Digital Preservation Challenges, Infrastructures and Evaluations

To preserve digitally encoded information over a long term following the OAIS Reference Model requires that the information remains accessible, understandable and usable by a specified Designated Community. These are significant challenges for repositories. It will be argued that infrastructure which is needed to support this preservation must be seen in the context of the broader science data infrastructure which international and national funders seek to put in place. Moreover aspects of the preservation components of this infrastructure must themselves be preservable, resulting in a recursive system which must also be highly adaptable, loosely coupled and asynchronous. Even more difficult is to be able to judge whether any proposal is actually likely to be effective. From the earliest discussions of concerns about the preservability of digital objects there have been calls for some way of judging the quality of digital repositories. In this chapter several interrelated efforts which contribute to solutions for these issues will be outlined. Evidence about the challenges which must be overcome and the consistency of demands across nations, disciplines and organisations will be presented, based on extensive surveys which have been carried out by the PARSE.Insight project (http://www.parse-insight.eu). The key points about the revision of the OAIS Reference Model which is underway will be provided; OAIS provides many of the key concepts which underpin the efforts to judge solutions. In the past few years the Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification: Criteria and Checklist (TRAC) document has been produced, as well as a number of related checklists. These efforts provide the background of the international effort (the RAC Working Group http://wiki.digitalrepositoryauditandcertification.org) to produce a full ISO standard on which an accreditation and certification process can be built. If successful this standard and associated processes will allow funders to have an independent evaluation of the effectiveness of the archives they support and data producers to have a basis for deciding which repository to entrust with their valuable data. It could shape the digital preservation market. The CASPAR project (http://www.casparpreserves.eu) is an EU part funded project with total spend of 16MEuros which is trying to faithfully implement almost all aspects of the OAIS Reference Model in particular the Information Model. The latter involves tools for capturing all types of Representation Information (Structure, Semantics and all Other types), and tools for defining the Designated Community. This chapter will describe implementations of tools and infrastructure components to support repositories in their task of long term preservation of digital resources, including the capture and preservation of digital rights management and evidence of authenticity associated with digital objects. In order to justify their existence, most repositories must also support contemporaneous use of contemporary as well as “historical” resources; the authors will show how the same techniques can support both, and hence link to the fuller science data infrastructure.

Ethics and Social Issues Related to Information Communication Technology (ICT)

Information Communication Technology (ICT) has raised new ethical concerns about the protection of personal privacy, protection of intellectual property, user responsibility, acceptable access and use of information, software licenses and piracy. A good ICT policy must be able to adequately consider these, and many other associated issues. This chapter therefore describes these ethical issues and how to deal with them as an individual or an organization. It provides information on the concept of ethics and the technological advancements responsible for the ethical concern. It discusses privacy, information rights, and intellectual property rights and ethics policy. The Nigerian national intellectual property right laws were examined in line with World Trade Organization/Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (WTO/TRIP) compliance.

Patent Infringement Risk Analysis Using Rough Set Theory

Patent infringement risk is a significant issue for corporations due to the increased appreciation of intellectual property rights. If a corporation gives insufficient protection to its patents, it may loss both profits from product, and industry competitiveness. Many studies on patent infringement have focused on measuring the patent trend indicators and the patent monetary value. However, very few studies have attempted to develop a categorization mechanism for measuring and evaluating the patent infringement risk, for example, the categorization of the patent infringement cases, then to determine the significant attributes and introduce the infringement decision rules. This study applies Rough Set Theory (RST), which is suitable for processing qualitative information to induce rules to derive significant attributes for categorization of the patent infringement risk. Moreover, through the use of the concept hierarchy and the credibility index, it can be integrated with RST and then enhance application of the finalized decision rules.

Policing of Movie and Music Piracy

Ongoing skirmishes between mainstream Hollywood entertainment conglomerates and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing networks recently reached a crescendo when a Swedish court convicted members of the world’s largest BitTorrent, The Pirate Bay, and handed out the stiffest sentence to date.1 Four operators of The Pirate Bay received one year imprisonments and fines totaling $30 million, including confiscation of equipment. While this verdict sent shockwaves amongst P2P networks, piracy remains rampant, and this incident further exacerbated relations between file sharers and Hollywood. In retaliation, supporters of P2P file-sharing attacked websites of the law firms representing the Hollywood studios (Johnson, 2009). This victory by Hollywood studios may be a Pyrrhic defeat in the long run if the studios do not soften their antagonistic relations with the public. This chapter explores structural and cultural conflicts amongst security actors that make fighting piracy extremely difficult. In addition, it considers the role of law enforcement, government, industries, and the general public in creating long-term security models.

Trust Calculation and Management in P2P and Grid Systems

The significance of efficient security mechanisms in P2P and Grid systems is unquestionable, since security is considered to be a quality of service factor for such systems. Traditional security mechanisms in P2P and Grid systems include encryption, sand-boxing and other access control and authentication mechanisms. Unfortunately these techniques incur additional overhead. By using trust and reputation-based mechanisms, the additional overhead is minimized. The deployment of efficient trust mechanisms results to a safer communication between P2P or Grid nodes, increasing the quality of service and making P2P and Grid technology more appealing. The aim of this book chapter is to lay the theoretical background of concepts such as trust, reputation, trust graphs and trust functions. Furthermore it presents classification schemes for trust functions, discussing the characteristics and differences of each classification. Finally, it analyses popular trust and reputation-based management mechanisms that have been implemented in both P2P and Grid systems.

The Management System of Enterprises’ Intellectual Property Rights

Strengthening the management of IPRs (intellectual property rights) is one of the most important ways to improve an enterprise’s innovative capability. NST (NineStar Technology Co., Ltd, in Zhuhai, China) wins the recognition of both the domestic and the foreign markets through building an advanced IPRs management system to promote their products and institutional innovation, and to respond positively to foreign patents litigations. Based on the case of NST, combined with related literatures, this paper introduced the six components of an enterprise’s IPRs management system: information system, strategic system, establishing system, development system, protection system, and operation system.

Open Content in Libraries

The basic issue examined in this chapter is how can open access be achieved through the instrument of contracts. In the digital environment right holders have the power to restrict access to works by using restrictive contractual terms enforced by means of technical measures. As a counterbalance to the extended authority of the right holder, open access movements have appeared which express the users’ need to have open access to creative content. It is put forward that the terms used in contractual forms that have been standardized and express the ideology of open content are not always compatible with the existing copyright law contractual provisions and the way in which collective management functions.

Library Photocopy Policies

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss library photocopy policies. It gives the meaning of photocopy, methods of photocopy, photocopy policies and copyright law as applicable to library photocopy. It is noted in the chapter that photocopy and its policy will continue to be part of the library as long as materials in printed format are available and provided to users.

An Evaluation of User Password Practice

Maintaining the security of information systems and associated data resources is vital if an organization is to minimize losses. Access controls are the first line of defense in this process. The primary function of authentication controls is to ensure that only authorized users have access to information systems and electronic resources. Password-based systems remain the predominant means of user authentication despite viable authentication alternatives. Research suggests that password-based systems are often compromised by poor user security practices. This chapter presents the results of a survey of 884 computer users that examines user practice in creating and reusing password keys, and reports the findings on user password composition and security practices for email accounts. Despite a greater awareness of security issues, the results show that many users still select and reuse weak passwords keys that are based on dictionary words and other meaningful information.

Application of Error Control Coding for Multimedia Watermarking Technologies

Intellectual property right, copyright, trade mark, digital rights management (DRM) are buzz words heard more often in era of Internet. Along with the uncountable advantages Internet has also brought certain evils. These evils have social, technological, economical and legal impact on our society in general. One of the issues concerning the “content creators” is mass violations of copyrights for their work through illegal distribution via “darknet”. Watermarking is seen as one of the component for DRM systems that can act as a deterrent to content flowing into the darknet. The performance of watermarking schemes can be improved if channel codes are used for encoding the hidden message. The chapter targets applications of Error Control Coding (ECC) to watermarking namely: copyright protection, authentication, forensics and stego watermarking techniques including active steganography. This chapter aims at studying various properties of watermarking systems (depending on application), looking into their specific requirements and then try to search for suitable error control code. This will boost the over all performance of watermarking techniques. This chapter also intends to discuss the state of art research in this direction and then presents a watermarking method based on facts covered in chapter.