Limitation of Sales Warranties as an Alternative to Intellectual Property Rights: An Empirical Analysis of IPhone Warranties’ Deterrent Impact on Consumers

Apple\u27s success with the Apple iPhone has brought with it certain problems. Its success has engendered a community that has attempted to circumvent Apple\u27s exclusive service agreement with AT&T. Unfortunately for Apple (and similarly situated manufacturers), intellectual property law allows consumers to alter their products so as to circumvent relationships that manufacturers may have with others. The patent and copyright law first sale doctrine allows consumers to manipulate a product after it is purchased. As a result, manufacturers are increasingly turning to alternatives to intellectual property to secure control over the device after the sale. One such alternative is the exclusion of warranty under Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code. This iBrief considers whether limitation of warranties have the deterrence effect manufacturers desire. Said differently, it considers whether manufacturers can use warranty limitations to prevent consumers from using their products in an unauthorized manner. The iBrief presents a behavioral model based on the Triandis model of planned behavior and enhances the model by accounting for likely and unlikely benefits and detriments. The model suggests that participants weigh the probability and magnitude of the detriment against the probability and magnitude of the beneficial impact when making the decision to engage in technological piracy. This model, considered with other empirical evidence, suggests that Apple\u27s warranty could be a stronger deterrent for consumers than civil liability. The iBrief concludes that manufacturers can better protect their post-sale expectation of profits by raising consumer awareness of their warranty\u27s quality and by raising awareness of the consequences for using the product in a way that is outside the terms of the consumers\u27 authorized use

On Optimal Input Design for Feed-forward Control

This paper considers optimal input design when the intended use of the identified model is to construct a feed-forward controller based on measurable disturbances. The objective is to find a minimum power excitation signal to be used in system identification experiment, such that the corresponding model-based feed-forward controller guarantees, with a given probability, that the variance of the output signal is within given specifications. To start with, some low order model problems are analytically solved and fundamental properties of the optimal input signal solution are presented. The optimal input signal contains feed-forward control and depends of the noise model and transfer function of the system in a specific way. Next, we show how to apply the partial correlation approach to closed loop optimal experiment design to the general feed-forward problem. A framework for optimal input signal design for feed-forward control is presented and numerically evaluated on a temperature control problem

Propagation of exponential phase space singularities for Schr\"odinger equations with quadratic Hamiltonians

We study propagation of phase space singularities for the initial value Cauchy problem for a class of Schr\"odinger equations. The Hamiltonian is the Weyl quantization of a quadratic form whose real part is non-negative. The equations are studied in the framework of projective Gelfand--Shilov spaces and their distribution duals. The corresponding notion of singularities is called the Gelfand--Shilov wave front set and means the lack of exponential decay in open cones in phase space. Our main result shows that the propagation is determined by the singular space of the quadratic form, just as in the framework of the Schwartz space, where the notion of singularity is the Gabor wave front set.Comment: 39 pages. To appear in J. Fourier Anal. App

Maurinian Truths : Essays in Honour of Anna-Sofia Maurin on her 50th Birthday

This book is in honour of Professor Anna-Sofia Maurin on her 50th birthday. It consists of eighteen essays on metaphysical issues written by Swedish and international scholars