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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Global Networks

Although the Internet has become ubiquitous, hardly anybody has a clear picture of its economic, political and technical hierarchies. Understanding this major technological development enables to gain an idea of the socio-economic powers structuring the Internet. World-Information.Org investigates the common legend that the Internet is highly decentralized and diversified and therefore not easily controllable and provides an assessment of the architectural properties of this network. It aims at making transparent the global communication structures and the technical Infostructure in the context of its invested interest.

Related search: Global Networks
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