Viacom v. YouTube: An Erroneous Ruling Based on the Outmoded DMCA

YouTube is currently the largest video website on the Internet. Although YouTube is often aware of the existence of infringing videos on its website, it only takes down such videos when copyright owners notify YouTube that a specific video is unauthorized. This policy prompted Viacom International to file a one billion dollar copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. On June 23, 2007, the court dismissed all charges against YouTube, holding that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) shielded the company from liability. This article argues that the court’s holding was erroneous because it misapplied several ambiguous provisions in the DMCA at critical junctures of its analysis. This article therefore proposes legislative amendments to the DMCA, and argues that the decision must be reversed on appeal in order to adequately protect the rights of copyright owners

Constant-Round Private Function Evaluation with Linear Complexity

We consider the problem of private function evaluation (PFE) in the two-party setting. Here, informally, one party holds an input $x$ while the other holds a circuit describing a function $f$; the goal is for one (or both) of the parties to learn $f(x)$ while revealing nothing more to either party. In contrast to the usual setting of secure computation --- where the function being computed is known to both parties --- PFE is useful in settings where the function (i.e., algorithm) itself must remain secret, e.g., because it is proprietary or classified. It is known that PFE can be reduced to standard secure computation by having the parties evaluate a universal circuit}, and this is the approach taken in most prior work. Using a universal circuit, however, introduces additional overhead and results in a more complex implementation. We show here a completely new technique for PFE that avoids universal circuits, and results in constant-round protocols with communication/computational complexity linear in the size of the circuit computing $f$. This gives the first constant-round protocol for PFE with linear complexity (without using fully homomorphic encryption), even restricted to semi-honest adversaries

Using Wikipedia to boost collaborative filtering techniques

One important challenge in the field of recommender systems is the sparsity of available data. This problem limits the ability of recommender systems to provide accurate predictions of user ratings. We overcome this problem by using the publicly available user generated information contained in Wikipedia. We identify similarities between items by mapping them to Wikipedia pages and finding similarities in the text and commonalities in the links and categories of each page. These similarities can be used in the recommendation process and improve ranking predictions. We find that this method is most effective in cases where ratings are extremely sparse or nonexistent. Preliminary experimental results on the MovieLens dataset are encouraging

Vitamin D Deficiency Promotes Liver Tumor Growth in Transforming Growth Factor-β/Smad3-Deficient Mice Through Wnt and Toll-like Receptor 7 Pathway Modulation.

Disruption of the TGF-β pathway is associated with liver fibrosis and suppression of liver tumorigenesis, conditions associated with low Vitamin D (VD) levels. However, potential contributions of VD to liver tumor progression in the context of TGF-β signaling remain unexplored. Our analyses of VD deprivation (VDD) in in vivo models of liver tumor formation revealed striking three-fold increases in tumor burden in Smad3(+/-) mice, with a three-fold increase in TLR7 expression compared to controls. ChIP and transcriptional assays confirm Smad3 binding at two TLR7 promoter SBE sites. Molecular interactions between TGF-β pathway and VDD were validated clinically, where an absence of VD supplementation was associated with low TGF-β pathway member expression levels and β-catenin activation in fibrotic/cirrhotic human liver tissues. Subsequent supplementing VD led to restoration of TGF-β member expression with lower β-catenin levels. Bioinformatics analysis provides positive supportive correlation between somatic mutations for VD-related genes and the TGF-β pathway. We conclude that VDD promotes tumor growth in the context of Smad3 disruption, potentially through regulation of TLR7 expression and β-catenin activation. VD could therefore be a strong candidate for liver cancer prevention in the context of aberrant Smad3 signaling