Biotechnology Process Patents: Is Special Legislation Needed?

The authors review administrative and court decisions prompting proposed changes to the patent law. After reviewing pros and cons, they argue that, on balance, pending bills can easily cause more problems than they solve

RGA users manual : version 2.3

RGA is an interpreter for a special language designed for the analysis of reachability graphs, or control flow graphs, generated from Petri nets. Although in some cases the reachability graph can become too large to be tractable, or can even be infinite, many interesting problems exist whose reachability graphs are of reasonable size. In RGA, the user has access to the names of the places in the net, and to the states of the reachability graph. The structure of the graph is also available through functions which return the sets of successor or predecessor states of a state and the transition-firings connecting the states. The RGA language allows dynamic typing of identifiers, recursion, and function and operator overloading. Rather than providing a number of predefined analysis functions, RGA provides primitive functions which allow the user to conduct complex analyses with little programming effort. RGA is part of a suite of tools, called P-NUT, intended to facilitate the analysis of concurrent systems described by Petri nets

Plutarch on the childhood of Alcibiades

Almost four decades ago, Donald Russell published in this journal an analysis of the first sixteen chapters of theLife of Alkibiades, which consist largely of short self-contained anecdotes about Alkibiades' childhood, youth and early career (Russell 1966b). As Russell demonstrated, most of these anecdotes are juxtaposed without any causal link. Although there are the occasional chronological markers – indications, for example, that Alkibiades is getting older and passing from childhood to early manhood – some are plainly out of chronological order and it is impossible to extract a clear chronology from them. Russell argued, however, that to try to extract such a chronological narrative would be to misunderstand the function of this material, which is not to provide a narrative of Alkibiades' early years but rather to illuminate and illustrate his character.Russell's argument, in particular the stress on Plutarch's interest in character, was seminal; together with two other papers published at roughly the same time, it marked the beginning of a new appreciation of Plutarch as an author of literary merit. But Russell was rather less convinced of the logic of selection of the first five anecdotes, which relate to Alkibiades' youth and comprise some one-and-a-half pages of Teubner text (Alk.2–3).</jats:p

Moving Beyond “Reasonable”: Clarifying the FTC’s Use of Its Unfairness Authority in Data Security Enforcement Actions

Data security breaches, which compromise private consumer information, seem to be an ever-increasing threat. To stem this tide, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has relied upon its authority to enforce the prohibition against unfair business practices under section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act (“section 5”) to hold companies accountable when they fail to employ data security measures that could prevent breaches. Specifically, the FTC brings enforcement actions when it finds that companies have failed to implement “reasonable” data security measures. However, companies and scholars argue that the FTC has not provided adequate notice of which data security practices it considers “reasonable” for the purposes of section 5. This Note explains and critically analyzes several existing proposals that seek to bring clarity to the FTC’s application of its unfairness authority in the data security context and ultimately proposes a novel solution which encourages the FTC explicitly to outline its minimum data security requirements through nonlegislative rulemaking. This Note contends that the FTC should incorporate a principle of proportionality in any rule to ensure that companies know which data security measures they should implement based on the relative sensitivity of the consumer data that they retain. Additionally, this Note suggests that the FTC should incorporate a safe harbor provision so that compliant companies know that, by following the FTC’s guidelines, they will be immune from section 5 enforcement actions

Why Trade Negotiations Still Matter to U.S. Agriculture

International Relations/Trade, Q17, Q18, Q54,

The WTO Agricultural Negotiations: Progress and Prospects

International Relations/Trade,