Intellectual property law on architectural design in collaborative design communication as digital assets

Digital Economy is one of the crucial elements promoted by the Digital Britain Report June 2009 and its Implementation Plan August 2009 in order to maintain and further the UK’s position as one of the world’s leading digital knowledge economies. Therefore, the application of Digital Technologies is high in the agenda. As pervasive digital technologies become more widely available, it becomes increasingly important to understand the legal implications of digital assets produced via digital technologies in collaborative design communication. Architects and engineers depend on intellectual property law to protect their original works. Copyright protection is automatic once a tangible medium of expression in any form of an innovative material, conforming the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, is created. Although copyright law provides automatic protection to all original architectural plans, the limitation is that it only protects the expression of ideas but not the ideas themselves. The purpose of this research is to explore how effective the UK’s copyright law regime is for protecting the rights and interests of architects and engineers in their works as digital assets. The UK’s copyright law is ripe for modernisation not only to protect the rights of designers but also to further UK’s position in digital economy.

Non-display uses of digital works: Google Books and beyond

With the advent of mass digitization projects, such as the Google Book Search, a peculiar shift has occurred in the way that copyright works are dealt with. Contrary to what has so far been the case, works are turned into machine-readable data to be automatically processed for various purposes without the expression of works being displayed to the public. In the Google Book Settlement Agreement, this new kind of usage is referred to as ‘non-display uses’ of digital works. The legitimacy of these uses has not yet been tested by Courts and does not comfortably fit in the current copyright doctrine, plainly because the works are not used as works but as something else, namely as data. Since non-display uses may prove to be a very lucrative market in the near future, with the potential to affect the way people use copyright works, we examine non-display uses under the prism of copyright principles to determine the boundaries of their legitimacy. Through this examination, we provide a categorization of the activities carried out under the heading of ‘non-display uses’, we examine their lawfulness under the current copyright doctrine and approach the phenomenon from the spectrum of data protection law that could apply, by analogy, to the use of copyright works as processable data.

Gestão da segurança da informação: certificação digital

More over, the information has become the main asset of the institutions. Being thus, the Information Security (IS) is getting attention as one of the activities of extreme importance in the corporations. Guarantee the confidentiality, integrity, availability, no deny and legality becomes something very important for the day-by-day of the businesses. An analysis of the risk, passing through the assessment of the threats and vulnerabilities, is mandatory to let grow the activities of the institutions. Digital Certification came into IS to guarantee the Not Deny (ND) because it makes the unquestioned identification of the person that makes the action. Therefore, Information Security can be defined as a knowledge field focused in the protection of the information assets against: unauthorized access, improper modifications, not availability, deny of authorship and illegality.

O direito ao esquecimento na era digital: desafios da regulação da desvinculação de urls prejudiciais a pessoas naturais nos índices de pesquisa dos buscadores horizontais

No julgamento do recurso especial referente à ação ajuizada pela apresentadora Xuxa Meneghel para compelir o Google Search a desvincular dos seus índices de busca os resultados relativos à pesquisa sobre a expressão “Xuxa pedófila” ou qualquer outra que associasse o nome da autora a esta prática criminosa, a relatora da decisão, a Ministra Nancy Andrighi, definiu de maneira clara a controvérsia de que cuida este trabalho: o cotidiano de milhares de pessoas depende atualmente de informações que estão na web, e que dificilmente seriam encontradas sem a utilização das ferramentas de pesquisas oferecidas pelos sites de busca. Por outro lado, esses mesmos buscadores horizontais podem ser usados para a localização de páginas com informações, URLs prejudiciais resultantes da busca com o nome das pessoas. Diante disso, o que fazer? Existiria realmente um direito de ser esquecido, isto é, de ter uma URL resultante de uma pesquisa sobre o nome de uma pessoa desvinculado do índice de pesquisa do buscador horizontal? Há quem afirme que a medida mais apropriada para lidar com esse problema seria ir atrás do terceiro que publicou essa informação originariamente na web. Há também quem defenda que a proteção de um direito de ser esquecido representaria uma ameaça grande demais para a liberdade de expressão e de informação. Diante deste quadro, esta dissertação visa a estabelecer quais podem ser as características e os limites do direito ao esquecimento na era digital, de acordo com o estado atual da legislação brasileira a respeito, confrontando-se tal direito com outros direitos e interesses públicos e privados (especialmente o direito à liberdade de expressão e à informação) e levando em conta as características de funcionamento da própria rede mundial de computadores, em especial das ferramentas de buscas. Tendo em vista a importância dos buscadores horizontais no exercício do acesso à informação e, além disso, as dificuldades relacionadas à retirada de URLs de todos os sítios em que tenham sido publicadas, nossa pesquisa focará no potencial – e nas dificuldades – de se empregar a regulação de tais ferramentas de busca para a proteção eficaz do direito ao esquecimento na era digital.

New laws for author's rights: adequate for digital preservation?

Introduction. Besides technical and economic-organisational problems, digital preservation also faces legal issues, especially regarding copyright legislation, since all digital preservation strategies involve copying materials and/or using software which is typically copyrighted. The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the extent to which current copyright laws meet the preservation requirements of library materials..Methodology. A cross-sectional analysis of recently updated national copyright laws as well as the impact of the other two protection methods: contractual and technological.Results. Even after the latest updates current copyright legislation is almost useless for digital preservation activities since the opportunities provided by WIPO Copyright Treaty to adapt and extend copyright exceptions and limitations have been used to the full.Conclusion. We need a legislation reform that will make it possible to carry out all required copying and communication activities and software use, even if circumventing technological protection is needed. But that is not enough for licensed works. The best solution for this kind of work is to include specific clauses in the licences that facilitate preservation activities. Thus, cooperation between both parties, libraries and rights' holders, is essential.

Um serviço de certificação digital para plataformas de middleware

Nowadays due to the security vulnerability of distributed systems, it is needed mechanisms to guarantee the security requirements of distributed objects communications. Middleware Platforms component integration platforms provide security functions that typically offer services for auditing, for guarantee messages protection, authentication, and access control. In order to support these functions, middleware platforms use digital certificates that are provided and managed by external entities. However, most middleware platforms do not define requirements to get, to maintain, to validate and to delegate digital certificates. In addition, most digital certification systems use X.509 certificates that are complex and have a lot of attributes. In order to address these problems, this work proposes a digital certification generic service for middleware platforms. This service provides flexibility via the joint use of public key certificates, to implement the authentication function, and attributes certificates to the authorization function. It also supports delegation. Certificate based access control is transparent for objects. The proposed service defines the digital certificate format, the store and retrieval system, certificate validation and support for delegation. In order to validate the proposed architecture, this work presents the implementation of the digital certification service for the CORBA middleware platform and a case study that illustrates the service functionalities

La nueva revolución digital: de la Internet del consumo a la Internet de la producción

Prólogo de Alicia Bárcena

The new digital revolution: From the consumer Internet to the industrial Internet

The new digital technologies have led to widespread use of cloud computing, recognition of the potential of big data analytics, and significant progress in aspects of the Internet of Things, such as home automation, smart cities and grids and digital manufacturing. In addition to closing gaps in respect of the basic necessities of access and usage, now the conditions must be established for using the new platforms and finding ways to participate actively in the creation of content and even new applications and platforms. This message runs through the three chapters of this book. Chapter I presents the main features of the digital revolution, emphasizing that today’s world economy is a digital economy. Chapter II examines the region’s strengths and weaknesses with respect to digital access and consumption. Chapter III reviews the main policy debates and urges countries to take a more proactive approach towards, for example, regulation, network neutrality and combating cybercrime. The conclusion highlights two crucial elements: first, the need to take steps towards a single regional digital market that can compete in a world of global platforms by tapping the benefits of economies of scale and developing network economies; and second, the significance of the next stage of the digital agenda for Latin America and the Caribbean (eLAC2018), which will embody the latest updates to a cooperation strategy that has been in place for over a decade.

Anteprojeto de um sistema digital de proteção e controle aplicado em uma subestação elétrica industrial

With the growth of the demand on electric energy in the last decades, the urban distribution and transmission systems have experienced a bigger necessity to improve on the substations, the automation procedures and techniques on the operation maneuvers of such systems, in a sense that better attends the quality levels, availability, continuity and operational reliability. In this way, the objective of the present paper is to perform a study of protection and control on an electrical industrial system involving the procedures of digitizing and maneuvers automatism utilizing operational techniques and other pertinent information used in a typical high-voltage Industrial Electrical System. Analysis were made on short-circuits to specify the main components of the 138 [kV] substation, in addition, there were used digital MiCOM relays to make the protection of the present elements. With that, a program was developed to allow the user to monitor the condition of circuit-breakers through a supervision screen being able to simulate some kinds of faults, as well as observing the characteristics of each device. This way, the importance of having a fast and reliable system that ensures the equipment’s protection and the industrial process continuity due to faults on the electrical system is noticeable. It’s important to highlight that all this digitizing was mainly favored by the development of digital technology on the last years, mainly on microelectronics, also with the appearance of supervision gadgets allowing the development of complex systems in supervision and electric energy control

Human and embodied energy analysis applied to water source protection and household water treatment interventions used in Mali, West Africa

As water quality interventions are scaled up to meet the Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of the population without access to safe drinking water by 2015 there has been much discussion on the merits of household- and source-level interventions. This study furthers the discussion by examining specific interventions through the use of embodied human and material energy. Embodied energy quantifies the total energy required to produce and use an intervention, including all upstream energy transactions. This model uses material quantities and prices to calculate embodied energy using national economic input/output-based models from China, the United States and Mali. Embodied energy is a measure of aggregate environmental impacts of the interventions. Human energy quantifies the caloric expenditure associated with the installation and operation of an intervention is calculated using the physical activity ratios (PARs) and basal metabolic rates (BMRs). Human energy is a measure of aggregate social impacts of an intervention. A total of four household treatment interventions – biosand filtration, chlorination, ceramic filtration and boiling – and four water source-level interventions – an improved well, a rope pump, a hand pump and a solar pump – are evaluated in the context of Mali, West Africa. Source-level interventions slightly out-perform household-level interventions in terms of having less total embodied energy. Human energy, typically assumed to be a negligible portion of total embodied energy, is shown to be significant to all eight interventions, and contributing over half of total embodied energy in four of the interventions. Traditional gender roles in Mali dictate the types of work performed by men and women. When the human energy is disaggregated by gender, it is seen that women perform over 99% of the work associated with seven of the eight interventions. This has profound implications for gender equality in the context of water quality interventions, and may justify investment in interventions that reduce human energy burdens.

Development and simulation of DSP filters for transformer differential protection / by Oskar Reynisson.

Transformer protection is one of the most challenging applications within the power system protective relay field. Transformers with a capacity rating exceeding 10 MVA are usually protected using differential current relays. Transformers are an aging and vulnerable bottleneck in the present power grid; therefore, quick fault detection and corresponding transformer de-energization is the key element in minimizing transformer damage. Present differential current relays are based on digital signal processing (DSP). They combine DSP phasor estimation and protective-logic-based decision making. The limitations of existing DSP-based differential current relays must be identified to determine the best protection options for sensitive and quick fault detection. The development, implementation, and evaluation of a DSP differential current relay is detailed. The overall goal is to make fault detection faster without compromising secure and safe transformer operation. A detailed background on the DSP differential current relay is provided. Then different DSP phasor estimation filters are implemented and evaluated based on their ability to extract desired frequency components from the measured current signal quickly and accurately. The main focus of the phasor estimation evaluation is to identify the difference between using non-recursive and recursive filtering methods. Then the protective logic of the DSP differential current relay is implemented and required settings made in accordance with transformer application. Finally, the DSP differential current relay will be evaluated using available transformer models within the ATP simulation environment. Recursive filtering methods were found to have significant advantage over non-recursive filtering methods when evaluated individually and when applied in the DSP differential relay. Recursive filtering methods can be up to 50% faster than non-recursive methods, but can cause false trip due to overshoot if the only objective is speed. The relay sensitivity is however independent of filtering method and depends on the settings of the relay’s differential characteristics (pickup threshold and percent slope).

Developing Higher-level Cognitive Skills In a Fire Protection Course

In an ideal world, all instructors of safety and health courses would be masters of course subject matter as well as the theories and practices for effective teaching. In practice, however, most instructors are much stronger in one or the other. This paper provides an example of how some fundamental knowledge from educational experts can be useful for improving a traditional safety course. Is there a problem with the way traditional safety and health (S&H) courses are taught? It is asserted by this author that S&H education, in general, places too much emphasis on acquisition and comprehension of facts at the expense of helping students develop higher-level cognitive abilities. This paper explains the basis for the assertion and reports an experience upgrading a traditional fire protection course to include more assignments involving the higher-level ability known in the education community as synthesis.