Copyright and Technology: Hearing the Dissonance

This thesis concerns copyright and technology. It investigates their ever-growing dissonance, currently intensified by the processes of digitisation taking place in society at large. If there is a pressing need to reassess/modify copyright law against the backdrop of digital technology, the thesis argues that a prerequisite of this is that it divorces itself from the limitations in the existing copyright paradigm and, accordingly, recognise technology as a quality and condition for both its emergence and subsistence. In contrast to the prevailing tradition of viewing technology as an extrinsic condition affecting copyright, here its intrinsic quality is traced and emphasised. This is accomplished by means of circumventing copyright’s fundamental orienting principle of property and drawing instead on the notion of communication, which in turn enables us to recognise and reconstitute the ever-present intertwinement of copyright and technology. While communication as an approach is not foreign to the copyright discourse, it has rarely been deployed in investigating the relation between copyright and technology. The thesis advances from an understanding of communication focused on the end points and recognises the middle as a prerequisite and an essential element of communication. This shift in view does not only allow recognition of noise as an intrinsic feature of communication but also becomes a methodological tool through which the dissonance of copyright and technology can be ‘heard’ and comprehended. In doing so, the thesis draws on information theory, the work of the French philosopher Michel Serres, media and sound studies. By traversing different fields of study, in the end, the thesis immerses itself into a soundscape, and thus ‘aurality’ becomes a sensible manner for answering the guiding research question of what is the actual dissonance between copyright and technology. Ultimately, it argues that this manner of displacement provides new passages of investigation that go beyond the limitations of copyright’s normativity, and sets a conceptual basis for addressing the issues and re-articulating the relation between copyright and technology

Copyright and Heritage: Relation, Origin, Temporality

If there is one feature that frames the conceptual and normative foundations for both copyright law and cultural heritage it is the principle of origin. For a copyright to subsist the law requires an original expression that establishes the origin upon which it recognises the author and subsequently actualises the existence of property rights over that expression. For the cultural heritage, it is the origin of in/tangible manifestations and expressions that becomes the principle according to which belonging, identity, and tradition are recognised and established. While the concept of cultural heritage has arguably been comparable to the notion of ‘cultural property’, this nevertheless indicates that ‘heritage’ still negotiates its status within the various discourses that enclose and view cultural expressions, resources, artefacts through the perspectives of property and ownership – the principles associated with the very legal tradition that copyright law originates from. The approach of studying the relationship between copyright law and cultural heritage is often considered through the prism of proprietary notions and the distinctions they entail: private/public, individual/collective. The questions about the way and extent to which they contrast, or for that matter overlap, are pertinent when contextualising their subject matter. Indeed, the protection and promotion of culture, understood here in its broadest sense, remain to inform the justifications for their normative construction. However, what fundamentally embodies their existence is the understanding of origin as a temporal quality, which gives rise to their narratives, histories, memories, preservation (of themselves and their subject matter). As the French philosopher Michel Serres notes: the time moves ‘along a line of origin…[which] is not a point, [but] ‘a long sequence of founding circumstances.'(1) This paper approaches time as an inherent principle of both copyright law and cultural heritage in conceptualising and comparing their subject matter. More specifically, it argues that it is their use and understanding of time – as a measure and function – that provides an alternative approach to question how time is subsumed into normative conceptions, how it is used to regulate and impose, how it gives rise to property rights, how it informs narratives and their ‘timelessness’. While copyright is a temporal category that only temporary preserves, the cultural heritage builds itself by the very transmission of notions, ideas, skills, knowledge, and artefacts that further solidify the foundation of its continuance. Their value is not only related to the temporal significance, or preserving the facts that contextualise and provide evidence for cultural development, but also of recognising their inherent relation to time (future and past) as a trace that informs understanding of a particular system, civilisation, legal practice or mode of thinking. (1) Michel Serres, Rome: The First Book of Foundations (Bloomsbury, 2015) 220

Law with the Sound of Its Own Making

This paper makes use of Robert Morris’s seminal artwork Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961) as an analogy and a structural device to put forward an understanding of law as a sonic artefact. Similar to this sculpture of sound, or sound of sculpture for that matter, it proposes that law although a statue-like formation, is nevertheless constituted by its own ever-lasting sounding that continuously shapes the spatial and temporal field in which it reverberates; and encloses subjects and objects with its concrete occurrence. By resisting law’s tendency to instrumentalise and objectify sound, it argues that such sonic quality cannot be reduced only to law’s own pronouncements and vocalisations, but it traces the sonic in beyond that what is ‘audible’ to law, or what an ear can hear. By drawing on the work of the French philosopher Michel Serres it demonstrates the relational qualities of sound, noise, and hearing as intrinsic qualities to the body and functioning of law. Approaching sound and its relation to law in this way not only brings forward questions about the ontological bearings of law, but it also allows to sound out novel epistemological passages for hearing, understanding, and thinking about law

Law as Sonic Performance

This is part of Lend Me Your Ears which is is a multi-stranded collection of audio and video recordings created as part of Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Post-Verbatim, Amplified Storytelling and Gig Theatre in the Digital Age. This Salon conversation is about the relationship between law, sound and listening. Looking into concepts such as law and justice, structure and form, listening and hearing, improvisation and composition, and machine listening, Mandic and Ramshaw question the ways in which sound and law are similar, focusing on their elusive and material qualities. Their starting points for discussion are the sound of a dying battery of a smoke alarm and and 1984 recording of a piece by George E. Lewis

Republican States Bolstered Their Health Insurance Rate Review Programs Using Incentives From the Affordable Care Act.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) included financial and regulatory incentives and goals for states to bolster their health insurance rate review programs, increase their anticipated loss ratio requirements, expand Medicaid, and establish state-based exchanges. We grouped states by political party control and compared their reactions across these policy goals. To identify changes in states rate review programs and anticipated loss ratio requirements in the individual and small group markets since the ACAs enactment, we conducted legal research and contacted each states insurance regulator. We linked rate review program changes to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) criteria for an effective rate review program. We found, of states that did not meet CMSs criteria when the ACA was enacted, most made changes to meet those criteria, including Republican-controlled states, which generally oppose the ACA. This finding is likely the result of the relatively low administrative burden associated with reviewing health insurance rates and the fact that doing so prevents federal intervention in rate review. However, Republican-controlled states were less likely than non-Republican-controlled states to increase their anticipated loss ratio requirements to align with the federal retrospective medical loss ratio requirement, expand Medicaid, and establish state-based exchanges, because of their general opposition to the ACA. We conclude that federal incentives for states to strengthen their health insurance rate review programs were more effective than the incentives for states to adopt other insurance-related policy goals of the ACA

Smart helmet: wearable multichannel ECG & EEG

Modern wearable technologies have enabled continuous recording of vital signs, however, for activities such as cycling, motor-racing, or military engagement, a helmet with embedded sensors would provide maximum convenience and the opportunity to monitor simultaneously both the vital signs and the electroencephalogram (EEG). To this end, we investigate the feasibility of recording the electrocardiogram (ECG), respiration, and EEG from face-lead locations, by embedding multiple electrodes within a standard helmet. The electrode positions are at the lower jaw, mastoids, and forehead, while for validation purposes a respiration belt around the thorax and a reference ECG from the chest serve as ground truth to assess the performance. The within-helmet EEG is verified by exposing the subjects to periodic visual and auditory stimuli and screening the recordings for the steady-state evoked potentials in response to these stimuli. Cycling and walking are chosen as real-world activities to illustrate how to deal with the so-induced irregular motion artifacts, which contaminate the recordings. We also propose a multivariate R-peak detection algorithm suitable for such noisy environments. Recordings in real-world scenarios support a proof of concept of the feasibility of recording vital signs and EEG from the proposed smart helmet

Intrinsic multi-scale analysis: a multi-variate empirical mode decomposition framework.

A novel multi-scale approach for quantifying both inter- and intra-component dependence of a complex system is introduced. This is achieved using empirical mode decomposition (EMD), which, unlike conventional scale-estimation methods, obtains a set of scales reflecting the underlying oscillations at the intrinsic scale level. This enables the data-driven operation of several standard data-association measures (intrinsic correlation, intrinsic sample entropy (SE), intrinsic phase synchrony) and, at the same time, preserves the physical meaning of the analysis. The utility of multi-variate extensions of EMD is highlighted, both in terms of robust scale alignment between system components, a pre-requisite for inter-component measures, and in the estimation of feature relevance. We also illuminate that the properties of EMD scales can be used to decouple amplitude and phase information, a necessary step in order to accurately quantify signal dynamics through correlation and SE analysis which are otherwise not possible. Finally, the proposed multi-scale framework is applied to detect directionality, and higher order features such as coupling and regularity, in both synthetic and biological systems

Tensor Networks for Dimensionality Reduction and Large-Scale Optimizations. Part 2 Applications and Future Perspectives

Part 2 of this monograph builds on the introduction to tensor networks and their operations presented in Part 1. It focuses on tensor network models for super-compressed higher-order representation of data/parameters and related cost functions, while providing an outline of their applications in machine learning and data analytics. A particular emphasis is on the tensor train (TT) and Hierarchical Tucker (HT) decompositions, and their physically meaningful interpretations which reflect the scalability of the tensor network approach. Through a graphical approach, we also elucidate how, by virtue of the underlying low-rank tensor approximations and sophisticated contractions of core tensors, tensor networks have the ability to perform distributed computations on otherwise prohibitively large volumes of data/parameters, thereby alleviating or even eliminating the curse of dimensionality. The usefulness of this concept is illustrated over a number of applied areas, including generalized regression and classification (support tensor machines, canonical correlation analysis, higher order partial least squares), generalized eigenvalue decomposition, Riemannian optimization, and in the optimization of deep neural networks. Part 1 and Part 2 of this work can be used either as stand-alone separate texts, or indeed as a conjoint comprehensive review of the exciting field of low-rank tensor networks and tensor decompositions.Comment: 232 page