While in business and private settings the disruptive impact of ICT have already been felt, the legal sector is now also starting to face such great disruptions. Innovations have been emerging for some time, affecting the working practices of legal professionals and the functioning and legitimacy of legal systems. In this paper, we present our vision for enabling the smart government ideal for ...

This paper will concentrate on presenting a legal analysis of two of the main challenges to open source software: SCO’s litigation and software patents. The paper discusses the validity of such challenges, their possible impact to the future of open source software, and the possible legal defences used against them. DOI: 10.2966/scrip.020205.256 © Andres Guadamuz 2005. This work is licensed und...

This paper will concentrate on presenting a legal analysis of two of the main challenges to open source software: SCO’s litigation and software patents. The paper discusses the validity of such challenges, their possible impact to the future of open source software, and the possible legal defences used against them. DOI: 10.2966/scrip.020205.256 © Andres Guadamuz 2005. This work is licensed und...

In setting up a data access policy to share controlled access data from the McGill Epigenomics Mapping Centre (EMC), an International Human Epigenome Consortium (IHEC) partner project, we encountered ethical and legal challenges that are likely to be relevant to other researchers sharing data, especially from Canadian projects. We discuss our solutions to the following data-sharing challenges, ...

In consumer-directed health care, patients will be expected to exert greater control over their spending decisions than before. As consumer-directed care gains market acceptance, courts will inevitably be involved in resolving challenges to the new arrangements. We anticipate that courts will be generally favorable toward consumer-directed care, but the new legal doctrine will not uniformly fav...

With the creation of the World Trade Organization (“WTO”), an area of international law may have become more like law as we commonly perceive it. Yet it is not necessarily the neutral technocratic process some of its proponents make it to be. Whatever is one’s perspective on trade liberalization and its enforcement, developing countries and developing country constituents are at a disadvantage ...

BACKGROUND Continued advances in human microbiome research and technologies raise a number of ethical, legal, and social challenges. These challenges are associated not only with the conduct of the research, but also with broader implications, such as the production and distribution of commercial products promising maintenance or restoration of good physical health and disease prevention. In th...

With rapid development since the 1970s, China is entering a period of social transformation, which not only creates favorable conditions for sustainable development but also presents new challenges. The transitional period in China is a stage in which two types of social transformation coexist, the first is the social transformation from agricultural society to industrial society; the second is...

This paper explores how the approach underlying Open Source development has encouraged a greater sharing of knowledge in related business and legal affairs, and subsequently leads to the emergence of Open Source-driven collaboration by enterprises to address challenges. We use an Economic approach to propose a theoretical framework for Open Source business analysis and provide a defined sample ...