{"title":"Who Owns the Blockchain? How Copyright Law Allows Right Holders to Control Blockchains","authors":"Sebastian Pech","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3693322","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3693322","url":null,"abstract":"The lack of control by a single authority is an oft-described characteristic of blockchain technology. This article shows the extent to which US and EU copyright law protects information stored on a blockchain and the manner in which right holders are able to control blockchains. While the two legal systems are almost identical in terms of protection of individual information stored on a blockchain, there are significant differences in the protection of the compilation of information.","PeriodicalId":219965,"journal":{"name":"InfoSciRN: Other Copyright & Intellectual Property (Sub-Topic)","volume":"298 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133373347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Development and Intellectual Property - the World Economic and Social Survey 2018 and Beyond","authors":"Hoi Wai Jackie Cheng, M. Parra","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3687110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3687110","url":null,"abstract":"The chapter calls for a rethinking of the trade-off between innovation and diffusion, with the focus on revisiting the current intellectual property (IP) institutions against the backdrop of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and sustainable development.<br><br>The contention is underpinned by two observations. First, a review of empirical evidence has generally failed to find much effect of IP institutions, notably patents, on innovation – the raison d’être of IP. While the incentivizing effect of IP on any given innovator’s R&D activities is indisputable, its effect on system-wide innovation could be counteracted by several factors. These include the adverse effects of IP institutions on innovation diffusion, follow-up innovations and competition, which could be partly attributed to the lack of clear boundaries of IP and the absence of efficient and liquid IP markets. As will be discussed in this chapter, these effects will likely become more salient in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.<br><br>Secondly, the increasingly restrictive global intellectual property rights (IPR) regime poses significant challenges to countries, especially developing ones, in accessing frontier technologies and fully participating in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which would in all likelihood lead to greater technology and development gaps. It may also lead to failures in addressing global problems such as climate change due to the under-utilization of technologies that could provide effective solutions if appropriately diffused.<br><br>This chapter concludes with a discussion on some of the options to revamp the market-based IP institutions that are directed at exclusivity and ownership, as well as alternative incentive mechanisms that seek to enable a wider diffusion of technologies without hampering innovation efforts.","PeriodicalId":219965,"journal":{"name":"InfoSciRN: Other Copyright & Intellectual Property (Sub-Topic)","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123087456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Crowding-Out Effects of Public Libraries and the Public Lending Right","authors":"Kyogo Kanazawa, K. Kawaguchi","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3082016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3082016","url":null,"abstract":"The public lending right (PLR) compensates authors for losses caused by public libraries' free lending of books. Setting the appropriate rate to maintain authors' incentives to create new works is important. We construct a novel dataset that integrates bookstores' sales data with copy data from public libraries in Japan and quantify the crowding-out effects of public libraries. We control for title-municipality-specific, months-after-publication-specific, and municipality-month-specific unobserved heterogeneities. We found that overall crowding-out effects exist. Moreover, we found the the effects to be highly progressive: the effects are stronger for popular titles. The total loss in revenue during the data period is 17.5% of actual sales revenue, which is higher than public libraries' expenditure on books (5%). The estimates indicate that the prevailing PLR rates are overly low to compensate for losses for popular books but that this could be a pure subsidy to other books.","PeriodicalId":219965,"journal":{"name":"InfoSciRN: Other Copyright & Intellectual Property (Sub-Topic)","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114876389","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}