The European Union-an expanding security community? EU Diplomacy Paper 06/2012, August 2012

This paper investigates why and how the geographical scope of the security community centered around the European Union (EU) is expanding. It starts from the assumption that the EU itself is a ‘tightly-coupled mature pluralistic security community’. The analysis of the expansion of this peaceful area is based on the theoretical framework first designed by Karl Deutsch and later developed by Emmanuel Adler and Michael Barnett. Contrary to the logic of the adage ‘si vis pacem para bellum’, I argue that the security community is expanding because the EU’s own origins and self-perception are driven by an ambition to create lasting peace. The key mechanisms I explore are the EU’s enlargement and neighborhood policies, which are best understood when analyzed against the concept of concentric circles: the regional EU-centered security community is a multi-speed security community, stronger at its core and weaker as it spreads towards its margins.

Multi-modal fingerprinting for multimedia assets: optimisation of media security protection in online distribution environments

Since the advent of the internet in every day life in the 1990s, the barriers to producing, distributing and consuming multimedia data such as videos, music, ebooks, etc. have steadily been lowered for most computer users so that almost everyone with internet access can join the online communities who both produce, consume and of course also share media artefacts. Along with this trend, the violation of personal data privacy and copyright has increased with illegal file sharing being rampant across many online communities particularly for certain music genres and amongst the younger age groups. This has had a devastating effect on the traditional media distribution market; in most cases leaving the distribution companies and the content owner with huge financial losses. To prove that a copyright violation has occurred one can deploy fingerprinting mechanisms to uniquely identify the property. However this is currently based on only uni-modal approaches. In this paper we describe some of the design challenges and architectural approaches to multi-modal fingerprinting currently being examined for evaluation studies within a PhD research programme on optimisation of multi-modal fingerprinting architectures. Accordingly we outline the available modalities that are being integrated through this research programme which aims to establish the optimal architecture for multi-modal media security protection over the internet as the online distribution environment for both legal and illegal distribution of media products.