The federal Certificate of Confidentiality plays an important role in research on sensitive topics by authorizing researchers to refuse to disclose identifiable research data in response to subpoenas in any legal setting. However, there is little known about how effective Certificates are in practice. This article draws on our legal and empirical research on this topic to fill this information ...

Millions of people lack access to affordable medicines. The intellectual property rules in the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) provide pharmaceutical companies with monopoly protections that allow them to market some drugs without competition by less costly generics. We examined availability of certain drugs in Guatemala and found that CAFTA intellectual property rules reduced acce...

Drawing on Value Sensitive Design, we developed a workable privacy addendum for an open source software license that not only covers intellectual property rights while allowing software developers to modify the software (the usual scope of an open source license), but also addresses enduser privacy. One central innovation of our work entails the integration of an informed consent model and a th...

The stated purpose of intellectual property protection is to stimulate innovation. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) requires all Members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to enact national laws conferring minimum standards of intellectual property protection by certain deadlines. Critics of the Agreement fear that such action is inconsistent wit...

Social and cognitive characteristics of adults with intellectual disabilities (ID) place them at risk for inappropriate inclusion in or exclusion from research participation. As we grapple with how to include adults with ID in research in order to secure their right to contribute to scientific advancements and be positioned to derive benefit from ensuing knowledge, it is critical to consider sc...

In current systems, application developers must provide substantial security-critical code—including code to handle authentication—in their applications. The result is that application flaws often undermine system security. We are building Ethos, an Operating System (OS) that leverages the kernel’s complete mediation property to guarantee more security protections—including network encryption a...