simulator. Atom probe tomography (APT), scanning transmission electron microscopy in a focused ion beam equipped scanning electron microscope (STEM-on-FIB), and electrical resistivity measurements provided complementary information on the precipitation status and were correlated with each other. It was demonstrated that accurate electrical resistivity measurements of the bulk steel could monitor the general consumption of solute microalloys (Nb) during hot working and were further complemented by APT measurements of the steel matrix. Precipitates that had formed during cooling or isothermal holding could be distinguished from strain-induced precipitates by corroborating STEM measurements with APT results, because APT specifically allowed obtaining detailed information about the chemical composition of precipitates as well as the elemental distribution. The current paper highlights the complementarity of these methods and shows first results within the framework of a larger study on strain-induced precipitation

Effect of quenching strategy and Nb-Mo sdditions on phase transformations and quenchability of high-strength boron steels

The application of direct quenching after hot rolling of plates is being employed in the production of ultra-high-strength hot rolled plates. When heavy gauge plates are produced, the complexity involve in achieving high cooling rates in the plate core is increased and the formation of undesirable soft phases within martensite is common. In the current paper, both direct quenching and conventional quenching (DQ and CQ) processing routes were reproduced by dilatometry tests and continuous cooling transformation (CCT) diagrams were built for four different high-strength boron steels. The results indicate that the addition of Mo and Nb-Mo suppresses the ferritic region and considerably shifts the CCT diagram to lower transformation temperatures. The combination of DQ strategy and the Mo-alloying concept provides the best option to ensure hardenability and the formation of a fully martensitic microstructure, and to avoid the presence of soft phases in the center of thick plates