Pieces Of Intellectual Property Research Articles

“For your future enjoyment”: managing intellectual property through franchise refurbishment

This article is interested in the ways franchises are managed through the retelling or expansion of the stories within them. Using Disney’s recent live-action versions of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast as a case study, I outline the industrial utility of franchised textual expansion, arguing that many reboots and sequels and other modes of franchised proliferation serve to facilitate a process of franchise refurbishment – or an instance of rebranding and intellectual property upkeep. Specifically, I consider the way Disney has used live-action versions of their classic animated princess narratives to assuage culturally outdated gender politics often associated with these valuable pieces of intellectual property. Ultimately, I argue that refurbishment is both a textual and an industrial process – or a set of processes – that has evolved alongside the logics of modern media franchising to aid in the long-term management of intellectual properties.

Patent-Bot

Patent-Bot is an artificial intelligence (AI) software program that learns language from the patent database to write original patents for submission to the United States Patent Office (USPTO). The program creates thousands of new patent summaries per second. Patent-Bot is itself a piece of intellectual property, which in turn exists to generate more intellectual property. Patent-Bot also invents new words in relation to its future concepts, which appear to test the current linguistic limits of innovation and communication. Patent-Bot was debuted as an interactive art installation in the Omnibus Filing exhibition at the Visual Arts Center, University of Texas at Austin. Omnibus Filing showcased artworks, inventions, prototypes and cross-disciplinary research projects undertaken by teams of scientists, artists and engineers. Patent-Bot has since exhibited at Piksel 17: A festival for Elektronisk Kunst og fri Teknologi, in Lydgalleriet, Bergen, Norway. The project is an ongoing collaboration between the authors spanning a variety of exhibition formats and modes of display.

THE CHALLENGE OF REVENUE SHARING WITH BUNDLED PRICING: AN APPLICATION TO MUSIC

Although bundling can substantially increase profits relative to standalone pricing, particularly for zero‐marginal‐cost information products, it has one major problem: bundling produces revenue that is not readily attributable to particular pieces of intellectual property, creating a revenue division problem. We evaluate several possible solutions using unique song valuation survey data. We find the Shapley value, a well‐motivated theoretical solution, is universally incentive compatible (all bundle elements fare better inside the bundle than under standalone pricing), but revenue‐sharing schemes feasible with readily available consumption data are not. Among feasible schemes, Ginsburgh and Zang's modified Shapley value performs best. (JEL C71, D79, L14)

Film in Air: Airspace, In-Flight Entertainment, and Nontheatrical Distribution

Film in Air: Airspace, In-Flight Entertainment, and Nontheatrical Distribution Stephen Groening On 21 May 1932 Los Angeles radio station KHJ transmitted a segment of a motion picture as a television signal for five minutes to a Western Air Express transport plane nearly ten miles away. The experiment was part of a proposed plan to transmit weather information to planes using the emergent technology of television. In this early application of in-flight screened entertainment, the visual communication technology was intended to further the efficiency of transportation technologies. Without accurate weather reports, goods (including human labor) could not be delivered safely and in a timely manner. However, if the experiment was simply to be used as a weather information system, it is unclear why Western Air Express and KHJ broadcast a feature-length film to test the technology. This convergence of entertainment and aviation technologies was a telling indication of a growing alliance between Hollywood and commercial air travel. Although the film (starring Loretta Young) was broadcast without sound, the engineers told reporters, who constituted the majority of those on the plane, that it would require only a small adjustment to also transmit sound, pointing toward the possibility of entertainment applications.1 The experiment demonstrated American technical prowess within the ongoing modern project: to eliminate barriers of physical distance and lay claim to the new kinds of spaces created by this project. The television signals were received on a moving vehicle, occupying the relatively new spatial category of “airspace” (a term barely twenty years old). As the plane itself defied the normal rules of territorial contiguity, flying over Los Angeles but not being in Los Angeles, the transnational communication apparatus of Hollywood became seemingly ethereal. Hollywood, ever ready to take the spotlight for new advancements in entertainment, now took flight to ensure its dominance over the dispersal of cultural content across new spatial categories—the airspace above the world stage. The introduction of new screen technologies, such as seatback screens on airplanes, has allowed Hollywood to multiply its exhibition sites and circulate its product into places and spaces it could not previously access. Film’s standing as an essential part of contemporary culture depends on the ability of film exhibition technologies to transform places into movie theaters (or approximations thereof). Furthermore, the introduction of these new exhibition technologies opens up additional sources for the film industry’s revenue stream. In-flight entertainment exemplifies the film industry’s intent to create and reach audiences rather than waiting for audiences to find the industry’s product. The film industry uses these new exhibition spaces (from which persons often find themselves unable to exit) to promote, market, and sell product. Film is thus no longer part of a menu of entertainment and leisure but a constant, sometimes distracting background. On many airplanes films appear on screens unbidden, ready to become the central focus of attention if a passenger chooses to listen in via headphones. Changes in the field of film studies indicate a growing concern and awareness of this multiplicity of new cinematic spaces: movies on television, films on computers, portable DVD players, seatback screens in minivans, and handheld digital media players. From the millennium issue of the journal Screen to the adoption of the initial “M” by the Society for Cinema Studies in 2002, the discipline has increasingly recognized that moving image culture is no longer locatable in the movie theater or on the silver screen. This can also be seen in the emergence of PhD programs, such as Moving Image Studies (Georgia State University) and Screen Cultures (Northwestern University), that by their very names proclaim “film” to be a limited and perhaps obsolete demarcation of the presence [End Page 4] of moving pictures in contemporary culture. Alongside this effort to find motion pictures in myriad nontheatrical places (a kind of “ambient cinema,” to paraphrase Anna McCarthy) is a turn toward “convergence culture” (to borrow from Henry Jenkins), in which motion pictures are seen as but one choice in a menu of digital entertainment options, a single facet of a franchised and remediated property—or merely a piece of intellectual property that converges with other cultural commodities in a single piece of...

Constraint-based watermarking techniques for design IP protection

Digital system designs are the product of valuable effort and know-how. Their embodiments, from software and hardware description language program down to device-level netlist and mask data, represent carefully guarded intellectual property (IP). Hence, design methodologies based on IP reuse require new mechanisms to protect the rights of IP producers and owners. This paper establishes principles of watermarking-based IP protection, where a watermark is a mechanism for identification that is: (1) nearly invisible to human and machine inspection; (2) difficult to remove; and (3) permanently embedded as an integral part of the design. Watermarking addresses IP protection by tracing unauthorized reuse and making untraceable unauthorized reuse as difficult as recreating given pieces of IP from scratch. We survey related work in cryptography and design methodology, then develop desiderata, metrics, and concrete protocols for constraint-based watermarking at various stages of the very large scale integration (VLSI) design process. In particular, we propose a new preprocessing approach that embeds watermarks as constraints into the input of a black-box design tool and a new postprocessing approach that embeds watermarks as constraints into the output of a black-box design tool. To demonstrate that our protocols can be transparently integrated into existing design flows, we use a testbed of commercial tools for VLSI physical design and embed watermarks into real-world industrial designs. We show that the implementation overhead is low-both in terms of central processing unit time and such standard physical design metrics as wirelength, layout area, number of vias, and routing congestion. We empirically show that the placement and routing applications considered in our methods achieve strong proofs of authorship and are resistant to tampering and do not adversely influence timing.