But she carries pages from the Till file nearly everywhere she goes, and several more boxes of FBI research await her at her office each day.

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The three-year research was carried out by a team of computer scientists who developed software that acted like a BitTorrent file-sharing client and logged all the connections made to it.

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Excited by the possibilities of her recent research results, Karen, a chemical engineering professor, decided it was time to file for patents on her new surface chemistry technology and create a business with a faculty colleague and two graduate students.

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Under this "old" model of intellectual property (IP), biotech firms raced to file a "fortress" of patents around newly discovered genes, closing off avenues of research for their competitors.

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Each of its 340 students receives a laptop, which they use to download textbooks, file homework and perform research.

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Lee Black, an analyst at Jupiter Research, estimates that such services have topped out at around 350, 000 subscribers, compared with tens of millions of file-swappers.

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