Defamation on the Internet: an analytical study of defamation law and the Internet in England and Wales: 1996 to 2009

For many decades, defamation law in England in Wales has predominantly only had to deal with material that has been published via printed publications, radio and television. As such, defamation law has been tailored to best suit these media. Since the introduction of the Internet, defamation law has been tested to its limits with a number of commentators arguing that it is not equipped to deal with the uniqueness of the online publications. Consequently, Internet service providers, content hosts and Internet users are all at risk of being held as the publisher and being sued for defamation, potentially, anywhere in the world, even if they had no prior knowledge of the material in question. Previous research regarding the Internet and defamation has been scarce. This research has set out to gain a greater understanding of the problems facing Internet service providers and the threats to freedom of expression on the Internet caused by defamation law, procedures and practice. This has been achieved by conducting an indepth desk research of academic text, press commentary and case law followed by interviews with Internet service providers, content hosts and lawyers with an expertise of defamation. Initial assumptions were that defamation law, procedures and practice was threatening freedom of expression on the Internet. This proved to be correct and of great concern to the Internet publishing community. It was also found that defamation law procedure and practice was in many cases efficient in the removal of alleged defamatory (Internet based) material and in its attempt to restore a person s reputation. It has been concluded that parts of defamation law in England and Wales could be revised to improve the preservation of freedom of expression on the Internet. Furthermore, current defamation law coupled with defamation procedures and practice are leaving Internet publishers vulnerable to vexatious claims of defamation. There is also evidence to suggest that conditional fee agreements used within defamation legal practice are becoming more popular for defamation cases and consequently, threatening freedom of expression on the Internet. Finally, Internet defamation cases and disputes are becoming a greater part of a defamation lawyer's practice and in some practices becoming more popular than traditional printed libel cases. It is for this reason that the results, conclusions and recommendations of this research are of a timely nature and of significant importance to the field of Internet publishing

Net Neutrality

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Chris Marsden maneuvers through the hype articulated by Netwrok Neutrality advocates and opponents. He offers a clear-headed analysis of the high stakes in this debate about the Internet's future, and fearlessly refutes the misinformation and misconceptions that about' Professor Rob Freiden, Penn State University Net Neutrality is a very heated and contested policy principle regarding access for content providers to the Internet end-user, and potential discrimination in that access where the end-user's ISP (or another ISP) blocks that access in part or whole. The suggestion has been that the problem can be resolved by either introducing greater competition, or closely policing conditions for vertically integrated service, such as VOIP. However, that is not the whole story, and ISPs as a whole have incentives to discriminate between content for matters such as network management of spam, to secure and maintain customer experience at current levels, and for economic benefit from new Quality of Service standards. This includes offering a ‘priority lane' on the network for premium content types such as video and voice service. The author considers market developments and policy responses in Europe and the United States, draws conclusions and proposes regulatory recommendations

Net Neutrality

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Chris Marsden maneuvers through the hype articulated by Netwrok Neutrality advocates and opponents. He offers a clear-headed analysis of the high stakes in this debate about the Internet's future, and fearlessly refutes the misinformation and misconceptions that about' Professor Rob Freiden, Penn State University Net Neutrality is a very heated and contested policy principle regarding access for content providers to the Internet end-user, and potential discrimination in that access where the end-user's ISP (or another ISP) blocks that access in part or whole. The suggestion has been that the problem can be resolved by either introducing greater competition, or closely policing conditions for vertically integrated service, such as VOIP. However, that is not the whole story, and ISPs as a whole have incentives to discriminate between content for matters such as network management of spam, to secure and maintain customer experience at current levels, and for economic benefit from new Quality of Service standards. This includes offering a ‘priority lane' on the network for premium content types such as video and voice service. The author considers market developments and policy responses in Europe and the United States, draws conclusions and proposes regulatory recommendations

Electronic Evidence and Electronic Signatures

In this updated edition of the well-established practitioner text, Stephen Mason and Daniel Seng have brought together a team of experts in the field to provide an exhaustive treatment of electronic evidence and electronic signatures. This fifth edition continues to follow the tradition in English evidence text books by basing the text on the law of England and Wales, with appropriate citations of relevant case law and legislation from other jurisdictions. Stephen Mason (of the Middle Temple, Barrister) is a leading authority on electronic evidence and electronic signatures, having advised global corporations and governments on these topics. He is also the editor of International Electronic Evidence (British Institute of International and Comparative Law 2008), and he founded the innovative international open access journal Digital Evidence and Electronic Signatures Law Review in 2004. Daniel Seng (Associate Professor, National University of Singapore) is the Director of the Centre for Technology, Robotics, AI and the Law (TRAIL). He teaches and researches information technology law and evidence law. Daniel was previously a partner and head of the technology practice at Messrs Rajah & Tann. He is also an active consultant to the World Intellectual Property Organization, where he has researched, delivered papers and published monographs on copyright exceptions for academic institutions, music copyright in the Asia Pacific and the liability of Internet intermediaries

INVESTIGATING THE USE OF INFORMATION COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY (ICT) FOR PEDAGOGIC CHANGE IN MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE (PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY) TEACHING/LEARNING IN NIGERIAN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS (HEIs)

This study identifies how for decades in Nigeria mathematics and science have been difficult to teach effectively, with lower-than-expected learning attainment. The study aims to explore the factors influencing underperformance in these subjects, in the context of the introduction by the Federal Government of the Vision 2020 policy aiming to address sub-optimal educational standards. Traditional teacher-centred pedagogy is predominant worldwide, including in the Nigerian education system, in the delivery of mathematics and science curricula. Despite the importance of these perceived “challenging and hard” subjects to economic, scientific and technological developments, this is, generally speaking, an inferior pedagogy to student-centred pedagogy, which promotes both memory and comprehension. This study investigates whether the introduction in this context of more Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-based and Student-Centred Learning (SCL)-based approaches may improve the quality of teaching and learning. For teachers/lecturers to acquire the necessary competencies, pedagogical and ICT skills, they were specially trained to develop the technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK/TPCK) needed in the effective use of ICT in mathematics and science mediated lessons that is focused towards boosting students’ performance and lowering failure rates. A mixed methods approach was used for this enquiry. A purposive sampling technique was used to select all participants who are from the Departments of Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Computer Science of a Nigerian university. Interviews, questionnaires and observations of classes mediated through ICT were used to collect data. The study identifies that the use of ICT in mathematics and science teaching is especially effective in the promotion of a student-centred approach, assisting the pivotal role of teachers as facilitators and enabling a more autonomous learning environment to be created, which in turn enhances students’ understanding of basic concepts. Furthermore, the findings confirm that the use of ICT provides new ways of communicating, learning, working collaboratively and likely improving students’ performance in mathematics and science. The findings also confirm that ICT adoption and integration into mathematics and science curricula is, nonetheless, still very low in the university involved in this study, while many challenges to the use of ICT in mathematics and science teaching and learning remain. This in turn leaves Nigerian teachers/lecturers generally still not availing themselves of student-centred pedagogy. This thesis recommends that the obstacles and other challenges to using ICT in teaching are tackled, in order to promote their effective use in higher education and to prepare Nigeria’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) graduates to be productive and competitive

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Framework to facilitate smooth handovers between mobile IPv6 networks

Fourth generation (4G) mobile communication networks are characterised by heterogeneous access networks and IP based transport technologies. Different access technologies give users choices to select services such as levels of Quality of Service (QoS) support, business models and service providers. Flexibility of heterogeneous access is compounded by the overhead of scanning to discover accessible services, which added to the handoff latency. This thesis has developed mechanisms for service discovery and service selection, along with a novel proposal for mobility management architectures that reduced handoff latency. The service discovery framework included a service advertisement data repository and a single frequency band access mechanism, which enabled users to explore services offered by various operators with a reduced scanning overhead. The novel hierarchical layout of the repository enabled it to categorise information into various layers and facilitate location based information retrieval. The information made available by the repository included cost, bandwidth, Packet Loss (PL), latency, jitter, Bit Error Rate (BER), location and service connectivity information. The single frequency band access mechanism further enabled users to explore service advertisements in the absence of their main service providers. The single frequency access mechanism broadcasted service advertisements information piggybacked onto a router advertisement packet on a reserved frequency band for advertisements. Results indicated that scanning 13 channels on 802.11 b interface takes 189ms whereas executing a query with maximum permissible search parameters on the service advertisement data repository takes 67ms. A service selection algorithm was developed to make handoff decisions utilising the service advertisements acquired from the service discovery framework; based on a user's preference. The selection algorithm reduced the calculation overhead by eliminating unsuitable networks; based on interface compatibility, service provider location, unacceptable QoS (Quality of service) and unacceptable cost; from the selection process. The selection algorithm utilised cost, bandwidth, PL, latency, jitter, BER and terminal power for computing the most suitable network. Results indicated that the elimination based approach has improved the performance of the algorithm by 35% over non- elimination oriented selection procedures, even after utilising more selection parameters. The service discovery framework and the service selection algorithm are flexible enough to be employed in most mobility management architectures. The thesis recommends Seamless Mobile Internet Protocol (SMIP) as a mobility management scheme based on the simulation results. The SMIP protocol, a combination of Hierarchical Mobile Internet Protocol (HMIP) and Fast Mobile Internet Protocol (FMIP), suffered hand off latency increases when undergoing a global handoff due to HMIP. The proposed modification to the HMIP included the introduction of a coverage area overlap, to reduce the global handoff latency. The introduction of a Home Address (HA) in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) binding table enabled seamless handoffs from WLANs by having a redirection mechanism for the user's packets after handoff. The thesis delivered a new mobility management architecture with mechanisms for service discovery and service selection. The proposed framework enabled user oriented, application centric and terminal based approach for selecting IPv6 networks