Periods and Workplace
Policy
Marcy Karin, UDC
Menstrual
management is an obstacle to full workplace equality and economic security. Menstruation
happens at work, but workplaces are not universally set up to support workers
needs to address their periods. For example, existing employment laws fail to
require breaks, flexible scheduling, or access to sanitary spaces to apply
menstrual products. Periods and blood also are stigmatized, gendered, and
subject to religious, social, and other mythology. The corresponding shame and
lack of menstrual education makes some workers susceptible to discrimination,
intimidation, and harassment. This structural mismatch prevents people from
properly managing periods at work. It also ignores the adverse employment
decisions that are taken on the basis of menstruation or otherwise against
menstruating individuals. Building on the 2010 federal law that created
breastfeeding accommodations, this paper proposes a new menstrual management
workplace protection law. This three-part proposal expands the menstrual equity
movement and normalizes and destigmatizes menstrual management by: creating
menstrual accommodations at work, including access to reasonable, job protected
break time and safe products that allow people to menstruate at work in the way
they want, without fear of retaliation or retribution; requiring access to
clean water and sanitary facilities to address blood exposure; and covering
menstruating individuals under existing discrimination laws.
An Instance of Open
Source Hardware Licensing
Timothy Murphy, University of Idaho
As open source software (OSS) has become
more prevalent and more widely accepted, many different OSS licenses have
proliferated to provide different licensing constructs for licensors and
licensees. The most popular OSS license is the GNU Public License (GPL), which
is protective of author rights and intended to foster an open software
community. Because software source code and object code files are primarily
protected by copyright, the options for license terms are relatively
straightforward and well-known. To the extent patent rights become an issue,
various additional provisions have been proposed to address that issue in the
context of the overall, copyright-focused license.
By contrast, open source hardware (OSH),
a relatively new entrant to the open source arena, does not have a robust
ecosystem of potential licenses. Because of the many different types of OSH and
the different types of intellectual property that are applicable at each stage
of the OSH development cycle, crafting a single license to govern all aspects
of OSH has proven difficult.
This article will first explore the
technical environment for OSH and then explore the underlying principles and drivers
of the open source community. Next, the applicability of different forms of
intellectual property at each stage of the OSH design/productization cycle will
be discussed along with the accompanying challenges presented by OSH. Finally,
the article will review existing licenses before proposing a new licensing
approach that focuses on permissive instantiations of OSH to address the
deficiencies in existing licenses.