Indo-U.S. FTA - Prospects for Audiovisual Services

Many WTO (World Trade Organization) member countries, including India, are defensive about opening up of the audiovisual sector in the Doha Round due to reasons of cultural sensitivity. On the other hand, the United States is pushing for liberalizing trade in this sector both in the WTO and in its bilateral FTAs (Free Trade Agreements). With the slow progress of the Doha Round, India and the United States are exploring the possibilities of entering into FTAs with like-minded trading partners. In this context, the present paper discusses the prospects of liberalizing audiovisual services under a possible Indo-U.S. FTA. The study found that India and the United States have significant trade complementarities in this sector which can be further enhanced under an FTA. It identifies areas such as co-production of films, digital content creation and broadband infrastructure in which companies from India and the United States can enter into mutually beneficial collaborations. It argues that India should enter into a media cooperation agreement with the U.S. to facilitate the inflow of technical know, finance and best management practices. It discusses regulatory and other reforms which would not only improve the productivity and global competitiveness of the Indian audiovisual sector but also enable it to gain from the FTA.Indo-U.S. FTA, GATS, bilateral agreements, audiovisual, Services

Best Effort and Practice Activation Codes

Activation Codes are used in many different digital services and known by many different names including voucher, e-coupon and discount code. In this paper we focus on a specific class of ACs that are short, human-readable, fixed-length and represent value. Even though this class of codes is extensively used there are no general guidelines for the design of Activation Code schemes. We discuss different methods that are used in practice and propose BEPAC, a new Activation Code scheme that provides both authenticity and confidentiality. The small message space of activation codes introduces some problems that are illustrated by an adaptive chosen-plaintext attack (CPA-2) on a general 3-round Feis- tel network of size 2^(2n) . This attack recovers the complete permutation from at most 2^(n+2) plaintext-ciphertext pairs. For this reason, BEPAC is designed in such a way that authenticity and confidentiality are in- dependent properties, i.e. loss of confidentiality does not imply loss of authenticity.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, TrustBus 201

Indo-U.S. FTA: Prospects for Audiovisual Services

Many WTO (World Trade Organization) member countries, including India, are defensive about opening up of the audiovisual sector in the Doha Round due to reasons of cultural sensitivity. On the other hand, the United States is pushing for liberalizing trade in this sector - both in the WTO and in its bilateral FTAs (Free Trade Agreements). With the slow progress of the Doha Round, India and the United States are exploring the possibilities of entering into FTAs with like-minded trading partners. In this context, the present paper discusses the prospects of liberalizing audiovisual services under a possible Indo-U.S. FTA. The study found that India and the United States have significant trade complementarities in this sector which can be further enhanced under an FTA. It identifies areas such as co-production of films, digital content creation and broadband infrastructure in which companies from India and the United States can enter into mutually beneficial collaborations. It argues that India should enter into a media cooperation agreement with the U.S. to facilitate the inflow of technical know, finance and best management practices. It discusses regulatory and other reforms which would not only improve the productivity and global competitiveness of the Indian audiovisual sector but also enable it to gain from the FTA.Indo-U.S. FTA, GATS, bilateral agreements, audiovisual, services

Ticketing as if consumers mattered

There are continued complaints on matters of event ticketing, particularly in music, despite recent changes in legislation and in practice. This report, a development of ideas following from Waterson (2016), sets out a personal view on the market, focusing on the UK and in particular the music sector, as it now exists. In it, I ask and respond to a self-imposed question- what might an improved ticketing system set out to achieve? In my view, a desirable ticketing system would be one that puts consumers first, both in terms of ease, fairness and choice. Hence the title. Currently, many of the participants in the market do not have consumers foremost in mind, and the lesson from various other markets where technology has shown significant potential is that ultimately, a framework that provides what (most) consumers want wins out

Secure and Transferable Mobile Ticketing Using Digital Rights Managements

The increasingly matured mobile commerce enriches our daily lives. Mobile ticketing, a process that allows consumers to order, make payment, acquire, and authenticate tickets using their mobile phones, will become popular since it can be conducted from anywhere and at anytime. In addition to the convenience of use, the fabrication and distribution costs of traditional paper-tickets can be greatly reduced with mobile tickets. Many applications, such as traffic tickets, concert tickets, movie tickets, and so on, may take the advantages of mobile ticketing. Such tickets, in their paper-forms, can be transferred to anyone before use since no specific identity is recorded in these tickets. Nevertheless, current schemes restrict mobile tickets to be non-transferable because the transferring will result in the tickets being invalidated. To overcome the non-transferability problem, we use the idea of digital rights managements to separate the content and the usage-rules of mobile tickets, and propose a transferrable mobile ticketing scheme. The usage-rule, i.e. the rights object of the ticket, registers the ticket identification and a hashed number comprising an issuer’s random number and the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) of the ticket owner. The rights object is independently issued by a trusted third party. When a ticket is transferred, the issuer will be notified and he will modify the rights object with a new hash value, computed from a new random number and the IMEI of the new owner who receives the transferred ticket. Therefore, mobile tickets are secured and transferrable in our proposed mobile ticketing scheme

Television: Peer-To-Peer’s Next Challenger

The entertainment industry has obsessed over the threat of peer-to-peer file sharing since the introduction of Napster in 1999. The sharing of television content may present a compelling case for fair use under the long-standing Betamax decision. Some argue that television sharing is fundamentally different than the distribution of music or movies since television is often distributed for free over public airwaves. However, a determination of fair use is unlikely because of the fundamental differences between recording a program and downloading it, recent regulation to suppress unauthorized content distribution and shifts in the television market brought on by new technology

Tradable Service Level Agreements to Manage Network Resources for Streaming Internet Services

In recent years, supply and demand of streaming applications via the Internet (e.g., video-on-demand, live TV coverage, video conferencing) have increased. The idea behind streaming Internet services is to avoid a time-consuming download, and instead, make the user view streaming content in real-time without delay. However, today’s Internet traffic is routed on a best effort basis without any support for guaranteed service provisioning. Missing traffic prioritization mechanisms to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) and, additionally, the fact that traffic passes several Internet Service Providers (ISP) during transmission is very disadvantageous for the performance of streaming Internet services. Therefore, a solution is presented to enhance existing protocols with QoS mechanisms. Service Level Agreements (SLA) and Operational Level Agreements (OLA) between service providers and service customers are proposed to enforce service guarantees on an economic base and they serve ISPs and Content Service Providers (CSP) to efficiently manage network resources. The concatenation of such contractual agreements between ISPs enables end-to-end-based service provisioning with QoS assurance. A contracting protocol is introduced to control the settlement of contracts and user demands. With the help of service brokers, SLAs could even be traded in a marketplace established for efficient use of limited resources