Database Protection: Are Laws Threatening To Destroy Our Building Blocks Of Knowledge?

Julia Alpert Gladstone
InSITE 2002  •  Volume 2  •  2002
This paper examines the various regimes that are used to protect databases to suggest that the continued progress o' science and technology that has enabled economic prosperity will be fostered by less regulation. The diversity between and within each of these regimes reflects fundamentally different views of intellectual property. Technology, specifically digitalization that has facilitated the creation, replication and easy dissemination of information has changed the value of information and threatens to create a striated society of information "haves" and "have-nots" due to enclosure mechanisms. As technology advances, the laws which we implement to build upon the existing intellectual property infrastructure must be developed with care to preserve the careful balance of the public good and private interest that has maintained the past 200 years of "progress of science and useful arts." The author suggests ways to structure a database to encourage or reward database developers while simultaneously fostering the advancement of science. Web Technology has changed conventional Information Systems (IS) and conventional Information Technology (IT) as we know it. There is no doubt that Web technology will provide the foundation for most future software systems. IS curriculum therefore needs to be brought up to date to reflect this reality. In this paper we update our earlier research leading to the design of a graduate model curriculum for Information Systems and describe a generic web-centric Information Systems Masters curriculum model. It is strong on web-technology and its goal is to produce students who are comfortable with both today's technology and technology of the future. Universities and colleges can adapt this curriculum model to design a new Masters in IS curriculum or simply to bring up to date any existing IS/IT curriculum. The model suggests new core concentration courses, and concentration electives.
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