The field of intellectual property (typically referred to as IP) is one that continues its rapid growth. Just a few years ago, individuals who identifi ed themselves as practitioners in the fi eld of intellectual property were met with blank stares. Now IP professionals are in constant demand, and it is a rare issue of any legal newspaper...

Millions of computer users regularly bind themselves to software license terms with the click of a mouse, usually without reading anything but the word "agree." Licenses for software as diverse as Microsoft Windows and Linux, and terms of use for websites such as Facebook, are all subject not only to intellectual property and...

Quality is not a fixed or universal property of software; it depends on the context and goals of its stakeholders. Hence, when you want to develop a high-quality software system, the first step must be a clear and precise specification of quality. Yet even if you get it right and complete, you can be sure that it will become invalid over...

Telephone, telefax, email and internet - the key ingredient of the inner workings is the conduit: the line which is designed to carry massive amounts of data at breakneck speed. In their data-carrying capacity optical fiber lines beat other technologies (copper cable, microwave beacons, satellite links) hands down, at least in the long...

This volume contains the papers presented at the 14th International Workshop on Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems (APPROX 2011) and the 15th International Workshop on Randomization and Computation (RANDOM 2011), which took place concurrently in Princeton University, USA, during August 17–19,...

In recent years, searching for source code on the web has become increasingly common among professional software developers and is emerging as an area of academic research. This volume surveys past research and presents the state of the art in the area of "code retrieval on the web." This work is concerned with the algorithms, ...

At the end of the twentieth century, intellectual property rights collided with everyday life. Expansive copyright laws and digital rights management technologies sought to shut down new forms of copying and remixing made possible by the Internet. International laws expanding patent rights threatened the lives of millions of people around the...