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Secure firearm storage might help reduce access by children and other unauthorized users and the related risk for injury or death. Information about state-specific prevalence of firearm storage practices can be used to develop secure storage messages and programs; however, such information is often unavailable. Data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, by respondent characteristics, were used to estimate prevalence of keeping firearms in or around the home and related storage practices for eight states that administered the firearm safety module in 2021 or 2022. Overall, 18.4% (California) to 50.6% (Alaska) of respondents reported that a firearm was kept in or around their home. Among those with a firearm in or around the home, 19.5% (Minnesota) to 43.8% (North Carolina) reported that a firearm was stored loaded. Across all eight states, approximately one half of those with a loaded firearm stored at least one loaded firearm unlocked. Among respondents with a child and a loaded firearm in the home, 25.2% (Ohio) to 41.4% (Alaska) reported that a loaded firearm was stored unlocked. Variability in firearm storage practices highlights the importance of local data and suggests opportunities to tailor prevention efforts to specific population groups to reduce risk for firearm handling by children without adult supervision, and other unauthorized persons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on analyzing the interaction among copyright law, state sovereign immunity, and the federal Takings Clause, addressing the issue of state actors without consequences after the Jim Olive Photography v. University of Houston decision. Topics include exploring the possibility of lawsuits under Takings Clause to hold state actors accountable for unauthorized use of copyrighted material and a refined version of the Copyright Reform Clarification Act for this purpose.

Despite long-standing debate about the challenges of establishing command and control of India’s nuclear weapons, few details about the structure and organization of such a system exist in the public domain. Objectives for effective command and control have been laid out in India’s Draft Nuclear Doctrine of 1999, which was followed by the more official statement from 2003 that described some of the organizations governing the new arsenal. It is now almost twenty years later, and many changes have occurred within Indian nuclear force structure. This article documents these evolutions and details some of the similarities and differences between how nuclear weapons might be controlled in India as compared to states that developed nuclear weapons earlier. It specifically examines some of the relevant infrastructure and capabilities, such as military command centres, satellites, and delivery vehicles, that have been developed in the last two decades that are important to nuclear command and control. This article also identifies continuing challenges, such as risks due to the entanglement of conventional and civilian infrastructure with nuclear systems, associated with command and control of nuclear weapons in India.

The article discusses James Bertrand Payne's attempt to present artist's proof copies of Tennyson's poems to the Sultan and the Turkish Ambassador in 1867. Topics include Payne's exploitation of out-of-copyright materials, the potential financial motive behind the gift, and the rejection of the proofs by the Turkish bureaucracy due to strict measures on receiving unauthorized works.

It is not just enough for a mark holder to raise an alarm and further proceed to seek redress in court for trademark infringement. Such mark owner must establish and prove the following elements to the court -- (1) unauthorised use in commerce of trademarks; (2) unauthorized use of the brand in respect to the sale of goods and services and other commercial activities; (3) unauthorized use of the mark as a trademark; (4) likelihood of confusion emanating from trademark infringement; and (5) No fair use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs on terms used in Section 3.12 of NACHA Operating Rules related to written statement of unauthorized debit. Topics include considered that an unauthorized debit Entry to a consumer account of a receiver; an unauthorized IAT debit to any receiver's account; or a debit Entry to a Consumer account of a receiver for which the receiver revoked authorization.

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) criminalizes the simple act of trespass upon a computer--intentional access without authorization. The law sweeps too broadly, but the courts and scholars seeking to fix it look in the wrong place. They uniformly focus on the term "without authorization" when instead they should focus on the statute's mens rea. On a conceptual level, courts and scholars understand that the CFAA is a criminal law, of course, but fail to interpret it comprehensively as one. This Article begins the first sustained treatment of the CFAA as a criminal law, with a full elaboration of the appropriate mens rea based upon congressional intent, cognate state criminal trespass statutes, and recent Supreme Court guidance on federal mens rea in general. A fully realized mens rea sweeps away many of the unjust potential applications of the CFAA on a far more principled basis than does a focus on, and re-writing of, "without authorization." My interpretative approach limits unjust applications of the provision, but many will remain. In a coda, I briefly show why we should likely abolish the trespass provision of the CFAA. The flaws of the CFAA, such as criminalizing ordinary and innocent behavior and arbitrary enforcement, flow from the same pathologies already inherent in criminal trespass law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) criminalizes a broad range of conduct related to the compromise of computer systems. Specifically, the CFAA prohibits unauthorized access to computer systems, defining such access as that which occurs "without authorization" or in a manner that "exceeds authorized access." Courts interpreting the meaning of unauthorized access under the CFAA have diverged into two camps. On one side, proponents of the broad approach argue that the CFAA unauthorized access inquiry should focus on access purpose, assessing whether a given access was conducted for a purpose authorized by the computer owner. On the other side, proponents of the narrow approach argue that the relevant inquiry should instead be permission focused, looking only at whether the computer owner had granted the accesser permission to access the computer (without regard for why the computer was accessed). ThisComment proposes a three-step framework for assessingCFAA unauthorized access that will resolve the present circuit split. Leveraging concepts from CFAA case law and offering applicability across a wide range of factual and technological contexts, this Comment's Available-Granted-Revoked (AGR) Framework sequentially evaluates (1) whether the computer inquestion is publicly available or private; (2) whether the computer's owner had, at any point, granted the accesser permission to access the computer; and (3) whether the computer owner had affirmatively revoked the accesser's permission, if any, prior to the purportedly unauthorized access. By adopting the Available-Granted-Revoked Framework, courts will be able to effectively advance the interests underlying both sides of the current circuit split and bring clarity to a persistent legal ambiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Celebrities have long been used in advertising and merchandising, but state law has evolved in recent decades to protect them from unauthorized uses, including, in some cases, unauthorized uses after their death. This paper examines the developing practice of using deceased celebrities in advertising and merchandising, including celebrities that have been "reanimated" using modern technology. It suggests that the law currently favors celebrity heirs over consumers and fans. It offers a proposal to balance the interests of heirs with those of consumers/fans by allowing postmortem protection of trademarks, copyrights, and authorized uses, but also allowing unauthorized uses unless they are likely to deceive consumers regarding authorization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates employee behavior of unauthorized access attempts on information systems (IS) applications in a financial institution and examines how opportunity contexts facilitate such behavior. By contextualizing multilevel criminal opportunity theory, we develop a model that considers both employee- and department-level opportunity contexts. At the employee level, we hypothesize that the scope and data value of the applications that an employee has legitimately accessed, together with the time when and location where the employee initiates access, affect the likelihood of the employee making unauthorized access attempts. At the department level, we hypothesize that department size moderates the impact of employee-level contextual variables on the likelihood of an employee making unauthorized attempts. To test these hypotheses, we collected six months of access log data from an enterprise single sign-on system of a financial institution. We find the hypothesized main effects of all employee-level contextual variables and department size are supported. In addition, department size reinforces the effects of data value, off-hour access, off-site access, and their interaction term, except for that of scope, on the outcome variable. Robustness analyses indicate that the proposed model does not align with those employees who might not know the systems well enough or who might make honest mistakes. We also discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Essay, we provide a blueprint for personalizing copyright law in order to reduce the deadweight loss that stems from its universal application to all users, including those who would not have paid for it. We demonstrate how big data can help identify inframarginal users, who would not pay for copyrighted content, and we explain how copyright liability and remedies should be modified in such cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in the case Byrd v. United States which deals with unauthorized rental car driver Terrence Byrd's reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to a police officer's search of the vehicle, and it mentions search and seizure law under the Fourth Amendment to America's Constitution. Legal standing to challenge a police-related search of an automobile is examined, along with an exclusionary rule under American evidence law.

The article focuses on Interim Policy Statement on ACH Data Breach Notification Requirements which was adopted by the Board of Directors on September 28, 2007. Topics include examines that purposes of this interim policy, a "data breach" is defined as the loss, theft or unauthorized access of Consumer-Level ACH Data by or from any ODFI or Originator or any of their respective third-party service providers using the ACH Network.

Copyright of Law & Justice Review is the property of Justice Academy of Turkey and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on the laws governing unauthorized access to computerized information in the U.S. Topics discussed include enactment of Consumer Fraud and Abuse Act and Electronic Communications Privacy Act for addressing the same; United States v. Nosal court case on the same; and Facebook, Inc. v. Power Ventures, Inc. court case addressing on computer crime.

Social network services (SNSs) have become one of the core Internet-based application services in recent years. Through SNSs, diverse kinds of private data are shared with users' friends and SNS plug-in applications. However, these data can be exposed via abnormal private data access. For example, the addition of fake friends to a user's account is one approach to gain access to a private user's data. Private user data can be protected from being accessed by using an automated method to assess information. This paper proposes a method that evaluates private data accesses for social network security. By defining normal private data access patterns in advance, abnormal private data access patterns can be exposed. Normal private data access patterns are generated by analyzing all of the consecutive private data accesses of users based on Bayesian probability. We have proven the effectiveness of our approach by conducting experiments where the private data access signals of Twitter accounts were collected and analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conventional radio-frequency identification (RFID)-based access control system cannot prevent unauthorized personnel from following authorized personnel into a restricted area. Thus, security and safety of personnel cannot be guaranteed. In this paper, we propose an intelligent access control system to address this problem. The proposed system consists of an ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID subsystem and a computer vision subsystem. The UHF RFID subsystem is responsible for the identification and authentication of personnel while the computer vision subsystem captures the images of personnel and accurately calculates their number. By comparing the number of personnel determined by the two subsystems, the access control problem of tailgating can be effectively solved. The proposed system has competitive advantages in terms of high detection accuracy and user convenience of hands-free access control. It can be used in many organizations that have security requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of what constitutes "unauthorized access" and "access in excess of authorization" to a protected computer under 18 U.S.C. § 1030 is proving to be intractable. At the same time, businesses are experiencing significant losses, as disloyal employees, on their way to new employment, take data that they think will be useful in their new jobs. Rather than argue for another meaning for "authorization" either in the courts or Congress, this Article proposes sidestepping the issue and solving the disloyal employee problem with legislation that deals directly with the problem--the employee's access to the employer's computer with the intent to steal information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contests over the meaning and application of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA") expose long-standing, complex questions about the sources and impacts of the concept of authority in law and culture. Accessing a computer network "without authorization" and by "exceeding authorized access" is forbidden by the CFAA. Courts are divided in their interpretation of this language in the statute. This Article first proposes to address the issue with an insight from social science research. Neither criminal nor civil liability under the CFAA should attach unless the alleged violator has transgressed some border or boundary that is rendered visible or "imageable" in the language of the research on which the argument draws. That claim leads to a second, broader point--emphasizing the potential "imageability" of computer networks, including the Internet, has implications that go beyond one statute because of what that emphasis may teach those who create and implement those networks and who shape the authority that relevant computer code exercises. "Authority" and "authorization" are social practices, continuing negotiations between those who produce them and those who acknowledge and recognize them. "Imageability" is a way of translating that observation into a normative claim in a specific statutory context. Recognizing the social dimensions of "authority" implicates both what kind of Internet society wants and what kind of Internet society will get. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unauthorized use of computer systems is at the core of computer trespass statutes, but there is little understanding of where everyday people draw the line between permissible and impermissible computer use. This Article presents a study that measures lay authorization beliefs and punishment preferences for a variety of computer misuse activities. Though perceived authorization is strongly predictive of punishment preferences, many people view common misuse activities as unauthorized but not deserving of any meaningful punishment. Majorities also viewed as unauthorized many activities--such as ignoring a website's terms of service, surfing the news while at work, or connecting to a neighbor's unsecured wireless network--that scholars have argued are implicitly licensed. This divergence between perceived authorization and desired punishment presents a challenge for the trespass framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA ") makes it a crime to "access [] a computer without authorization or exceed[] authorized access. '' Courts and commentators have struggled to explain what types of conduct by a computer user are "without authorization. " But this approach is backwards; authorization is not so much a question of what a computer user does, as it is a question of what a computer owner allows. In other words, authorization under the CFAA is an issue of consent, not conduct; to understand authorization, we need to understand consent. Building on Peter Westen's taxonomy of consent, I argue that we should distinguish between the factual question of what uses a computer owner manifests her consent to and the legal question of what uses courts will deem her to have consented to. Doing so allows us to distinguish the different kinds of questions presented by different kinds of CFAA cases, and to give clearer and more precise answers to all of them. Some cases require careful fact-finding about what reasonable computer users in the defendant's position would have known about the owner's expressed intentions; other cases require frank policy judgments about which kinds of unwanted uses should be considered serious enough to trigger the CFAA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thirty years ago, Congress passed the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA ") to combat the emerging problem of computer crime. The statute's core prohibitions targeted one who "accesses" a computer "without authorization" or who "exceeds authorized access." Over time, the incremental statutory changes and large-scale technological changes have dramatically expanded the potential scope of the CFAA. The question of what constitutes unauthorized access has taken on far greater significance than it had thirty years ago, and courts remain deeply divided on this question. This Article explores the text, purpose, and history of the CFAA, as well as a range of normative considerations that should guide interpretation of the statute. This Article concludes that courts should pursue a narrow and "code-based" understanding of unauthorized access under the CFAA--both in terms of what it means to access a computer without authorization and in terms of what it means to exceed authorized access. The CFAA has strayed far from its original purpose: Congress failed to define key terms in the CFAA, and courts have overlooked limiting principles within the statute. From a normative perspective, even if it is desirable to provide owners of networked computer systems with stronger legal protection for their systems, the CFAA's unauthorized access provisions are not the proper vehicle for doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Periodic Mobile Forensics (PMF) system investigates user behavior on mobile devices. It applies forensic techniques to an enterprise mobile infrastructure, utilizing an on‐device agent named TractorBeam. The agent collects changed storage locations for later acquisition, reconstruction, and analysis. TractorBeam provides its data to an enterprise infrastructure that consists of a cloud‐based queuing service, relational database, and analytical framework for running forensic processes. During a 3‐month experiment with Purdue University, TractorBeam was utilized in a simulated operational setting across 34 users to evaluate techniques to identify masquerading users (i.e., users other than the intended device user). The research team surmises that all masqueraders are undesirable to an enterprise, even when a masquerader lacks malicious intent. The PMF system reconstructed 821 forensic images, extracted one million audit events, and accurately detected masqueraders. Evaluation revealed that developed methods reduced storage requirements 50‐fold. This paper describes the PMF architecture, performance of TractorBeam throughout the protocol, and results of the masquerading user analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the protection and fair use of copyright content from unauthorized use. Topics discussed include Major League Baseball Advanced Media's (MLBAM) policy of issuing Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA); copyright infringement not actually constitute infringement if the use of the material is protected as fair use; and role of new media environment attracting new fans of sport baseball.

This article is sanctified to the actual subject -research of unmanned aerial vehicles(UAV). The flow diagram of UAV is shown in this scientific work, the information about advantages, prospects and methods of UAV application in the different spheres of life is brought up. The basic methods of unauthorized access to management and software are analysed. The examples of unauthorized interference to the work of UAV control system are shown and the possible solutions of UAV defence are offered. Anapparatus, which gives an opportunity to find out the place of UAV stay on certain territory and report about it, is analysed.The list of developing safe methods of counteraction to the UAV is given to consideration. The questions of home soldiery unmanned aerial vehicles, that become more important with every day, are considered. The types of possible attacks are analyzed. It is educed that basic defense is still the cryptosystem of UAV control system defense. This article allows you to delve into the issues and benefits caused by new unmanned aerial techniques, understand the seriousness of the problems and prospects, the ability to research and development in this direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In semi-arid regions, aquifers provide a series of practical advantages that make them preferential sources of water supply. In Spain, groundwater meets about one-fifth of the total water demand and is used to irrigate over one-third of the total irrigated land. This article examines groundwater use in Spain from the perspective of the EU Water Framework Directive. Analysis of different sector uses suggests that core problems (and solutions) related to groundwater lie in agricultural uses and that the Directive's environmental requirements remain distant from reality on the ground, where economic, political and social reasons prevail on legal obligations set by national and supranational authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conventional wisdom has it that a property owner assumes virtually no responsibility for guiding others in fulfilling their duties not to trespass on the former's property. In other words, the entire risk of making an unauthorized use of the property in question rests upon the duty-holders. This view is best captured by the keep-off picture of property, according to which the content of the duty in question is that of excluding oneself from a thing that is not one's own. In this article, we argue that this view is mistaken. We advance conceptual, normative, and doctrinal arguments to show that this account runs afoul of the actual workings of the tort in question. A more precise account of trespass to land will reveal that the tort gives rise to a hybrid regime of tort liability, one which combines considerations of fault along with those of strict liability. On the proposed account, therefore, an owner does assume some responsibility for guiding others in fulfilling the duty they owe the former. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Radio frequency identification (RFID) systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in both public and private domains. However, because of the inherent weaknesses of underlying wireless radio communications, RFID systems are plagued with a wide variety of security and privacy threats. A large number of these threats arise because of the tag's promiscuous response to any reader requests. This renders sensitive tag information easily subject to unauthorized reading. Promiscuous tag response also incites different forms of relay attacks whereby a malicious colluding pair, relaying messages between a tag and a reader, can successfully impersonate the tag without actually possessing it. Because of the increasing ubiquity of RFID devices, there is a pressing need for the development of security primitives and protocols to defeat unauthorized reading and relay attacks. However, currently deployed or proposed solutions often fail to satisfy the constraints and requirements of the underlying RFID applications in terms of (one or more of) efficiency, security, and usability. This paper proposes a novel research direction, one that utilizes sensing technologies, to tackle the problems of unauthorized reading and relay attacks with a goal of reconciling the requirements of efficiency, security, and usability. The premise of the proposed work is based on a current technological advancement that enables many RFID tags with low-cost sensing capabilities. The on-board tag sensors will be used to acquire useful contextual information about the tag's environment (or its owner, or the tag itself). For defense against unauthorized reading and relay attacks, such context information can be leveraged in two ways. First, contextual information can be used to design context-aware selective unlocking mechanisms so that tags can selectively respond to reader interrogations and thus minimize the likelihood of unauthorized reading and 'ghost-and-leech' relay attacks. Second, contextual information can be used as a basis for context-aware secure transaction verification to defend against special types of relay attacks involving malicious readers. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to several surveys studied by both cloud computing providers and security solution providers, security concerns, in particular data security, are the main reasons for people's reluctance to employ cloud computing. In this paper, we address the concern of data security by introducing SECRESO, a SEcure storage model for Cloud data based on REed-SOlomon code. In our proposed model, we enhance Reed-Solomon code with an extra security layer in which a password is always required to reconstruct data from its encoded blocks in the storage. In this way, without a correct password, unauthorized users cannot see the data, and hence the data is secure. Additionally, to support fault tolerance, we also introduce a log based data recovery scheme that allows data recovery without knowing the password. In this way, even though the recovered data can be incorrect, as soon as the password is provided, information from the log can be used to correct the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access control mechanisms in software systems administer user privileges by granting users permission to perform certain operations while denying unauthorized access to others. Such mechanisms are essential to ensure that important business functions in an organization are conducted securely and smoothly. Currently, the dominant access control approach in most major software systems is role-based access control. In this approach, permissions are first assigned to roles, and users acquire permissions by becoming members of certain roles. However, given the dynamic nature of organizations, a fixed set of roles usually cannot meet the demands that users (existing or new) have to conduct business. The typical response to this problem is to myopically create new roles to meet immediate demand that cannot be satisfied by an existing set of roles. This ad hoc creation of roles invariably leads to a proliferation in the number of roles with the accompanying administrative overhead. Based on discussions with practitioners, we propose a role refinement scheme that reconstructs a system of roles to reduce the cost of role management. We first show that the role-refinement problem is strongly NP-hard and then provide two polynomial-time approximation algorithms (a greedy algorithm and a randomized rounding algorithm) and establish their performance guarantees. Finally, numerical experiments--based on a real data set from a firm's enterprise resource planning system--are conducted to demonstrate the applicability and performance of our refinement scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the history, development and significance of the fair use doctrine, which provides protection to copyright holders of photographs and images against copyright infringement lawsuits in the U.S. It discusses the judicial decision of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in the case of Eiselein v. BuzzFeed regarding the copyright infringement by BuzzFeed Inc. for unauthorized use of photographs clicked by photographer Kai T. Eiselein.

In this work are described and researched methods of protection of navigation system from unauthorized attempts to substitute trajectory of moving objects, guided by radio or satellite. The proposed methodology to detect such interference in the operation of the navigation system is based on the use of data for historical, located on the premises trajectory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Background: The authorized and unauthorized use of cannabis for therapeutic purposes (CTP) has increased dramatically in recent years, and physicians have called for further research to better clarify the parameters of effective and appropriate use. We report findings from a large cross-sectional study of the use of CTP in Canada and compare use across medical conditions and across authorized and unauthorized users. Methods: We examined cannabis use history, medical conditions and symptoms, patterns of current use of CTP, modes of access and perceived effectiveness among 628 self-selected Canadians consumers of CTP. Participants were recruited from medical cannabis dispensaries and from organizations that assist users of CTP. Results: Patients reported using cannabis to treat multiple symptoms, with sleep, pain, and anxiety being the most common. Cannabis was perceived to provide effective symptoms relief across medical conditions. Patterns of use were also consistent across medical conditions. Notable differences were observed with regard to modes of access. Conclusion: Across medical conditions respondents reported using cannabis to effectively address diverse symptoms. Results indicate a substantial disconnect between the therapeutic use of cannabis and research on the risks and benefits of such use; particularly with regard to the anxiolytic and sedative use of cannabis. Authorized and unauthorized users exhibited few meaningful differences with regard to medical conditions and patterns of use, but faced substantial differences regarding access. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The nature of furtum has been subjected to various interpretations, often with the assumption that this delict changed in nature between the Twelve Tables and end of the 2nd century A.D. It is submitted here that the delict was originally an intrusion upon the power (manus, potestas, dominium) of the paterfamilias and in its most acute form (furtum manifestum) punished with a religious sanction, viz. treating the fur as sacer. The same sanction is found in the Twelve Tables for other delicts, connected with the power of the pater familias. Since manifest furtum always implied that the fur was caught red-handed, desacralisation of the delict led to a reduction of this constellation to a mere being caught in the act. Assuming this to have been the original nature offurtum explains the forms of furtum usus and possessionis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs on terms used in Section 1.11 of NACHA Operating Rules related to Unauthorized Entry Fee including reports that ODFI agrees to pay an Unauthorized Entry Fee to the respective RDFI for a debit Entry that is Returned to the ODFI with a Return Reason Code of R05, R07, R10.

Abstract: Engineers have proposed many watermark mechanisms for protecting the content of digital media from unauthorized use. The visible watermark scheme indicates the copyright of digital media posted over the Internet by embedding an inconspicuous but recognizable pattern into media. However, the embedding process often results in serious distortion of the protected image. Since the strength of the watermark in conventional methods mainly depends on the feature of protected media, this may lead to unsatisfactory transparency of watermarked images. This paper proposes a removable solution for visible watermark mechanism. By adopting the subsampling technique, the method proposes a contrast-adaptive strategy to solve this problem. This method can also guarantee the essentials of general visible watermark schemes. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms related works in terms of preserving the quality of the restored image. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]