IPR Protection in the High-Tech Industries: A Model of Piracy

This article investigates the relation between the level of publicness of digital goods – i.e. their degree of non-excludability and non-rivalness – and the pirating behaviour of the consumers. The main focus is put on the difference between the ex-ante level of publicness – determined by the anti-piracy strategies of the firms – and the ex-post level of publicness – which is a consequence of external factors such as the consumers network structure, the consumers sharing behaviour, etc. The two models developed in the article detail the required conditions for anti-piracy strategies to be successful and show the influence of the economic environment on these conditions.Digital goods, Piracy, Public goods, Free-riding, Intellectual Property Rights

Understanding the Challenges of the Digital Economy: The Nature of Digital Goods

This article investigates the economic nature and characteristics of digital goods. Such goods are, due to their replicability, shown to be public goods (albeit in an evolutionary way) and durable goods. Furthermore, the content of such goods, combined with their durability, makes them experience goods. While only one of these characteristics would be sufficient to create difficulties for producers and lead to market failure, this article demonstrates that each of the characteristics reinforces the other. The framework presented in the article is then applied to two important issues: the new trend of massive consumer piracy and the overall problem of value of digital goodsdigital goods, public goods, durable goods, experience goods, piracy.

Lossy Channel Games under Incomplete Information

In this paper we investigate lossy channel games under incomplete information, where two players operate on a finite set of unbounded FIFO channels and one player, representing a system component under consideration operates under incomplete information, while the other player, representing the component's environment is allowed to lose messages from the channels. We argue that these games are a suitable model for synthesis of communication protocols where processes communicate over unreliable channels. We show that in the case of finite message alphabets, games with safety and reachability winning conditions are decidable and finite-state observation-based strategies for the component can be effectively computed. Undecidability for (weak) parity objectives follows from the undecidability of (weak) parity perfect information games where only one player can lose messages.Comment: In Proceedings SR 2013, arXiv:1303.007

White Knight or Trojan Horse? The Consequences of Digital Rights Management for Consumers, Firms and Society

Due to its ability to solve all main problems associated with digital goods, Digital Rights Management is the favourite option used by companies to tackle piracy. The aim of this article is to discuss the consequences of DRM for consumers, firms and society. The rationales of DRM are discussed and the expected benefits for firms are presented.. In contrast, consumers are shown to be likely to see few benefits in DRM. This article demonstrates that even a standard DRM system is unlikely to improve social welfare. The article concludes with some public policy recommendations.Digital Rights Management, Digital Goods, Piracy, Excludability, Durability, Sampling.

The Property Tax Exemption for Nonprofits

This paper reviews the existing literature on the property tax exemption for nonprofit organizations and identifies gaps to be addressed in future research. We start by examining justifications and existing eligibility criteria for the property tax exemption, followed by studies of the magnitude of the revenue loss from the exemption. We focus on theoretical and empirical studies of the economic effects of the exemption. We consider the effect of the tax advantage on nonprofit decisions about inputs, outputs and organizational form, decisions to rent or own, location decision, market share, and the effect of the exemption on neighboring property values. Finally, we evaluate research about the use of PILOTs and the implications of their possible expansion. We conclude that future studies need to examine further the magnitude of the revenues forgone, the advantages and disadvantages of PILOTs, and other solutions for distributing more evenly the burden of the exemption. Further studies are also needed to understand the economic effects of the property tax exemption, with opportunities for theoretical and empirical contributions. Working Paper 08-1

Abstractions and sensor design in partial-information, reactive controller synthesis

Automated synthesis of reactive control protocols from temporal logic specifications has recently attracted considerable attention in various applications in, for example, robotic motion planning, network management, and hardware design. An implicit and often unrealistic assumption in this past work is the availability of complete and precise sensing information during the execution of the controllers. In this paper, we use an abstraction procedure for systems with partial observation and propose a formalism to investigate effects of limitations in sensing. The abstraction procedure enables the existing synthesis methods with partial observation to be applicable and efficient for systems with infinite (or finite but large number of) states. This formalism enables us to systematically discover sensing modalities necessary in order to render the underlying synthesis problems feasible. We use counterexamples, which witness unrealizability potentially due to the limitations in sensing and the coarseness in the abstract system, and interpolation-based techniques to refine the model and the sensing modalities, i.e., to identify new sensors to be included, in such synthesis problems. We demonstrate the method on examples from robotic motion planning.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, Accepted at American Control Conference 201

Uncertainty in phylogenetic tree estimates

Estimating phylogenetic trees is an important problem in evolutionary biology, environmental policy and medicine. Although trees are estimated, their uncertainties are discarded by mathematicians working in tree space. Here we explicitly model the multivariate uncertainty of tree estimates. We consider both the cases where uncertainty information arises extrinsically (through covariate information) and intrinsically (through the tree estimates themselves). The importance of accounting for tree uncertainty in tree space is demonstrated in two case studies. In the first instance, differences between gene trees are small relative to their uncertainties, while in the second, the differences are relatively large. Our main goal is visualization of tree uncertainty, and we demonstrate advantages of our method with respect to reproducibility, speed and preservation of topological differences compared to visualization based on multidimensional scaling. The proposal highlights that phylogenetic trees are estimated in an extremely high-dimensional space, resulting in uncertainty information that cannot be discarded. Most importantly, it is a method that allows biologists to diagnose whether differences between gene trees are biologically meaningful, or due to uncertainty in estimation.Comment: Final version accepted to Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistic

Seeing is Believing: Dynamic Evolution of Gene Families

Department of Integrative Biology, Center for Computational Biology, Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712Supported by National Science Foundation Grants IOS- 0843712 and IOS-1354942 (to H.A.H.) and DBI-0939454 for the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action.Integrative Biolog

Co-creation and user innovation: The role of online 3D printing platforms

The aim of this article is to investigate the changes brought about by online 3D printing platforms in co-creation and user innovation. As doing so requires a thorough understanding of the level of user involvement in productive processes and a clear view of the nature of co-creative processes, this article provides a ‘prosumption’ framework and a typology of co-creation activities. Then, based on case studies of 22 online 3D printing platforms, a service-based taxonomy of these platforms is constructed. The taxonomy and typology are then matched to investigate the role played by online 3D platforms in regard to the various types of co-creation activities and, consequently, how this impacts user innovation

Before Ghibli was Ghibli:Analysing the historical discourses surrounding Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky (1986)

While Studio Ghibli may have become Japan’s most important and successful animation studio, its early significance is far more debatable in relation to the success of its films. Normally viewed from the present moment, Studio Ghibli’s brand significance is unmistakable, having become a producer of world renowned animation, and a distribution label for its own animated hit films and other high-profile animation in Japan. To challenge this perception of Ghibli’s brand significance, this article revisits the early history of Studio Ghibli in order to examine the discourses around the formation of the studio. Using Studio Ghibli’s first official film release, Tenkū no shiro Lapyuta (Castle in the Sky) (Miyazaki, 1986) as a case study, this article argues for a corrective analysis of the importance of Studio Ghibli to animator Hayao Miyazaki’s first ‘Ghibli’ film. The article demonstrates that throughout this release, there was a tension between art and industry that would become the hallmark of Ghibli’s style, but that the company itself may have had little to do with that brand’s early conception