An open source alternative in law, economics and the social sciences has been the Social Science Research Network, or SSRN (www.ssrn.com). SSRN, a for-profit company, provides a venue for scholars to publish pre-print and other editions of their scholarly works for free, and allows users to...

It must be a challenge being Google these days. In barely 15 years, Google has gone from a tech start-up founded by a couple of grad students, to one of the most dominant forces in the information industry. Its market capitalization of over a quarter of a trillion – that's “T”-trillion –...

Price gouging is not a new phenomenon by any means. Wikipedia describes it as a reaction to a “supply shock” that goes beyond what is “considered reasonable or fair.” Many states–particularly those in the hurricane belt–have laws against price gouging during states of emergency, such...

With the passage of what ended up as the America Invents Act in 2011, an extended, multi-year effort — often characterized as “patent reform” — reached something of a culmination. The Act outlined several significant changes in patent law, the first being a change in who was entitled to...

The Federal E-rate program was established in 1996 as part of a broad effort to bring high-speed Internet access to schools and libraries around the country, particularly in rural areas. Under the program, schools and libraries can receive grants which cover up to 90% of their Internet service...

There has been a dramatic rise in patents issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, particularly in technology related areas. Patent statistics show that the number of software, technology and technology-related business practices patents have more than doubled in the last six...

The stunning rise in patents, patent lawsuits and patent controversies has emerged as a serious concern to the information industry. Between 1963 and 2005 the number of patent applications in the United States has quadrupled. The number of patent applications filed world wide increased nearly...

The information community is a global community, this is well known. When I sit in a Russian Internet café and access LexisNexis (owned by Reed Elsevier, a Dutch multinational corporation), or sit in my office in Pittsburgh and review e-journals provided by Kluwer Online, I am interacting with...

One of the more interesting facets of the Internet is that no one person, corporation, government, or group runs it as a whole. Different organizations have responsibility for setting and managing technical standards, Internet architecture, and the domain name system. And of course, the...

A few months ago, I was working on my home computer when all of a sudden Internet Explorer started getting bombarded with multiple images of full page pop-up advertising. It would not stop until 4 or 5 advertising windows were displayed. I closed each of the windows and ran my virus-checker,...