This study is to explore how Chinese software users perceive the issues of software copyright and piracy. Tianya Community, the largest online public forum in China, was selected as a site to study users' online communication about software copyright and piracy. Data were collected over five discussion boards in which software copyright and piracy were discussed extensively to retrieve 561 posting threads with 6,150 messages ranging from March 1, 1999 to June 30, 2007. Lindlof and Taylor's (2002) qualitative communication research methods were used to locate and analyze the recurring dominant themes within the online discussion by Chinese Internet users. The study revealed two opposing discourses existing in software users? perceptions, which represent globalization and anti-globalization processes surrounding software copyright and piracy. Mittleman and Chin's (2005) theoretical framework was adopted to interpret material and spiritual tensions between human/material factors, such as software owners, software users, China, and foreign developed countries. Meanwhile, the actor-network theory was applied to map out the roles of non-human/non-material factors, such as new technology, patriotism, and Chinese culture, which function to moderate the existing confrontations between globalization and anti-globalization by preventing software users from totally falling down into either direction of supporting or opposing software piracy. As a result, both forces of conformity and resistance were found to coexist within software users' perceptions and fragment their identities. To deal with fragmented identities, Chinese software users generally adopted a flexible, discriminative position composed by a series of distinctions, between offline purchasing of pirated discs and software download, between enterprise users and individual users, between foreign and local software companies, between freeware/open-source software and copyright/pirated software, between software companies and independent software developers, and between conceptual recognition and behavioral practice. Meanwhile, traditional resistance movements of Polanyi's (1957) counter-movements and Gramsci's (1971) counter-hegemony were reduced from collective contestations with openly declared call for resistance to Scott's (1990) notion of infra-politics that was communicated among software users and expressed in their everyday practice of piracy use but not in public and government discourse.

In March 1991 the World Intellectual Property Organization held an international symposium attended primarily by lawyers, to discuss the questions that artificial intelligence poses for intellectual property law (i.e., copyright and patents). This is an edited version of a talk presented there, which argues that AI poses few problems in the near term and that almost all the truly challenging issues arise instead from software in general. The talk was an attempt to bridge the gap between the legal community and the software community, to explain why existing concepts and categories in intellectual property law present such difficult problems for software, and why software as a technology breaks several important assumptions underlying intellectual property law.

This doctoral thesis addresses the question of why and how the United States of America (US) legal system should grant legal personhood to software intelligence (SI). This new legal status of SI is visualised as a dependent type of person. The SI dependent legal person would be determined by an inextricable connection between SI and a new type of corporate body, introduced here as SI-Human Amalgamation (SIHA). SI has been defined as one or more computer programmes with an ability to create work that is unforeseen by humans. This includes SI capacity to generate unforeseen innovations, patentable inventions and/or infringe the rights of other patent holders. At present, SI is an entity unrecognised by law. The fact that SI is neither a natural nor a legal person indicates that it cannot be considered the rights' owner or liability bearer. This in turn creates tensions both in society and legal systems because questions, such as, who should hold those rights or be liable for autonomous acts of SI, remain unanswered. It is argued that the SI dependent legal person and SIHA, are necessary to address the new challenges introduced by SI. SI and SIHA, their creativity and actions would be distinct from those performed by human beings involved in the creation of this amalgamation, such as SI's operators or programmers. As such, this structure would constitute an amalgamation based on human beings and SI cooperation (SIHA). SI, as a dependent legal person, would hold the patents rights to its own inventions thus ensuring favourable conditions for the incentives of the US patent system. In addition, the proposed legal framework with the use of legislative instruments could address any liability concerns arising from the foreseen and unforeseen actions, omissions and failure to act of SI.

Univ., Diss.--Frankfurt (Main)., 2002. / Literaturverz. S. 233 - 247.

Diploma Thesis Abstract The aim of this thesis is to summarize the relevant means of protection of a computer program. My intention was to think and consequently write about the past and present of legal protection of computer programs of all sorts, aiming especially on czech status quo of this protection. The main source of rules was and still is the czech Author Act, but I've also tried to analyze other, mainly european, laws. Together with history of a computer program my goal was to put before-mentioned into a broader context. At the beginning of the thesis, after the explanatory and historical part, in the chapter about the subject matter of author law, the computer program, I'm trying to delimitate the differences between source and object code. In the process of writing this thesis, I've tried to summarize the relevant means of use, especially the action of installing a program, legal means and connotations of this process. Also I wrote about distribution of a computer program regarding author rights. Consequently I'm briefly analyzing the relatively fresh decision of Court of Justice of the European Union, which is about protection of a graphical user interface of a computer program. In the two final chapters I'm describing the issues in licensing of software and various available legal actions to...

This theses analyses necessity and legitimacy of existence of intellectual property rights, especially patents and copyrights. There is shown the true essence of these instruments as monopoly privilege. On case of information technology I demonstrate that these privileges are unreasonable and counterproductive in many cases. Analysis of ?free software? alternative model proves that use of patents and copyrights is not a necessary condition of creation of intangible goods. The last part of this work shows, that existence of any special instruments for intangible goods protection is not needed as well as it is not reasonable.