Market-awareness in service-based systems

Service-based systems are applications built by composing pre-existing services. During design time and according to the specifications, a set of services is selected. Both, service providers and consumers exist in a service market that is constantly changing. Service providers continuously change their quality of services (QoS), and service consumers can update their specifications according to what the market is offering. Therefore, during runtime, the services are periodically and manually checked to verify if they still satisfy the specifications. Unfortunately, humans are overwhelmed with the degree of changes exhibited by the service market. Consequently, verification of the compliance specification and execution of the corresponding adaptations when deviations are detected cannot be carried out in a manual fashion. In this work, we propose a framework to enable online awareness of changes in the service market in both consumers and providers by representing them as active software agents. At runtime, consumer agents concretize QoS specifications according to the available market knowledge. Services agents are collectively aware of themselves and of the consumers' requests. Moreover, they can create and maintain virtual organizations to react actively to demands that come from the market. In this paper we show preliminary results that allow us to conclude that the creation and adaptation of service-based systems can be carried out by a self-organized service market system

An Analysis of Service Ontologies

Services are increasingly shaping the world’s economic activity. Service provision and consumption have been profiting from advances in ICT, but the decentralization and heterogeneity of the involved service entities still pose engineering challenges. One of these challenges is to achieve semantic interoperability among these autonomous entities. Semantic web technology aims at addressing this challenge on a large scale, and has matured over the last years. This is evident from the various efforts reported in the literature in which service knowledge is represented in terms of ontologies developed either in individual research projects or in standardization bodies. This paper aims at analyzing the most relevant service ontologies available today for their suitability to cope with the service semantic interoperability challenge. We take the vision of the Internet of Services (IoS) as our motivation to identify the requirements for service ontologies. We adopt a formal approach to ontology design and evaluation in our analysis. We start by defining informal competency questions derived from a motivating scenario, and we identify relevant concepts and properties in service ontologies that match the formal ontological representation of these questions. We analyze the service ontologies with our concepts and questions, so that each ontology is positioned and evaluated according to its utility. The gaps we identify as the result of our analysis provide an indication of open challenges and future work

Making Virtual Copyright Work

This Article proposes measures that attempt to strike the balance between creation and access. The virtual-world community is not likely to persevere with the little copyright protection it currently enjoys. Creativity will dwindle and the rich, energetic settings that make virtual worlds so attractive to businesses and entertainers will follow suit. At the same time, because much of the creativity in virtual worlds is derivative in nature, virtual creators are also unlikely to benefit from strong copyright protections. Therefore, current interpretation of copyright law must be revisited and revised before applying it to virtual worlds. Part I details virtual worlds and, in particular, the features that set Second Life apart. Part II asks whether virtual works are copyrightable at all and answers in the affirmative, and then discusses authorship and ownership issues in virtual worlds. Part III discusses what copyright means for virtual worlds, including just how important creativity and continued incentives to create are for the survival of virtual worlds. Finally, Part IV argues that, while copyright will be imposed on virtual worlds, broadening the scope of fair use in virtual worlds and imposing a compulsory license for virtual derivatives will encourage creativity and more effectively serve the purpose of copyright law

Copyright’s Techno-Pessimist Creep

Government investigations and public scrutiny of Big Tech are at an all-time high. While current legal scholarship and government focus have centered overwhelmingly on whether and how antitrust law and § 230 of the Communications Decency Act can be revised to address platform dominance, scant attention has been paid to another, almost unseen attempt to regulate Big Tech: copyright law. The recent adoption in Europe of Article 17 of the Copyright Directive, which holds internet platforms liable for user-generated creative content unless they obtain costly content licenses, is the most direct example of such regulation—and may serve as precedent for similar changes to U.S. law. Meanwhile, before the courts and in the executive branch, copyright holders are increasingly harnessing anti–Big Tech sentiment to advocate for everything from weakening fair use doctrine to terminating long-standing government oversight of certain concentrated content holders. As recent scholarship laments the role that copyright minimalism played in the meteoric ascent of large technology platforms, this Article argues that increasing copyright protection will not combat monopolies. The seemingly compelling public narrative that laws must be rewritten to combat power by any means necessary ignores the uniqueness of copyright markets as ones dominated not by diffuse, weak licensors bargaining with technology giants, but instead by large, oligopolistic content conglomerates. Changes in copyright laws that increase the cost of content licenses fail to address, and indeed will only enrich, the long-standing dominance of traditional content licensors. They will also entrench and concentrate licensees, creating a bilateral oligopolistic market for copyrighted works. And such changes will, ultimately, hasten the obsolescence of the very content industries that advocated for these reforms, as today’s licensees evolve to become tomorrow’s licensors. This Article concludes that to fight monopoly, to be truly neo-Brandeisian, one must think beyond copyright law

Making Virtual Copyright Work

This Article proposes measures that attempt to strike the balance between creation and access. The virtual-world community is not likely to persevere with the little copyright protection it currently enjoys. Creativity will dwindle and the rich, energetic settings that make virtual worlds so attractive to businesses and entertainers will follow suit. At the same time, because much of the creativity in virtual worlds is derivative in nature, virtual creators are also unlikely to benefit from strong copyright protections. Therefore, current interpretation of copyright law must be revisited and revised before applying it to virtual worlds. Part I details virtual worlds and, in particular, the features that set Second Life apart. Part II asks whether virtual works are copyrightable at all and answers in the affirmative, and then discusses authorship and ownership issues in virtual worlds. Part III discusses what copyright means for virtual worlds, including just how important creativity and continued incentives to create are for the survival of virtual worlds. Finally, Part IV argues that, while copyright will be imposed on virtual worlds, broadening the scope of fair use in virtual worlds and imposing a compulsory license for virtual derivatives will encourage creativity and more effectively serve the purpose of copyright law

Making Virtual Copyright Work

This Article proposes measures that attempt to strike the balance between creation and access. The virtual-world community is not likely to persevere with the little copyright protection it currently enjoys. Creativity will dwindle and the rich, energetic settings that make virtual worlds so attractive to businesses and entertainers will follow suit. At the same time, because much of the creativity in virtual worlds is derivative in nature, virtual creators are also unlikely to benefit from strong copyright protections. Therefore, current interpretation of copyright law must be revisited and revised before applying it to virtual worlds. Part I details virtual worlds and, in particular, the features that set Second Life apart. Part II asks whether virtual works are copyrightable at all and answers in the affirmative, and then discusses authorship and ownership issues in virtual worlds. Part III discusses what copyright means for virtual worlds, including just how important creativity and continued incentives to create are for the survival of virtual worlds. Finally, Part IV argues that, while copyright will be imposed on virtual worlds, broadening the scope of fair use in virtual worlds and imposing a compulsory license for virtual derivatives will encourage creativity and more effectively serve the purpose of copyright law