94,276 research outputs found

    Oblivion: Mitigating Privacy Leaks by Controlling the Discoverability of Online Information

    Get PDF
    Search engines are the prevalently used tools to collect information about individuals on the Internet. Search results typically comprise a variety of sources that contain personal information -- either intentionally released by the person herself, or unintentionally leaked or published by third parties, often with detrimental effects on the individual's privacy. To grant individuals the ability to regain control over their disseminated personal information, the European Court of Justice recently ruled that EU citizens have a right to be forgotten in the sense that indexing systems, must offer them technical means to request removal of links from search results that point to sources violating their data protection rights. As of now, these technical means consist of a web form that requires a user to manually identify all relevant links upfront and to insert them into the web form, followed by a manual evaluation by employees of the indexing system to assess if the request is eligible and lawful. We propose a universal framework Oblivion to support the automation of the right to be forgotten in a scalable, provable and privacy-preserving manner. First, Oblivion enables a user to automatically find and tag her disseminated personal information using natural language processing and image recognition techniques and file a request in a privacy-preserving manner. Second, Oblivion provides indexing systems with an automated and provable eligibility mechanism, asserting that the author of a request is indeed affected by an online resource. The automated ligibility proof ensures censorship-resistance so that only legitimately affected individuals can request the removal of corresponding links from search results. We have conducted comprehensive evaluations, showing that Oblivion is capable of handling 278 removal requests per second, and is hence suitable for large-scale deployment

    Foreign direct investment under weak rule of law : theory and evidence from China

    Get PDF
    This paper develops a self-enforcing contract model to show that better economic fundamentals can help when there is weak rule of law -- but with order -- to attract foreign direct investment, whereas lowering taxes does not necessarily help. Using a cross-region Chinese dataset, the analysis finds evidence consistent with the theoretical analysis. Regional variations in tax rates and the perceived quality of formal contracting institutions are not correlated with regional inflows of foreign direct investment, but leadership characteristics are. Most conventional economic factors have the predicted effects on foreign direct investment. The finding that foreign direct investment is lower in locations where domestic private firms have better access to finance and where the air quality is poor is new to the literature.Debt Markets,Emerging Markets,Investment and Investment Climate,Bankruptcy and Resolution of Financial Distress,Access to Finance

    Allocating and Enforcing Property Rights in Land: Informal versus Formal Mechanisms in Subsaharan Africa

    Get PDF
    The standard view of economists is that formalisation of private rights in land is a prerequisite of economic growth, especially so in conditions of acute population pressure and agricultutal commercialisation. That stage has been reached in many regions of the African continent, hence the recommendation that land rights be duly registered by a central authority acting on behalf of the state. An alternative view, more prevalent among social scientists, claims that, far from being bypassed by evolving scarcity circumstances, the informal (customary) land tenure system is capable of adjusting itself to the needs of a modern agriculture while at the same time ensuring a more equitable access to land for those whose livelihood narrowly depends upon it. This paper aims at assessing these two views by carefully looking at the arguments advanced by their respective upholders as well as by taking stock of the most recent empirical evidence available to test their validity. It will be shown that the first view is not as solidly grounded as it may seem at first sight, yet the second view must be duly qualified to allow for serious inter-community failures of the 'indigenous order' solution.

    Property Regimes in Resource Conservation-A Framework for Analysis

    Get PDF
    This paper develops a conceptual framework for analysing property regimes in conservation of natural resources. Human beings interaction with their environment is governed through institutions of property; therefore they play an important role in the conservation of natural resources. This paper uses concepts from the New Institutional Economics School of thought and from theories of property to develop normative criteria to assess property institutions in resource management.Natural Resource Management, Property Intuitions

    Institutions, sustainable land use and consumer welfare: the case of forest and grazing lands in northern Ethiopia

    Get PDF
    Land is an essential factor of production. Institutions that govern its efficient use determine the sustainability of this essential resource. In Ethiopia all land is publicly owned. Such an institutional setting is said to have resulted in the major degradation of Ethiopia's land resources and dissipation of the resource rent. An alternative to this is assigning a private property institution. In this paper, we examine the consumer welfare effects of a change in the institutional setting on communal forest and grazing lands, using a cross-section data set of 200 households in Northern Ethiopia. Findings suggest that changing the current institutional setting could indeed be welfare reducin

    Cultural Environmentalism and the Constructed Commons

    Get PDF
    Van Houweling explores both the benefits and failings of conservation easements on land on the one hand and the licensing commons on the other. Conservation easement The tools of cultural environmentalism in the lights of objections to conservation easements and more general concerns with complicated and fragmented property rights are also considered. Among other things, she provides clear theoretical differences between the public domain, where freedom is based on the absence of property rights, and the licensing commons, where freedom is based on the absence on the preemptive exercise of the property rights by the rights holder in order to grant use privileges to users of the commons, and sometimes binds to those future users to add their own improvements back to the common pool

    Property Regimes in Resource Conservation-A Framework for Analysis

    Get PDF
    This paper develops a conceptual framework for analysing property regimes in conservation of natural resources. Human beings interaction with their environment is governed through institutions of property; therefore they play an important role in the conservation of natural resources. This paper uses concepts from the New Institutional Economics School of thought and from theories of property to develop normative criteria to assess property institutions in resource management.Natural Resource Management, Property Intuitions

    Musical Property Rights Regimes in Tanzania and Kenya after TRIPS

    Get PDF
    Despite the passage of relatively uniform copyright legislation throughout East Africa and the formation of regional organizations meant to further standardize these laws, the protection of musical works in East African creative industries has varied significantly within and between Tanzania and Kenya. While enforcement remains weak throughout East Africa, each country has also taken a different path in the implementation of copyright policies meant to support musical property rights. These different trajectories can be explained, in large part, by the particular political, social and economic paths taken by East African countries toward the neoliberal present

    Copyright Enforcement of Non-Copyright Terms: MDY v. Blizzard and Krause v. Titleserv

    Get PDF
    The rise of software and software licensing has led to another phenomenon: the attempted enforcement of software licenses through copyright law. Over the last fifteen years, content creators have begun to bring copyright suits against licensees, arguing that violation of license terms withdraws the permission needed to run the software, turning the use of the software into copyright infringement. Not surprisingly, courts have rejected this argument, and both the Ninth Circuit, in MDY v. Blizzard, and the Second Circuit, in Krause v. Titleserv, have developed new legal rules to prevent copyright enforcement of contract terms. This iBrief explores software licensing in detail, analyzes the courts’ responses, and concludes that the Ninth Circuit’s approach to copyright enforcement of license terms is preferable to the Second Circuit’s approach because it is supported by legislative history, more straightforward, and more likely to prevent future content creators from enforcing their licenses through contract
    • 

    corecore