Personal rights management (PRM) : enabling privacy rights in digital online media content

With ubiquitous use of digital camera devices, especially in mobile phones, privacy is no longer threatened by governments and companies only. The new technology creates a new threat by ordinary people, who now have the means to take and distribute pictures of one’s face at no risk and little cost in any situation in public and private spaces. Fast distribution via web based photo albums, online communities and web pages expose an individual’s private life to the public in unpreceeded ways. Social and legal measures are increasingly taken to deal with this problem. In practice however, they lack efficiency, as they are hard to enforce in practice. In this paper, we discuss a supportive infrastructure aiming for the distribution channel; as soon as the picture is publicly available, the exposed individual has a chance to find it and take proper action.Wir stellen ein System zur Wahrnehmung des Rechts am eigenen Bild bei der Veröffentlichung digitaler Fotos, zum Beispiel von Handykameras, im Internet vor. Zur Entdeckung der Veröffentlichung schlagen wir ein Watermarking-Verfahren vor, welches das Auffinden der Bilder durch die potentiell abgebildeten Personen ermöglicht, ohne die Rechte des Fotografen einzuschränken

Mobile Innovation and the Music Business in Japan: The Case of Ringing Tone Melody ("Chaku-Mero") (Research Note)

This paper examines the development process and successful factors of the ringing tone melody downloading service, or "Chaku-Mero," in Japan. Chaku-Mero is a mobile Internet service in which a subscriber could download from a wide selection of music melodies his/her favorite with some fee to get it ring when the mobile phone receives a call message. This service is arguably the most successful m-commerce business in the world. According to three major mobile communication carriers, NTT DoCoMo, KDDI, and J-Phone, Chaku-Mero accounts for 40 to 60% of their paid service sales on the mobile Internet. Industry sources estimate that annual payment for Chaku-Mero reached approximately 80-90 billion yen in 2002 (currently US$1=120yen). Also, it has been argued that the Japanese Chaku-Mero service is the sole example of Internet cultural content business, be it fixed or mobile, in the world that has successfully overcome complicated conflicts and concerns of copyrights among different parties and created a significant market. The paper describes the process of how this business has evolved. It traces back the pre-mobile-Internet phase of related services such as the "Sky Melody" service by J-Phone and the wireless Karaoke business, which served as precursors of Chaku-Mero. Then the paper examines the business structure: the parties involved in the business, their relations, and how values are created and distributed among them. Also, the paper analyzes why some content providers have been more successful than others. A leading Chaku-Mero provider, for example, maintains more than 6.5 million subscribers and annual sales of 12 billion yen. Over all, the paper provides a preliminary study of mobile innovation in the music business, which is a part of a larger study of the history of interactions between technologies to create, record, distribute, and promote music and the music business. It would give some implications for the prospects of mobile Internet businesses for music and other cultural contents.

Identifying the impact of the circular economy on the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods Industry Opportunities and challenges for businesses, workers and consumers – mobile phones as an example STUDY

Mobile phones, particularly smartphones, have undergone a period of rapid growth to become virtually indispensable to today's lifestyle. Yet their production, use and disposal can entail a significant environmental burden. This study looks at the opportunities and challenges that arise from implementing circular economy approaches in the mobile phone value chain. A review of the value chain and different circular approaches is complemented by a scenario analysis that aims to quantify the potential impacts of certain circular approaches such as recycling, refurbishment and lifetime extension. The study finds that there is a large untapped potential for recovering materials from both the annual flow of new mobile phones sold in Europe once they reach the end of their life and the accumulated stock of unused, so-called hibernating devices in EU households. Achieving high recycling rates for these devices can offer opportunities to reduce EU dependence on imported materials and make secondary raw materials available on the EU market. As such, policy action would be required to close the collection gap for mobile phone devices. Implementing circular approaches in the mobile phone value chain can furthermore lead to job creation in the refurbishment sector. Extending the lifetime of mobile phones can also provide CO2 mitigation benefits, particularly from displacing the production of new devices

Cyber-crime Science = Crime Science + Information Security

Cyber-crime Science is an emerging area of study aiming to prevent cyber-crime by combining security protection techniques from Information Security with empirical research methods used in Crime Science. Information security research has developed techniques for protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information assets but is less strong on the empirical study of the effectiveness of these techniques. Crime Science studies the effect of crime prevention techniques empirically in the real world, and proposes improvements to these techniques based on this. Combining both approaches, Cyber-crime Science transfers and further develops Information Security techniques to prevent cyber-crime, and empirically studies the effectiveness of these techniques in the real world. In this paper we review the main contributions of Crime Science as of today, illustrate its application to a typical Information Security problem, namely phishing, explore the interdisciplinary structure of Cyber-crime Science, and present an agenda for research in Cyber-crime Science in the form of a set of suggested research questions

HandiVote: simple, anonymous, and auditable electronic voting

We suggest a set of procedures utilising a range of technologies by which a major democratic deficit of modern society can be addressed. The mechanism, whilst it makes limited use of cryptographic techniques in the background, is based around objects and procedures with which voters are currently familiar. We believe that this holds considerable potential for the extension of democratic participation and control