No description available.

This thesis studies the influence of US Supreme Court judgement in Feist Publications Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co on Directive 96/9/EC. It primarily looks at the implications of Feist decision, and the influence that it had on European legislation. The decision in Feist Publications led the Commission to believe two things: Feist created a new-line of jurisprudence in US in the context of copyright protection of factual databases, and the decision will be detrimental for future production of electronic databases. This thesis shows that the Feist decision was a clarification of existing copyright law. As an example, the thesis observes that the US database market did not react to any apprehended negative impact of Feist. In the US, where there was no specific Database Right, Feist has had negligible practical and doctrinal impact. The Feist decision also left an indelible mark on the overall structure of the Database Directive. While Article 3 represented the positive impact, Article 7 was surrounded by uncertainties and ambiguities. This Article represents the outcome of apprehending negative impact of Feist. This has resulted in an imbalance which must be rectified and only a limited amount of protection should be offered to producers in absence of evidence.

This study examines the responses of European intellectuals since the 1880s to an increasingly virulent and organized anti-Semitism in Europe, and the ways in which they sought to understand the character and origins of the hatred, and to fathom and work out the problems, terms and possibilities for Jewish identity. Focusing on the French figures Bernard Lazare and Marcel Proust from the time of the Dreyfus Affair and then on the Frankfurt School of social theory and Hannah Arendt from the period around and after the Second World War, the thesis argues that these thinkers created a common historical-psychological discourse on anti-Semitism, which attempted to confront, comprehend and explain the historically critical issues of anti-Semitism and Jewish identity. The study explores the discourse’s fundamental assumptions, insights, and arguments regarding the origins, character, and magnitude of anti-Semitism. It also analyzes its contentions concerning the contradictions, sources, and alternatives for Jewish identity. But, more, it claims that, despite their frequent perceptiveness, these figures’ interpretations of the two concerns proved limited, deficient, even deeply flawed. The thesis seeks to show that its intellectuals’ attempt to understand the twin issues was hence a failure to grasp and interpret them adequately, and to resolve them. It contends further that what impaired the authors’ engagements with anti-Semitism and Jewish selfhood were ideas that were fundamental to their thinking. These intellectual factors, moreover, connected the figures solidly to important historical contexts that they inhabited, thereby implicating the significant settings in the epistemological errors and defeats. These momentous ideas thus operated as both contextualizing and destructive forces—linking the intellectuals to their home contexts and transforming their understanding of their historic problematic into a misunderstanding. / Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2009-04-16 08:34:25.821