This post originally appeared on the Engelberg Center blog.

This post originally appeared on the OSHWA blog .

I recently found myself reading Mark Lemley’s paper The Benefit of the Bargain while also helping a friend put together the Terms of Service (ToS) for their new startup. Lemley’s paper essentially argues that modern ToS - documents that are written by services to be one sided and essentially imposed on users as a take-it-or-leave-it offer - should no longer be enforced as contracts because they have lost important fairness elements of what make contracts contracts.

Earlier this summer the Engelberg Center released a new study on ebook ownership. The study was motivated by a superficially simple question: “why can’t you own an ebook?”.

The air quality in NYC has been . . . not great this summer. This presents and opportunity. Why settle for knowing that the air is not great in the city when you can know how not-great it is in your very own home?