The Undue Reliance on Physical Objects in the Regulation of Information Products
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this Article is to critically analyze the root causes and justifications supporting the different treatment of information products that are embodied in a physical object from the ones that are not. The divide in the treatment of different forms of property is to a large extent arbitrary and we need to take a closer look at the profound effects that it may have on the regulation of information products, and the balance of powers between suppliers and recipients. Part II considers the effects of the overemphasis on a physical object in defining goods and services and the consequent rippling effects it has on enforcing sales and licenses. The Article will then delve into further illustrations of the emphasis on a physical object on the application of the first sale or exhaustion doctrine and on what exclusive copyright acts are involved in the commercialization of information products. Part III explains the root causes of the current overemphasis on the presence of a physical object through misconceptions of property and through the active role that suppliers play in shaping the nature of information products. I observe how the over emphasis on a physical progressively decreases recipients’ ownership powers and privileges to information products, thereby creating double standards that may lead to a legal and normative degradation. Part IV proposes to redefine personal tangible property by looking at what its essential attributes should be. In particular, the concept of ownership “as an organizing idea,” should help discern when personal property rights of recipients of information products should be recognized and enforced in conjunction with the need to constrain the effects that supplier contracts have on the personal property rights of recipients of information products.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.080 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".