Towards an affirmative public domain
Two competing and yet complementary philosophical concepts form the foundation for the legal protection of intellectual property – ‘competing’ in that created works protected by copyright are unavailable for unrestricted use by others as a result of the economic monopoly given to the works’ owners, and ‘complementary’ in that the presumption is that works no longer protected by copyright serve as the basis for the creation of new copyrightable works. These unprotected works comprise the ‘public domain,’ which has never been affirmatively defined. In Golan v. Holder (2012), the US Supreme Court concluded that such a realm is constitutionally unimportant. This research contends, however, that the Court's decision is incorrect, that Golan, federal legislation, and international treaties threaten to bring larger and larger portions of cultural and intellectual content under the control of a property regime that does not understand the contradiction inherent in the notion of absolute property rights in intangible goods. The result is that the public domain is under tremendous pressure from those entities which have the most to gain from expanded authorial rights and from a weakened and less inclusive public domain. Citizens thus will have fewer rights to access and freely use their culture as they choose. The eventual significance of this evolution will be that further creativity and innovation will be stifled, the opposite of the intention of intellectual property law. In this article, we develop an affirmative definition of the public domain, which we believe will correct the imbalance in current intellectual property law.
America's `special relationships' : foreign and domestic aspects of the politics of alliance
Introduction: The Politics of Special Relationships John Dumbrell and Axel R. Schafer 1. Model Nations: US Allies and Partners in the Modernizing Imagination Nick Cullather 2. Old World, New World: Great Britain and America From the Beginning Kathleen Burk 3. Hating Bush, Supporting Washington: George W. Bush, Anti-Americanism and the US-UK Special Relationship John Dumbrell 4. The US-Canada Relationship: How 'Special' Is America's Oldest Unbroken Alliance? David G. Haglund 5. Australia, the US and the Unassailable Alliance Mark Beeson 6. Yearning and Spurning: New Zealand's Special Relationships with Britain and the United States Dolores E. Janiewski 7. Testing the Limits of a Special Relationship: US Unilateralism and Dutch Multilateralism in the Twenty-first Century Giles Scott-Smith 8. An Aborted Special Relationship: US-Russian Relations in the Post-Cold War World, 1989-2007 Alex Marshall and J. Simon Rofe 9. The Ecstasy and the Agony: The Rise and Fall of US-Iranian Relations Donette Murray 10. America's Israel/ Israel's America Ian J. Bickerton 11. US-Israel Relations: A Special Friendship Lee Marsden 12. The Death of a Peculiar Special Relationship: Myron Taylor and the Religious Roots of America's Cold War Andrew Preston 13. 'What Marx, Lenin, and Stalin needed was...to be born again': Evangelicals and the 'Special Relationship' between Church and State in US Cold War Foreign Policy Axel R. Schafer
EFFECT OF SAMPLE PREPARATION ON WATER TREE RESISTANCE OF XLPE/SEBS BLENDS
The effects of an aromatic polymer, such as poly[styrene-b-(ethylene-co-butylene)b-styrene] (SEBS), and its preparation processes on water tree resistance, morphology, crystallinity, dielectric constant and dielectric loss tangent of crosslinked polyethylene (XLPE)/SEBS and XLPE/SEBS/ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) blends were investigated. The XLPE/SEBS samples were characterized by means of differential scanning calorimetry, scanning electron microscopy, dielectric spectral analysis and the accelerated water treeing experiment. The results clearly showed that although SEBS was partially compatible with LDPE and it was dispersed evenly in XLPE matrix, the blends demonstrated excellent dielectric performances, such as dielectric constant and dissipation factor. The crystallinity of XLPE/SEBS blends was decreased with increase in SEBS content and it was further decreased with the addition of EVA. SEBS could effectively improve the water-tree resistance of XLPE and both SEBS and EVA were found to improve the water tree resistance of XLPE synergistically as expected. The differences in sample preparation processes could change the phase morphology and dielectric performance of the blends, and could also influence the dispersion of SEBS in XLPE matrix as well as the crystallinity of the blends. Different preparation processes led to different water tree resistance behaviours of the samples. The improvement of SEBS dispersion in XLPE matrix helped to improve the water tree resistance of XLPE.