Intrinsically Legal-For-Trade Objects by Digital Signatures

The established techniques for legal-for-trade registration of weight values meet the legal requirements, but in praxis they show serious disadvantages. We report on the first implementation of intrinsically legal-for-trade objects, namely weight values signed by the scale, that is accepted by the approval authority. The strict requirements from both the approval- and the verification-authority as well as the limitations due to the hardware of the scale were a special challenge. The presented solution fulfills all legal requirements and eliminates the existing practical disadvantages.Comment: 4 pages, 0 figure

Economics and Engineering for Preserving Digital Content

Progress towards practical long-term preservation seems to be stalled. Preservationists cannot afford specially developed technology, but must exploit what is created for the marketplace. Economic and technical facts suggest that most preservation ork should be shifted from repository institutions to information producers and consumers. Prior publications describe solutions for all known conceptual challenges of preserving a single digital object, but do not deal with software development or scaling to large collections. Much of the document handling software needed is available. It has, however, not yet been selected, adapted, integrated, or deployed for digital preservation. The daily tools of both information producers and information consumers can be extended to embed preservation packaging without much burdening these users. We describe a practical strategy for detailed design and implementation. Document handling is intrinsically complicated because of human sensitivity to communication nuances. Our engineering section therefore starts by discussing how project managers can master the many pertinent details.

A Decentralised Digital Identity Architecture

Current architectures to validate, certify, and manage identity are based on centralised, top-down approaches that rely on trusted authorities and third-party operators. We approach the problem of digital identity starting from a human rights perspective, with a primary focus on identity systems in the developed world. We assert that individual persons must be allowed to manage their personal information in a multitude of different ways in different contexts and that to do so, each individual must be able to create multiple unrelated identities. Therefore, we first define a set of fundamental constraints that digital identity systems must satisfy to preserve and promote privacy as required for individual autonomy. With these constraints in mind, we then propose a decentralised, standards-based approach, using a combination of distributed ledger technology and thoughtful regulation, to facilitate many-to-many relationships among providers of key services. Our proposal for digital identity differs from others in its approach to trust in that we do not seek to bind credentials to each other or to a mutually trusted authority to achieve strong non-transferability. Because the system does not implicitly encourage its users to maintain a single aggregated identity that can potentially be constrained or reconstructed against their interests, individuals and organisations are free to embrace the system and share in its benefits.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figures, 3 table

Legal Issues in E-Commerce Transactions - An Indian Perspective

Recent advances in telecommunications and computer technologies have moved computer networks to the centre of the international economic infrastructure, everyone with a computer and connected to the Internet has become a potential player and a potential market. These technological developments have gone hand in hand with a trend, predominantly in the developed world, towards a post-industrial knowledge economy. The vast majority of these 'e-commerce' transactions to date have taken place in countries with advanced economies and infrastructure. For developing countries such as India, e-commerce offers significant opportunities; e-commerce diminishes existing advantages of cost, communication, and information, and may create new markets for indigenous products and services. Many Organizations and communities in India have begun to take advantage of the potential of the e- Commerce, critical challenges remain to be overcome before its potential can be fully realized for the benefit of all citizens

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Updating democracy studies: outline of a research program

Technologies carry politics since they embed values. It is therefore surprising that mainstream political and legal theory have taken the issue so lightly. Compared to what has been going on over the past few decades in the other branches of practical thought, namely ethics, economics and the law, political theory lags behind. Yet the current emphasis on Internet politics that polarizes the apologists holding the web to overcome the one-to-many architecture of opinion-building in traditional representative democracy, and the critics that warn cyber-optimism entails authoritarian technocracy has acted as a wake up call. This paper sets the problem – “What is it about ICTs, as opposed to previous technical devices, that impact on politics and determine uncertainty about democratic matters?” – into the broad context of practical philosophy, by offering a conceptual map of clusters of micro-problems and concrete examples relating to “e-democracy”. The point is to highlight when and why the hyphen of e-democracy has a conjunctive or a disjunctive function, in respect to stocktaking from past experiences and settled democratic theories. My claim is that there is considerable scope to analyse how and why online politics fails or succeeds. The field needs both further empirical and theoretical work

Implementation Of Maqasid Shariah In Islamic House Financing: A Study Of The Rights And Responsibilities Of Contracting Parties In Bai Bithaman Ajil And Musharakah Mutanaqisah

The Maqasid-oriented approach in Islam demonstrates the Muslims commitment to uphold the authenticity of Islam as a religion and a complete way of life (ad-din). Maqasid Shariah is a transparent tool to outline and clarify the effective extent of the rights and responsibilities of the Mukallaf (servant of Allah) towards each other. Ignorance on Maqasid Shariah in Islamic business transactions, particularly for Islamic house financing led to misinterpretation, disruption, chaos, and trivial conflicts among the contracting parties. This paper discusses the implementation of Bai Bithaman Ajil (BBA) and Musharakah Mutanaqisah (MM) Home Financing instruments as practiced in Malaysia using the method of Imam al Shatibi. This paper concluded that a sound understanding of the knowledge, goals, and objectives of the Shariah at every level of a contract involving parties to a sale and purchase in Islamic Home Financing would enable improvement in practice through ijtihad (collective decision or general consensus). The Maqasid Shariah (the objective of Islamic Jurispudence) is adequate to provide the appropriate vehicle and procedure for the fulfillment of rights and responsibilities of contracting parties, thereby eliminating all sorts of financial criminology in trading and business (Kamali, 2002)

Global dynamic E-marketplaces, and their role in the internet-based economy

Collaboration capabilities are what will most probably create the gap between winners and losers in business-to-business (B2B) commerce. In this context, the electronic marketplace (EM) comes as a medium for trade and collaboration, and a common entry point where partners can share business processes and adopt a decentralized business model fuelled by market evolution. The thesis illustrates the advantages of collaborative business and presents the information technologies that support it. The purpose of this thesis is to educate both the author and the reader on the technology and infrastructure that supports collaborative business and to posit that among the three major information technology infrastructures that enable B2B commerce, the EM model provides significant advantages for individual companies and industries compared to Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P). The thesis identifies key tools and value-added services EM\u27s should provide their participants to meet the requirements of modern companies and the Internet-based economy. Finally, the thesis suggests potential impacts of EM\u27s on the modern business ecosystem

The Communicative Character of Capitalistic Competition: A Hayekian response to the Habermasian challenge

"Ideal speech situations", "domination-free discourse" or "deliberative communities" describe political ideals proudly cherished by many sociologists. The sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, motivation is to mobilise political discourse as an instrument to tame or transform the capitalistic "system" according to alleged needs of "society". Most economists and defenders of capitalistic competition, in return, don?t care about communicative communities. The individual market actor is assumed or demanded to be free to choose among given alternatives satisfying given preferences subject to given constraints. Why, then, should homo oeconomicus argue (van Aaken 2003)? There is no "communicative action" among the individuals that populate economic textbooks, there is only "commutative action". Only a few, mostly "Austrian", economists realised that the exchange of goods and services within the spontaneous order of "catallaxy" involves an exchange of knowledge, ideas, opinions, expectations, and arguments – that markets are indeed communicative networks (e.g. Hayek 1946/48; Lavoie, ed. 1991; Horwitz 1992). In fact, and this will be my major claim, market competition is more "deliberative" than politics in the sense that more information about available social problem solutions and their comparative performance, about people's preferences, ideas and expectations is spontaneously created, disseminated and tested. This very idea is anathema for followers of Habermasian discourse ethics. The intellectual thrust and political clout of their vindication of deliberative politics critically seems to depend on a mostly tacit assumption that markets fail to address social needs and regulate social conflicts. Political discourse therefore ?steps in to fill the functional gaps when other mechanisms of social integration are overburdened? (Habermas 1996: 318). I will claim that the argument should be very much the other way around: politics and public deliberations are overburdened mechanisms – unable to deal with an increasingly complex and dynamic society. Moreover, the requisites of ideal speech communities are so enormous that functional gaps are inevitable. Partly, these gaps can be closed if market competition steps in. Partly, reorganisations of the political system are needed. Hence, I am not arguing that Habermas is wrong by stressing the need for open discourse in order to reach informed agreement among citizens who seek to realise mutual gains from joint commitment by contributing to common (public) goods and submitting to common rules of conduct (s.a. Vanberg 2003). I am challenging his neglect of capitalistic competition as a communicative device and his disdain for the classical liberal conception of bounded democracy that respects individual property rights (e.g. Habermas 1975; 1998). --