Copyright Management and Control Systems: Post-Infringement

Post-infringement technologies allow the owners of copyrighted works to identify infringements and thus enhance enforcement of intellectual property rights and encompass systems such as:

Steganography

Applied to electronic files, steganography refers to the process of hiding information in files that can not be easily detected by users. Steganography can be used by intellectual property owners in a variety of ways. One is to insert into the file a "digital watermark" which can be used to prove that an infringing file was the creation of the copyright holder and not the pirate. Other possibilities are to encode a unique serial number into each authorized copy or file, enabling the owner to trace infringing copies to a particular source, or to store copyright management information.

Agents

Agents are programs that can implement specified commands automatically. Copyright owners can use agents to search the public spaces of the Internet to find infringing copies. Although the technology is not yet very well developed full-text search engines allow similar uses.

Copyright Litigation

While not every infringement will be the subject of litigation, the threat of litigation helps keep large pirate operations in check. It helps copyright owners obtain relief for specific acts of infringement and publicly warns others of the dangers of infringement.

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Eliminating online censorship: Freenet, Free Haven and Publius

Protecting speech on the global data networks attracts an increasing attention. The efforts and the corresponding abilities of governmental authorities, corporations and copyright enforcement agencies are countered by similar efforts and abilities of researchers and engineers to provide means for anonymous and uncensored communication, as Freenet, Free Haven and Publius. All three of them show a similar design. Content is split up and spread on several servers. When a file is requested, the pieces are reassembled. This design makes it difficult to censor content. All of these systems are not commercial products.

The most advanced system seems to be Publius. Because of being designed by researchers and engineers at the prestigious AT&T Labs, Publius is a strong statement against online censorship. No longer can it be said that taking a firm stand against the use of technologies limiting the freedom of individuals is a position of radical leftists only.

For more information on Publius, see John Schwartz, Online and Unidentifiable? in: The Washington Post, June 30, 2000, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21689-2000Jun29.html .

Freenet web site: http://freenet.sourceforge.net

Free Haven web site: http://www.freehaven.net

Publius web site: http://www.cs.nyu.edu/waldman/publius

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Java Applets

Java applets are small programs that can be sent along with a Web page to a user. Java applets can perform interactive animations, immediate calculations, or other simple tasks without having to send a user request back to the server. They are written in Java, a platform-independent computer language, which was invented by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Source: Whatis.com

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The World Wide Web History Project

The ongoing World Wide Web History Project was established to record and publish the history of the World Wide Web and its roots in hypermedia and networking. As primary research methods are used archival research and the analysis of interviews and talks with pioneers of the World Wide Web. As result a vast of collection of historic video, audio, documents, and software is expected. The project's digital archive is currently under development.

http://www.webhistory.org/home.html

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