Greg Tang passed away suddenly on February 7, 2011.  He will be greatly missed by everyone at Harvard Law School.  In his memory, we are republishing his Digest Comment from last semester. – The Digest Staff Intel and the x86 Architecture: A Legal Perspective Written by Greg Tang Edited by Ian Wildgoose Brown Editorial Policy Intel, the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer, owes its global leadership position to its x86 microprocessors. Intel and its main competitor, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), command 80.4% and 11.5% ... Read More...

Written by Nathan Lovejoy Edited by Harry Zhou Editorial Policy The September 30th issue of Rolling Stone featured an article provocatively titled “How to Save the Music Business” by U2 manager Paul McGuinness. In it, McGuinness shifts a hefty portion of responsibility for online copyright infringement to Internet service providers: “Let’s get real: Do people want more bandwidth to speed up their e-mails or to download music and films as rapidly as possible?”[i] He goes on to argue that service ... Read More...

Written by Greg Tang Edited by Ian Wildgoose Brown Editorial Policy Intel, the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer, owes its global leadership position to its x86 microprocessors. Intel and its main competitor, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), command 80.4% and 11.5% of the microprocessor market, respectively. In other words, over 90% of the world’s computers have brains that only understand the x86 instruction set for translating software instructions into computer functioning. Consequently, most computer programs support, if not exclusively, x86 microprocessors. The ... Read More...

By Matthew Becker Edited by Matt Gelfand Editorial Policy The application of copyright in the space of virtual worlds has been a subject of increasing consideration in the legal community over the past few years.[i] Literature on this subject has often centered on two focal points: the existing laws and approaches that are likely to produce successful litigation in this evolving arena; and the idea that the best approach to settling copyright disputes might be to try to find recourse ... Read More...

By Alea Mitchell Edited by Cary Mayberger Editorial Policy Innovative hosting of user-generated content on the Internet, and a subsequent increase in unauthorized copyrighted material among this content, means reimagining copyright jurisprudence. The issue of how we protect an owner’s “exclusive” right to reproduce, distribute, and publicly perform his or her work, while not stifling advances in global communication and technology, underlies the concern in recent infringement suits brought against online hosts like YouTube, eBay, Hi5, and Veoh. See 17 ... Read More...