Copyright Enforcement of Non-Copyright Terms: MDY v. Blizzard and Krause v. Titleserv

The rise of software and software licensing has led to another phenomenon: the attempted enforcement of software licenses through copyright law. Over the last fifteen years, content creators have begun to bring copyright suits against licensees, arguing that violation of license terms withdraws the permission needed to run the software, turning the use of the software into copyright infringement. Not surprisingly, courts have rejected this argument, and both the Ninth Circuit, in MDY v. Blizzard, and the Second Circuit, in Krause v. Titleserv, have developed new legal rules to prevent copyright enforcement of contract terms. This iBrief explores software licensing in detail, analyzes the courts’ responses, and concludes that the Ninth Circuit’s approach to copyright enforcement of license terms is preferable to the Second Circuit’s approach because it is supported by legislative history, more straightforward, and more likely to prevent future content creators from enforcing their licenses through contract

Introduction to Random Signals and Noise

Random signals and noise are present in many engineering systems and networks. Signal processing techniques allow engineers to distinguish between useful signals in audio, video or communication equipment, and interference, which disturbs the desired signal. With a strong mathematical grounding, this text provides a clear introduction to the fundamentals of stochastic processes and their practical applications to random signals and noise. With worked examples, problems, and detailed appendices, Introduction to Random Signals and Noise gives the reader the knowledge to design optimum systems for effectively coping with unwanted signals.\ud \ud Key features:\ud • Considers a wide range of signals and noise, including analogue, discrete-time and bandpass signals in both time and frequency domains.\ud • Analyses the basics of digital signal detection using matched filtering, signal space representation and correlation receiver.\ud • Examines optimal filtering methods and their consequences.\ud • Presents a detailed discussion of the topic of Poisson processed and shot noise.\u

Satellite Imagery Multiscale Rapid Detection with Windowed Networks

Detecting small objects over large areas remains a significant challenge in satellite imagery analytics. Among the challenges is the sheer number of pixels and geographical extent per image: a single DigitalGlobe satellite image encompasses over 64 km2 and over 250 million pixels. Another challenge is that objects of interest are often minuscule (~pixels in extent even for the highest resolution imagery), which complicates traditional computer vision techniques. To address these issues, we propose a pipeline (SIMRDWN) that evaluates satellite images of arbitrarily large size at native resolution at a rate of > 0.2 km2/s. Building upon the tensorflow object detection API paper, this pipeline offers a unified approach to multiple object detection frameworks that can run inference on images of arbitrary size. The SIMRDWN pipeline includes a modified version of YOLO (known as YOLT), along with the models of the tensorflow object detection API: SSD, Faster R-CNN, and R-FCN. The proposed approach allows comparison of the performance of these four frameworks, and can rapidly detect objects of vastly different scales with relatively little training data over multiple sensors. For objects of very different scales (e.g. airplanes versus airports) we find that using two different detectors at different scales is very effective with negligible runtime cost.We evaluate large test images at native resolution and find mAP scores of 0.2 to 0.8 for vehicle localization, with the YOLT architecture achieving both the highest mAP and fastest inference speed.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables, 1 appendix. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1805.0951

Provision of metro ethernet services using a reconfigurable photonic access network

The paper proposes a design for traffic engineering to provide Ethernet services using an extended access network. Ethernet has remained the dominant technology for Local Area and Enterprise Networks, the use of Ethernet in metro networks has seen significant interest of late to provide for end to end Ethernet services to the user. The Broadband Photonic (BBP) access network is viewed as a quasi independent stack of EPONs in which geographically spread customer-VLANs (C-VLANs) can be implemented. The use of such a network for providing metro Ethernet like services in addition to traditional access services is presented

New Ethernet Based Optically Transparent Network for Fiber-to-the-Desk Application

We present a new optical local area network architecture based on multimode optical fibers and components, short wavelength lasers and detectors and the widely used fast Ethernet protocol. The presented optically transparent network represent a novel approach in fiber-to-the-desk applications. It is made to minimize the costs associated with a passive optical LAN implementation. The biggest issues in the realization of the network are the synchronization of bursty traffic and collision detection. We present, in detail, the solution to the synchronization problem by introducing an analog sinusoidal carrier that is in addition to the data signal only sent within the data packet duration. The extraction of data and the synchronization signal is made by using simple filtering, facilitating the receiver realization

Enhancement of multioctave dynamic range in a push-pull modulated analog photonic link

We demonstrate an analog photonic link with a high multioctave spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) using a push-pull modulation technique of laser diodes combined with a balanced detection scheme. SFDR enhancements ranging from 5 dB to 18 dB, relative to the case of a single arm link, have been obtained in a frequency range of 2.5 GHz to 3.2 GHz

A Novel Modulation Scheme for Noise Reduction in Analog Fiber Optic Links

A novel balanced modulation and detection scheme for analog fiber optic links is proposed to overcome the limitations in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and dynamic range (DR). In this scheme, the modulating signal is split into positive and negative halves and applied to a pair of laser diodes. Both arms of the link will convey a half-wave rectified version of the signal. At the receiving end the signal is restored via differential detection. Calculation results show that significant improvement in link SNR together with suppression of second-order distortions are achieved