Legal uncertainty under EU acquis for the author of Graphical User Interface design - A new sui generis protection needed?
This thesis is about the legal protection of the Intellectual Property (IP) of the design of the graphical user interface (GUI) for computer programs aka software. The research into this matter of law was done by finding out and analysing how this protection is provided through international treaties, statutory law and case law. It concludes that there is a certain amount of legal uncertainty within the area researched and that full harmonization of IPRs within EU most probably would remove this issue and thereby benefit the individual author. This thesis takes the reader on a journey where we will explore the dimension where law and technology meet and merge.
CONTU revisited: the case against copyright protection for computer programs in machine-readable form.
Professor Samuelson casts a critical eye on the Final Report of the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) which recommended that copyright protection be extended to machine-readable versions of computer programs. CONTU appears to have misunderstood computer technology and misinterpreted copyright tradition in two significant respects. The Commission failed to take into account the historical importance of disclosure of the contents of protected works as a fundamental goal of both the copyright and patent laws. It also erroneously opined that the utilitarian character of a work was no bar to its copyrightability when both the statute and the case law make clear that utilitarian works are not copyrightable. Since computer programs in machine-readable forms do not disclose their contents and are inherently utilitarian, copyright protection for them is inappropriate. Congress acted on CONTU's recommendation without understanding the significance of these conceptual flaws. Professor Samuelson recommends the creation of a new form of intellectual property law specifically designed for machine-readable programs.
Promoting Public-Regarding Legislation Through Statutory Interpretation: An Interest Group Model
We live in a time of widespread dissatisfaction with the legislative outcomes generated by the political process.' Too often the process seems to serve only the purely private interests of special interest groups at the expense of the broader public interests it was ostensibly designed to serve. While the current distrust of government represents a major shift away from the dominant public perception of "government as helper ' 2 that existed from the time of the New Deal until the present decade, the current attitude is not new by any means. As Professor Sunstein has observed, "[t]he problem of faction has been a central concern of constitutional law and theory since the time of the American Revolution." In fact, a basic justification offered by the framers for their new Constitution centered around its usefulness in controlling interest groups.4 Academics, however, have only recently applied the tools of