Pervasively Distributed Copyright Enforcement

In an effort to control flows of unauthorized information, the major copyright industries are pursuing a range of strategies designed to distribute copyright enforcement functions across a wide range of actors and to embed these functions within communications networks, protocols, and devices. Some of these strategies have received considerable academic and public scrutiny, but much less attention has been paid to the ways in which all of them overlap and intersect with one another. This article offers a framework for theorizing this process. The distributed extension of intellectual property enforcement into private spaces and throughout communications networks can be understood as a new, hybrid species of disciplinary regime that locates the justification for its pervasive reach in a permanent state of crisis. This hybrid regime derives its force neither primarily from centralized authority nor primarily from decentralized, internalized norms, but instead from a set of coordinated processes for authorizing flows of information. Although the success of this project is not yet assured, its odds of success are by no means remote as skeptics have suggested. Power to implement crisis management in the decentralized marketplace for digital content arises from a confluence of private and public interests and is amplified by the dynamics of technical standards processes. The emergent regime of pervasively distributed copyright enforcement has profound implications for the production of the networked information society

Music 2025 : The Music Data Dilemma: issues facing the music industry in improving data management

© Crown Copyright 2019Music 2025ʼ investigates the infrastructure issues around the management of digital data in an increasingly stream driven industry. The findings are the culmination of over 50 interviews with high profile music industry representatives across the sector and reflects key issues as well as areas of consensus and contrasting views. The findings reveal whilst there are great examples of data initiatives across the value chain, there are opportunities to improve efficiency and interoperability

Watermarking FPGA Bitfile for Intellectual Property Protection

Intellectual property protection (IPP) of hardware designs is the most important requirement for many Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) intellectual property (IP) vendors. Digital watermarking has become an innovative technology for IPP in recent years. Existing watermarking techniques have successfully embedded watermark into IP cores. However, many of these techniques share two specific weaknesses: 1) They have extra overhead, and are likely to degrade performance of design; 2) vulnerability to removing attacks. We propose a novel watermarking technique to watermark FPGA bitfile for addressing these weaknesses. Experimental results and analysis show that the proposed technique incurs zero overhead and it is robust against removing attacks

Global Innovation Policy Index

Ranks fifty-five nations' strategies to boost innovation capacity: policies on trade, scientific research, information and communications technologies, tax, intellectual property, domestic competition, government procurement, and high-skill immigration

Foucault in Cyberspace: Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hardwired Censors

This is an essay about law in cyberspace. I focus on three interdependent phenomena: a set of political and legal assumptions that I call the jurisprudence of digital libertarianism, a separate but related set of beliefs about the state\u27s supposed inability to regulate the Internet, and a preference for technological solutions to hard legal issues on-line. I make the familiar criticism that digital libertarianism is inadequate because of its blindness towards the effects of private power, and the less familiar claim that digital libertarianism is also surprisingly blind to the state\u27s own power in cyberspace. In fact, I argue that the conceptual structure and jurisprudential assumptions of digital libertarianism lead its practitioners to ignore the ways in which the state can often use privatized enforcement and state-backed technologies to evade some of the supposed practical (and constitutional) restraints on the exercise of legal power over the Net. Finally, I argue that technological solutions which provide the keys to the first two phenomena are neither as neutral nor as benign as they are currently perceived to be. Some of my illustrations will come from the current Administration proposals for Internet copyright regulation, others from the Communications Decency Act and the cryptography debate. In the process, I make opportunistic and unsystematic use of the late Michel Foucault\u27s work to criticise some the jurisprudential orthodoxy of the Net

Intellectual Property Policy Online: A Young Person’s Guide

This is an edited version of a presentation to the Intellectual Property Online panel at the Harvard Conference on the Internet and Society, May 28-31, 1996. The panel was a reminder of both the importance of intellectual property and the dangers of legal insularity. Of approximately 400 panel attendees, 90% were not lawyers. Accordingly, the remarks that follow are an attempt to lay out the basics of intellectual property policy in a straighforward and non-technical manner. In other words, this is what non-lawyers should know (and what a number of government lawyers seem to have forgotten) about intellectual property policy on the Internet. The legal analysis which underlies this discussion is set out in the Appendix

The Bellagio Global Dialogues on Intellectual Property

Reviews Rockefeller's conference series on intellectual property and its efforts to promote policies and institutional capacities that better serve the poor, with a focus on food security and public health. Discusses global policy, development, and trade

Considerations about Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Economic Growth in the Digital Economy

Three technological trends—the omnipresence of information in digital form, the generalised use of computer networks, and the rapid proliferation of the World Wide Web—have profound implications for the way intellectual property (IP) is created, distributed, and accessed by every sector of society. In the last ten years much discussion of these issues has occurred in the literature and political and legislative domain. The information infrastructure offers an extraordinary ease of access to a vast array of information and peril for information to be reproduced inappropriately and for information access to be controlled in new and problematic ways. IPR regimes affect the diffusion of scientific knowledge, the innovation process and, ultimately, economic performance. Information technology raised some problems regarding the protection of intellectual property and drived to the discovery of a large number of solutions during past years. This paper’s purpose is to reveal what is the situation regarding IPR protection, economic growth and innovation in Romania, in the context of digital economy.intellectual property rights (IPR), innovation, economic growth, digital economy, Romania.

The relationship between copyright and contract law

Contracts lie at the heart of the regulatory system governing the creation and dissemination of cultural products in two respects: (1) The exclusive rights provided by copyright law only turn into financial reward, and thus incentives to creators, through a contract with a third party to exploit protected material. (2) From a user perspective purchases of protected material may take the form of a licensing contract, governing behaviour after the initial transaction. Thus, a review of the relationship between copyright and contract law has to address both supply- and demand-side issues. On the supply side, policy concerns include whether copyright law delivers the often stated aim of securing the financial independence of creators. Particularly acute are the complaints by both creators and producers that they fail to benefit from the exponential increase in the availability of copyright materials on the Internet. On the demand side, the issue of copyright exceptions and their policy justification has become central to a number of reviews and consultations dealing with digital content. Are exceptions based on user needs or market failure? Do exceptions require financial compensation? Can exceptions be contracted out by licence agreements? This report (i) reviews economic theory of contracts, value chains and transaction costs, (ii) identifies a comprehensive range of regulatory options relating to creator and user contracts, using an international comparative approach, (iii) surveys the empirical evidence on the effects of regulatory intervention, and (iv) where no evidence is available, extrapolates predicted effects from theory