Payment Methods For Consumer-to-Consumer Online Transactions

Participants in online auctions use a variety of payment mechanisms, but checks and money orders still represent the most commonly used means of payment. Credit cards afford greater protection to buyers, but until recently payment by credit card was not even an option for person-to-person transactions. However, several online payment services have been established that enable individuals to make credit card payments to one another, generally with the payment service acting as an intermediary. These services are growing rapidly, mainly because of the speed and convenience that they offer. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to the risks and potential liabilities they involve for buyers and sellers. This Article compares online payment systems and similar intermediary services to traditional payment mechanisms in that context

Spam Legislation in the United States, 22 J. Marshall J. Computer & Info. L. 3 (2003)

This article examines the effect of spam legislation in the United States. It discusses state legislation and the common provisions of state spam legislation, such as disclosure and labeling requirements and opt-out provisions. It also analyzes the consequences of state anti-spam legislation. Federal legislation is analyzed, with a brief look at the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. The article concludes that legislation has not had a big impact on spam, and the CAN-SPAM Act is not likely to change or curb spam

Copyright & Privacy - Through the Privacy Lens, 4 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 273 (2005)

What legal tools do privacy advocates have available to defend an individual’s right to privacy? How far does this right go? How should these rights be defended—or if necessary—curtailed? What is the role of Government, of the practicing bar and of academics

Copyright & Privacy - Through the Technology Lens, 4 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 242 (2005)

How is new technology impacting on the more general question of privacy in cyberspace? Is the original notion of an expectation of anonymity on the internet still viable? Can technology pierce through the expectation of privacy even without judicial interference? Do individuals need protection from such technology? Is there technology available to protect the individual? Should these technological tools be regulated? Should the law differentiate between various types of alleged “illegal” behavior; e.g., IP infringement, defamation, possession of pornography and terrorism? Are there international standards that can assist in regulating the intersection between technology and privacy in cyberspace

Spacelike distance from discrete causal order

Any discrete approach to quantum gravity must provide some prescription as to how to deduce continuum properties from the discrete substructure. In the causal set approach it is straightforward to deduce timelike distances, but surprisingly difficult to extract spacelike distances, because of the unique combination of discreteness with local Lorentz invariance in that approach. We propose a number of methods to overcome this difficulty, one of which reproduces the spatial distance between two points in a finite region of Minkowski space. We provide numerical evidence that this definition can be used to define a `spatial nearest neighbor' relation on a causal set, and conjecture that this can be exploited to define the length of `continuous curves' in causal sets which are approximated by curved spacetime. This provides evidence in support of the ``Hauptvermutung'' of causal sets.Comment: 32 pages, 16 figures, revtex4; journal versio

Noncommutative Lattices and Their Continuum Limits

We consider finite approximations of a topological space $M$ by noncommutative lattices of points. These lattices are structure spaces of noncommutative $C^*$-algebras which in turn approximate the algebra \cc(M) of continuous functions on $M$. We show how to recover the space $M$ and the algebra \cc(M) from a projective system of noncommutative lattices and an inductive system of noncommutative $C^*$-algebras, respectively.Comment: 22 pages, 8 Figures included in the LaTeX Source New version, minor modifications (typos corrected) and a correction in the list of author