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Vol 7 No 1 - Roger Williams University School of Law

Vol 7 No 1 - Roger Williams University School of Law

Vol 7 No 1 - Roger Williams University School of Law

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capital.343 While there may be no recognised legislativeintellectual property right in data, a contract can be used toregulate the way in which people use information that has beencollected to create contractual or privately ordered informationalproperty rights. The limit <strong>of</strong> a contract (besides some complexconstitutional issues) is that it is only enforceable against theparties to the contract and not the world at large. For instance, ifI buy a licence to use data that contains restrictions on my furthercopying, selling or exploiting the data, that licence will not bind astranger who copied the data.B. Contractual LicensingContract is also very important to the broader issue <strong>of</strong>information licensing.344 In the information economyinformational products are usually licensed and not sold; thelicense is the product. In most instances you do not receive anownership right to anything but rather a right to use information.In real space, when I buy a book I do not obtain ownership <strong>of</strong> thecopyright owner’s right to reproduce the book, but I do gainownership <strong>of</strong> the physical thing called the book. Withinformational products, such as s<strong>of</strong>tware games and digitalimages, you are usually only given a licence to use the informationfor specific purposes, and to this end, you must read the licenceclosely to determine your user rights. In essence, the contractuallicence determines “exploitation” and “user” rights in informationand in this way contract is used as a mechanism for definingdigital property.C. Formation <strong>of</strong> Contractual LicencesAn issue vitally important to this contractual definition <strong>of</strong>digital property is the way in which contractual licences areformed. In order to determine informational rights, it is343. See ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3d 1447 (7th Cir. 1996).344. See Gail E. Evans & Brian F. Fitzgerald, Information Transactions UnderUCC Article 2B: The Ascendancy Of Freedom <strong>of</strong> Contract in the Digital Millennium, 21U. New S. Wales L.J. 404 (1998), available at http:// www.law.unsw.edu.au/publications/journals/unswlj/ecommerce/evans.html;Robert W. Gomulkiewicz, The LicenseIs The Product: Comments on the Promise <strong>of</strong> Article 2B for S<strong>of</strong>tware and InformationLicensing, 13 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 891 (1998); David Nimmer et al., The Metamorphosis<strong>of</strong> Contract into Expand, 87 Cal. L. Rev. 17 (1999). Licenses are contracts that defineuser rights in relation to information products.

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