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Medical image data plays a critical role in health care today. Whatever the context of image processing (research and educational activities, diagnostic or forensic purposes, etc.), they are supposed to be treated as highly sensitive. Unfortunately, currently available image-processing tools also enable very sophisticated malicious modification of their content. This paper is focused on the assessment of the effectiveness of selected so-called zero watermarking methods (ones that do not cause any modification of an image sample), in the protection of the integrity, and proving authorship, of these medical image studies. We have studied many zero watermarking methods and selected one representative from each type of known algorithms for comparison. We have conducted a series of simulations over a huge research database of anonymized medical image studies (patient examinations). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legal literature on intellectual property has rarely focused on choreographies. Choreographic works are different from other works protected under copyright law, because they consist in a limited number of standardised building blocks (musical notes, dance steps and movements) which are then each time arranged in an original, creative, and reproducible combination. The questions for lawyers are whether the combination of these elements is deemed worthy of protection by the legal domain in its entirety, or whether the musical part and the movement sequence can only find protection as separate components of the choreographic work; in either case, the question arises as to what are the thresholds for protection, and what remedies are available. In this paper, the author examines the legal issues related to choreographies through a comparative approach, considering concrete cases related to this matter as well as national legislation and international IP treaties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robust reversible watermarking (RRW) methods are popular in multimedia for protecting copyright, while preserving intactness of host images and providing robustness against unintentional attacks. However, conventional RRW methods are not readily applicable in practice. That is mainly because: 1) they fail to offer satisfactory reversibility on large-scale image datasets; 2) they have limited robustness in extracting watermarks from the watermarked images destroyed by different unintentional attacks; and 3) some of them suffer from extremely poor invisibility for watermarked images. Therefore, it is necessary to have a framework to address these three problems, and further improve its performance. This paper presents a novel pragmatic framework, wavelet-domain statistical quantity histogram shifting and clustering (WSQH-SC). Compared with conventional methods, WSQH-SC ingeniously constructs new watermark embedding and extraction procedures by histogram shifting and clustering, which are important for improving robustness and reducing run-time complexity. Additionally, WSQH-SC includes the property-inspired pixel adjustment to effectively handle overflow and underflow of pixels. This results in satisfactory reversibility and invisibility. Furthermore, to increase its practical applicability, WSQH-SC designs an enhanced pixel-wise masking to balance robustness and invisibility. We perform extensive experiments over natural, medical, and synthetic aperture radar images to show the effectiveness of WSQH-SC by comparing with the histogram rotation-based and histogram distribution constrained methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of the technological measures that copyright holders employ to lock their works and discusses why users are disadvantaged. It compares the anticircumvention rules in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in the US and the Copyright, Patents and Designs Act in the UK; the latest exemptions to circumventing activities released by the US Library of Congress are included. It reviews the evolution of Chinese anti-circumvention rules, starting with a well-known case preceding the promulgation of the anti-circumvention rules, then it examines the anti-circumvention provisions in the Copyright Act 1990, the Software Regulation 2001 and the ISP Interpretation 2004. It also critically analyzes the latest Network Regulation 2006 by comparing it with the DMCA and the CDPA. The paper suggests that the Chinese anticircumvention rules need to be constructed with more legal certainties. Recommendations are also made for additional redrafting to make China's anti-circumvention rules more adaptive to a digital environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite similarities in technology and other aspects of their operation, the typical pharmaceutical manufacturing firm is far more profitable than the typical phonograph record company. These industries are compared in terms of their institutional environments, primarily from 1950 to 1965. Strong differences in organizational effectiveness, regarding their ability to control three aspects of the environment—pricing and distribution, patent and copyright law, and external opinion-leaders—are suggested to help account for the differential performance of these industries. The utility of comparing whole industries as units of analysis in organizational research is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comparative study on the differences and similarities of the laws and case law of copyright ownership in works created in employment relationships in Colombia, Germany, and the U.S. It discusses the ownership of specific kinds of works particularly computer programs regulated in the European Community Directive 91/250. Furthermore, it analyzes the authorship and differences between the author's right law system and the Anglo American Copyright system.