Content Control: The Motion Picture Association of America's Patrolling of Internet Piracy in America, 1996-2008

This historical and political economic investigation aims to illustrate the ways in which the Motion Picture Association of America radically revised their methods of patrolling and fighting film piracy from 1996-2008. Overall, entertainment companies discovered the World Wide Web to be a powerful distribution outlet for cultural works, but were suspicious that the Internet was a Wild West frontier requiring regulation. The entertainment industry's guiding belief in regulation and strong protection were prompted by convictions that once the copyright industries lose control, companies quickly submerge like floundering ships. Guided by fears regarding film piracy, the MPAA instituted a sophisticated and seemingly impenetrable "trusted system" to secure its cultural products online by crafting relationships and interlinking the technological, legal, institutional, and rhetorical in order to carefully direct consumer activity according to particular agendas. The system created a scenario in which legislators and courts of law consented to play a supportive role with privately organized arrangements professing to serve the public interest, but the arrangements were not designed for those ends. Additionally, as cultural products became digitized consumers experienced a paradigm shift that challenged the concept of property altogether. In the digital world the Internet gives a consumer access to, rather than ownership of, cultural products in cyberspace. The technology granting consumers, on impulse, access to enormous amounts of music and films has been called, among many things, the "celestial jukebox." Regardless of what the technology is called, behind the eloquent veneer is the case in point of a systematic corrosion of consumer rights that, in the end, results in an unfair exchange between the content producers and consumers. What is the relationship of the MPAA to current piracy practices in America? How will Hollywood's enormous economic investment in content control affect future film distribution, exhibition, and consumer reception? Through historical analysis regarding the MPAA's campaign against film piracy along with interviews from key media industry personnel and the pirate underground, this contemporary illustration depicts how the MPAA secures its content for Internet distribution, and defines and criticizes the legal and technological controls that collide with consumer freedoms

Service-Oriented Foreign Direct Investment: Legal and Policy Frameworks Protecting Digital Assets in Offshoring Information Technology (IT) - Enabled Services

This thesis examines challenges caused by global cyberspace, which continues to undermine the ability of regulatory instruments aimed at cyber security and deterring cybercrime so that digital assets including those associated with Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) are protected. Progress in information and communication technology (ICT) has brought about both challenges and opportunities for mankind. While ICT has enabled seamless communication on cyberspace, it has also made every phenomenon, positive or negative on cyberspace possible. The good side of ICT is the endless opportunities provided to harness multiple features and capabilities of associated technologies while its side effect being the enormous security challenge on cyberspace. Legal and policy frameworks are needed to help mitigate cyber security threats and safeguard digital assets against such threats while promoting the benefits of ICT. To this end nations attempt to regulate cyberspace within their territories, but may quickly find out that issues on cyberspace are both global and national at the same time, and as such not fully controllable at national levels only. If nations cannot fully regulate ICT and cyberspace, this will have negative implications for digital investor’s assets in their territories as well. That is investor’s information assets may not be adequately safeguarded by means of national legal instruments. This dissertation seeks to analyze the question as to whether it is entirely possible for nation-states to address the multifaceted challenges introduced by cyberspace with appropriate national legal and policy frameworks alone to protect digital investments. This dissertation argues that, on the one hand, nations are behind in providing proper regulatory coverage for cyberspace, while, on the other hand, existing regulations have largely been unsuccessful in containing cyber security threats primarily due to complications caused by the ubiquitous global presence of cyberspace per se. Consequently, investor’s digital assets are more susceptible to unauthorized access and use, or destruction, all of which cannot be fully accounted for with currently available legal or technical means. There is a strong indication that digital investor assets demand more protection efforts from both investors and forum nations alike compared to what is needed to protect and promote traditional FDI

The Legal Aspects of Cybercrime in Nigeria: An Analysis with the UK Provisions

Cybercrime offences know no limits to physical geographic boundaries and have continued to create unprecedented issues regarding to the feasibility and legitimacy of applying traditional legislations based on geographic boundaries. These offences also come with procedural issues of enforcement of the existing legislations and continue to subject nations with problems unprecedented to its sovereignty and jurisdictions. This research is a critical study on the legal aspects of cybercrime in Nigeria, which examines how laws and regulations are made and applied in a well-established system to effectively answer questions raised by shortcomings on the implementation of cybercrime legislations, and critically reviews various laws in Nigeria relating or closely related to cybercrime. This research will provide insight into current global cybercrime legislations and the shortfalls to their procedural enforcement; and further bares the cybercrime issues in Nigeria while analysing and proffering a critique to the provisions as provided in the recently enacted Nigerian Cybercrime (Prohibition and Prevention) Act 2015, in contradistinction to the existing legal framework in the United Kingdom and the other regional enactments like the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime, African Union Convention on Cybersecurity and Personal Data Protection 2014, and the ECOWAS Directive on Cybercrime 2011

Copyright Law: An Open Source Casebook

Copyright Law is an open access casebook available for free to students. This edition was published in Spring 2019.https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/oer/1002/thumbnail.jp

Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion

382 p.Libro ElectrónicoEach of us has been in the computing field for more than 40 years. The book is the product of a lifetime of observing and participating in the changes it has brought. Each of us has been both a teacher and a learner in the field. This book emerged from a general education course we have taught at Harvard, but it is not a textbook. We wrote this book to share what wisdom we have with as many people as we can reach. We try to paint a big picture, with dozens of illuminating anecdotes as the brushstrokes. We aim to entertain you at the same time as we provoke your thinking.Preface Chapter 1 Digital Explosion Why Is It Happening, and What Is at Stake? The Explosion of Bits, and Everything Else The Koans of Bits Good and Ill, Promise and Peril Chapter 2 Naked in the Sunlight Privacy Lost, Privacy Abandoned 1984 Is Here, and We Like It Footprints and Fingerprints Why We Lost Our Privacy, or Gave It Away Little Brother Is Watching Big Brother, Abroad and in the U.S. Technology Change and Lifestyle Change Beyond Privacy Chapter 3 Ghosts in the Machine Secrets and Surprises of Electronic Documents What You See Is Not What the Computer Knows Representation, Reality, and Illusion Hiding Information in Images The Scary Secrets of Old Disks Chapter 4 Needles in the Haystack Google and Other Brokers in the Bits Bazaar Found After Seventy Years The Library and the Bazaar The Fall of Hierarchy It Matters How It Works Who Pays, and for What? Search Is Power You Searched for WHAT? Tracking Searches Regulating or Replacing the Brokers Chapter 5 Secret Bits How Codes Became Unbreakable Encryption in the Hands of Terrorists, and Everyone Else Historical Cryptography Lessons for the Internet Age Secrecy Changes Forever Cryptography for Everyone Cryptography Unsettled Chapter 6 Balance Toppled Who Owns the Bits? Automated Crimes—Automated Justice NET Act Makes Sharing a Crime The Peer-to-Peer Upheaval Sharing Goes Decentralized Authorized Use Only Forbidden Technology Copyright Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance The Limits of Property Chapter 7 You Can’t Say That on the Internet Guarding the Frontiers of Digital Expression Do You Know Where Your Child Is on the Web Tonight? Metaphors for Something Unlike Anything Else Publisher or Distributor? Neither Liberty nor Security The Nastiest Place on Earth The Most Participatory Form of Mass Speech Protecting Good Samaritans—and a Few Bad Ones Laws of Unintended Consequences Can the Internet Be Like a Magazine Store? Let Your Fingers Do the Stalking Like an Annoying Telephone Call? Digital Protection, Digital Censorship—and Self-Censorship Chapter 8 Bits in the Air Old Metaphors, New Technologies, and Free Speech Censoring the President How Broadcasting Became Regulated The Path to Spectrum Deregulation What Does the Future Hold for Radio? Conclusion After the Explosion Bits Lighting Up the World A Few Bits in Conclusion Appendix The Internet as System and Spirit The Internet as a Communication System The Internet Spirit Endnotes Inde

Copyright law, digital content and the internet in the Asia-Pacific

This e-book provides an insight into the key issues facing copyright law and digital content policy in a networked information world, based on papers presented at the First International Forum on the Content Industry and Intellectual Property. Published by Sydney University Press, this e-book provides an insight into the key issues facing copyright law and digital content policy in a networked information world, based on papers presented at the First International Forum on the Content Industry and Intellectual Property. The book features chapters from a wide range of experts in their respective fields from across the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, the People\u27s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Singapore. Some of the areas examined include the new digital environment, digital content policy, the networked information economy, copyright law and new media. The book provides a timely and scholarly appraisal of the legal and policy considerations facing anyone trying to regulate, sponsor or utilise the vast array of new media and content platforms now available

European Perspectives on the Information Society: Annual Monitoring Synthesis and Emerging Trend Updates

This report is one of the outcomes of the EPIS06 Project ¿ European Perspectives on the Information Society ¿ carried out by the ETEPS (European Techno-Economic Policy Support) network in cooperation with the Joint Research Centre Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (JRC IPTS) with the aim of providing strategic intelligence to policy makers by taking a prospective view on the evolution of ICT. This report combines the Annual Monitoring Synthesis (AMS) Report and five Emerging Trend Updates (ETU). It forms one of the main building blocks of the project, establishing an observatory of trends in technology and business evolutions of ICT. More particularly, the Annual Monitoring Synthesis Report (AMS Report) aims to identify new ICT-related developments likely to have a significant impact on the future of the Information Society, both in terms of growth and jobs for Europe and R&D policy prioritisation. By scanning and monitoring recent major foresight exercises and industrial technology roadmaps, as well as other future-oriented analysis and policy papers, the AMS attempts to detect early signals and possible disruptive forces so as to enable timely policy responses and anticipate potential challenges for policy makers. The AMS is structured along six main themes which emerged as a result of the analysis: - Convergence of infrastructures, - Human-computer convergence ¿ technologies for direct human computer interaction, - Pervasive or ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence, - The future of the Internet, - Citizens¿ concerns, - Working life. A structured overview with a summary of each of the foresights, roadmaps and other sources studied is presented in the AMS report annex. In addition, five Emerging Trends Updates (ETU) present the results of focused briefs on emerging themes of interest for policy making, covering the following topics: - ETU1 on the state-of-the-art of the creative content sector, - ETU2 on ICT and the offshoring of services, - ETU3 on ICT and the role of ICTs as enablers for energy efficiency, - ETU4 on ICT tools and services in intelligent domestic and personal environments, - ETU5 on ICT and privacy in the Knowledge Society ¿ the case of search engines.JRC.J.4-Information Societ