Making the World Wide Web Safe for Democracy: A Medium-Specific First Amendment Analysis

The World Wide Web, a vast speech domain that may ultimately swallow all current forms of telecommunications media, presents urgent First Amendment issues. Most significantly, the structure of linked documents on the Web has served to concentrate speech power and impoverish democratic discourse. As extensive surveys by the author and others demonstrate, commercial speech dominates the Web and political discourse on the Web has become balkanized. Using a quantitative model, it is possible to isolate and identify the characteristics of Web sites that contribute to robust public debate. These findings suggest a range of structural policies that would support the democratic aspirations of the First Amendment by protecting equal access to speech power on the Web. Among these is a must-carry rule that would require popular Web sites to provide free links that would be distributed on an egalitarian basis. Such a rule should be found constitutional under current First Amendment doctrine

Alappat Redux: Support for Functional Language in Software Patent Claims

The Federal Circuit has suggested in some recent cases that any algorithm can serve as adequate structural support for a means-plus-function element in a software patent claim under § 112(f). A recent proposal by Mark Lemley fully endorses this proposition and seeks its broader application. The concept of an algorithm, however, is too slippery to serve as the basis for such a rule. In this Article, I argue that this overreliance on the algorithm concept originated in a revisionist gloss on the Federal Circuit\u27s 1994 Alappat decision. Informed by a closer reading of what Alappat actually has to say about claim construction under § 112(f), I propose a more stable concrete causation standard that is not only applicable to all technologies, but also well-aligned with the reforms in the software field intended by Lemley\u27s proposal

\u3cem\u3eAlapatt\u3c/em\u3e Redux: Support for Functional Language in Software Patent Claims

The Federal Circuit has suggested in some recent cases that any algorithm can serve as adequate structural support for a means-plus-function element in a software patent claim under § 112(f). A recent proposal by Mark Lemley fully endorses this proposition and seeks its broader application. The concept of an algorithm, however, is too slippery to serve as the basis for such a rule. In this Article, I argue that this overreliance on the algorithm concept originated in a revisionist gloss on the Federal Circuit\u27s 1994 Alappat decision. Informed by a closer reading of what Alappat actually has to say about claim construction under § 112(f), I propose a more stable concrete causation standard that is not only applicable to all technologies, but also well-aligned with the reforms in the software field intended by Lemley\u27s proposal

The Learned Hand Unformula for Short-Swing Liability

Section 16(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 allows for the recovery of short-swing profits realized by certain insiders from trading in a corporation’s stock within a period of less than six months. Three generations of corporate law students have been taught the “lowest-in, highest-out” formula that is intended to maximize the disgorgement of short-swing profits under section 16(b). Arnold Jacobs’s 1987 treatise presented two hypothetical examples where the formula fell short of the intended maximum, but courts, commentators, and practitioners have largely ignored these theoretical challenges to the formula’s validity. This Article identifies Gratz v. Claughton as the first reported real-world example of the formula’s failure. Ironically, Gratz has been taught and cited for more than sixty years as a leading authority for the formula’s use, not least because of its distinguished author, Judge Learned Hand. This Article argues that Gratz has been misunderstood and that Hand wisely adjudicated this complex case without prescribing or endorsing the formula in any way. It also shows that the formula has no need of Gratz’s endorsement, as long as the formula is correctly interpreted as limited to simpler cases where it is mathematically valid. It formalizes and extends Jacobs’s results by showing that the formula may fall short of the maximum by up to fifty percent when misused in more complex cases, and has actually fallen short in another more recent case. Finally, it provides online tools to enable practitioners and judges to calculate short-swing liability correctly in all cases

Quantum feedback and adaptive measurements

Summary form only given. Although real-time feedback of measured signals is an essential component of sensing and control in classical settings, models for quantum feedback that are rigorous yet useful have only become possible since the advent of measurement-based quantum trajectory theory. The quantum feedback scenario introduces new concerns of coherence and measurement backaction, but recent work has shown that these can be treated properly in a formal integration of quantum trajectory theory with standard state-space formulations of filtering and control theory. Pioneering studies by H. M. Wiseman have shown that such models can be used to design and to analyze realistic schemes for adaptive homodyne measurement and for feedback control of atomic motion. Much of the ongoing research in our group focuses on the experimental implementation of such schemes. For a broad range of quantum feedback scenarios, certain recurring technical issues arise out of the need to perform complex, high-bandwidth processing of measured signals. We are developing a "rapid-prototyping" approach to refining signal processing and feedback algorithms via quantum trajectory simulation on a PC, followed by translation of the algorithms into hardware Description language (HDL)