Enforcement del diritto d'autore nell'ambito di Internet vs. protezione dei dati personali: bilanciamento tra diritti fondamentali e contesto culturale = Copyright enforcement in the Internet vs. personal data protection: balance between fundamental rights and cultural context

The starting point of this research are a number of selected lawsuits in which copyright holders have tried to enforce their rights against Internet users suspected of illegal file-sharing. In so doing, copyright enforcement collided with users’ information privacy. Employing a comparative and multidisciplinary approach, my aim is to understand the way judges solve the mentioned conflict between information privacy and copyright enforcement. The comparison involves the European system (with particular regard to Italy) and the North American ones (US and Canada). The idea behind my analysis is that technology affects society, which in turn affects lawmakers, and even judges. Indeed, judges do not live a secluded life, but operate within a society. Therefore, it is at least plausible, if not necessary, that their decisions reflect the values of that society. Many studies illustrate the way courts decide and if and how they can be influenced by the society and culture in which they operate. To assess if my statement is sound, I shall consider the perception of copyright in the three normative systems. The same analysis is undertaken with regard to information privacy. Importance is given also to the policies adopted for the two rights. Unsurprisingly, technology has affected in many ways the substance of both privacy and copyright norms, as well as people’s lives and people’s way of behaving. This has led to a different perception of the need to protect the aforementioned rights. The question I mean to answer is the following: could this be a reason why, despite similar legal frameworks, the outcomes of lawsuits are quite different among the considered legal systems? This is the goal of my research, conscious of the fact that anyway my answer can be just one of the many possible explanations

The "Egg of Columbus" for Making the World’s Toughest Fibres

In this letter we present the "Egg of Columbus" for making fibres with unprecedented toughness: a slider, in the simplest form just a knot, is introduced as frictional element to dissipate additional energy and thus demonstrating the existence of a previously "hidden" toughness. The proof of concept is experimentally realized making the world’s toughest fibre, increasing the toughness modulus of a commercial Endumax macroscopic fibre from 44 J/g up to 1070 J/g (and of a zylon microfiber from 20 J/g up to 1400 J/g). The ideal upperbound toughness is expected for graphene, with a theoretical value of 10^5 J/g. This new concept, able of maximizing (one fold increment) the structural robustness, could explain the mysterious abundance of knot formations, in spite of their incremental energy cost and topological difficulty, in biological evolved structures, such as DNA strands and proteins

Hierarchical multiple peeling simulations

The phenomenon of the exceptional dry adhesion achieved by some natural biological materials has been widely investigated in recent years. In particular, the analysis of the terminal elements of gecko pads and their specific structure and topology has led to the development of bioinspired synthetic fibrillar adhesives, including mushroom-shaped tips. To model the expected adhesion and detachment behaviour of multiple contacts, only recently the last author has derived a theory of multiple peeling, extending the pioneering energy-based single peeling theory of Kendall, including large deformations and pre-stretching. In this contribution, we study the problem of the adhesion of single and multiple contacts using finite element analysis, with the aim of studying complex peeling geometries. Both non-hierarchical tape-like and hierarchical geometries are considered, and the adhesive properties are compared, showing a marked improvement in the latter case. Results are promising and the numerical approach can be exploited in future attempts to determine optimal configurations and improve the adhesion of artificial bioinspired structures

Il biodiritto e i suoi confini: definizioni, dialoghi, interazioni

Il volume raccoglie alcuni dei risultati finali del progetto di ricerca “L’impatto delle innovazioni biotecnologiche sui diritti della persona: uno studio interdisciplinare e comparato”, finanziato dal Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (FIRB 2006). Il volume nasce inoltre dall’opportunità di proporre ed approfondire le linee trasversali esistenti anche tra differenti contributi pubblicati, in momenti diversi, nel sito www.biodiritto.org. La metodologia adottata rispecchia l'approccio interdisciplinare e comparato adottato dal progetto di ricerca, nella sforzo costante di andare oltre i limiti sia della materia giuridica, sia dei singoli ordinamenti nazionali

Modeling the Transition Towards Renminbi's Full Convertibility: Implications for China's Growth

There is a widespread consensus that China’s growth paradigm needs a rebalancing away from investment and external demand and towards consumption and domestic demand. This rebalancing process is supposed to be accompanied by the transition towards Renminbi’s full convertibility. In contrast, it is controversial to what extent this adjustment will accelerate the slowdown of China’s growth, which will likely occur because of other structural factors. We address these issues by means of a two-country two-stage (before and after Renminbi’s full convertibility) model, which reproduces some qualitative features of China’s growth pattern and its relationship with the US. We analyze to what extent altering the Chinese exchange rate policy, as well as other structural and policy variables, may have (short-, medium- and long-term) effects on the evolution of the Chinese economy. The paper shows that by lifting the controls on the capital account and letting the currency float, the Chinese authorities will not only expose the economy to the risks of free capital mobility, but will also renounce to important policy instruments for controlling the dynamics of China’s economy and the allocation of the national resource

The Privacy of Minors within Patient-Centered eHealth Systems

E-health has become a central feature in the agenda of many European legislators. Health information technologies open up new legal issues in the transition from a paper-based framework to a digital one. The paper focus on a specific issue emerging in this transition, the treatment of the so-called «supersensitive data» of minors processed within the legal framework of the «Fascicolo Sanitario Elettronico» (FSE), a patient-centred ehealth system that has been recently defined and regulated in Italian law. After having outlined the general discipline of this system, the paper shows how the right to control their information (in some cases even against the parents’ right to access these information) recognized to minors by a growing body of sources of law and case law interpretations is challenged in this new scenario and need to be taken in account when designing the rules and the information flows permitted by FSE systems. In conclusion, some recommendations to ensure the proper design and implementation of a FSE system according to the minors’ right to control their information are provided

Luci ed ombre delle più recenti riforme del mercato del lavoro tedesco agli occhi del giuslavorista italiano = (The impact of the most recent labour law reforms in Germany: considerations from an Italian perspective)

The working paper examines the impact of the most recent German labour law and labour market reforms on employment dynamics, pointing put, first of all, that these reforms have been adopted both by the federal legislator and by the social partners, i.e. outside and inside the industrial relations’ system. While the legislative reforms concentrated on introducing and regulating atypical work forms, on employment services, and on social security cushions, the reforms adopted by the social partners have made the standard employment relationship more flexible. According to many scholars these measures, especially the ones agreed within the industrial relations’ system, have been fundamental to maintain employment and the competitiveness of German firms. The analysis confirms the overall positive effects of these reforms, but it shows that at the same time precariousness has grown also in Germany and that, as a consequence, the quality of jobs has significantly worsen. Finally, it is suggested to think about the possible outcomes of similar reforms in Italy, especially in relation to the need of making the standard employment relationship more flexible, which is a crucial issue not only in order to preserve employment, but also to generally take on the challenges of postfordism and economic globalisation

Spenden für ein seltenes Exemplar von Grimmelshausens „Springinsfeld“?

Nach Jahrzehnten wurde im Herbst 2012 wieder eine Erstausgabe von Grimmelshausens Roman Springinsfeld (1670) versteigert und vom Antiquariat Wolfgang Braecklein in Berlin für die stattliche Summe von 19.000 € gekauft. Es stammte aus der Privatbibliothek des Essayisten und Übersetzers Friedhelm Kemp (1914-2011). Im Katalog der Stuttgarter Antiquariatsmesse (Ende Januar 2014) wird das Springinsfeld-Exemplar vom selben Antiquariat für 35.000 € angeboten

Provenance in Open Data Entity-centric Aggregation

Recently an increasing number of open data catalogs appear on the Web. These catalogs contain data that represents real world entities and their attributes. Entities can be imported from several catalogs to build web services; hence there is a need to trace the source of each entity and attribute value in a way that handles also the possible conflicts between attribute values coming from overlapping sources. For open data, source tracing requires capturing both the provenance of the attribute values and the identity links between entities. We present here a new entity-centric source tracing model that extends an incremental import process and implements a conflict avoidance strategy

Social Behavior Analysis of VoIP Users and its application to Malicious Users Detection (Extended Version { V1.0)

IP Telephony has become very popular and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based telephony systems are almost substituting the traditional PSTN systems. Being so widespread and ubiquitous, the protocol’s resilience and security in presence of incorrect, malformed or malicious messages is fundamental for the correct management of a network. This is of particular importance for the session-based applications since they appear to be much more sensitive very sensitive not only to malicious attacks, but also to errors, and even incorrect interpretation of the standard. To have an in-depth knowledge about the net-work behavior is primary requirement to design and tune any attack or anomaly detection system. In the context of VoIP, traffic analysis plays a very significant role due to the fact that SIP based VoIP traffic does not follow any generic model to describe its characteristics like traditional telephony. To this end, we have performed a thorough analysis on SIP traces captured from the VoIP network of our institution. Here, we use social network analysis techniques to capture the relationship behavior of users and to explore distinct behavioral patterns of users inside the VoIP network. Knowledge about the normal behavior of the system and users gained from the traffic analysis is helpful in detecting intrusion and anomalies. In this paper, we also present an anomaly detection architecture where we train an automated machine with the normal behavioral pattern of the users. The machine, thus trained, is capable of identifying malicious users