The tremendous spreading of multimedia via Internet motivates the watermarking as a new promising technology for copyright protection. This work is concerned with the design and development of novel algorithms in the spatial and transform domains for robust and secure watermarking of coloured images. These algorithms are adaptive, content-dependent and compatible with the Human Visual System (HVS). The host channels have the ability to host a large information payload. Furthermore, it has enough capacity to accept multiple watermarks. Abstract This work achieves several contributions in the area of coloured images watermarking. The most challenging problem is to get a robust algorithm that can overcome geometric attacks, which is solved in this work. Also, the search for a very secure algorithm has been achieved via using double secret keys. In addition, the problem of multiple claims of ownership is solved here using an unusual approach. Furthermore, this work differentiates between terms, which are usually confusing the researchers and lead to misunderstanding in most of the previous algorithms. One of the drawbacks in most of the previous algorithms is that the watermark consists of a small numbers of bits without strict meaning. This work overcomes this weakness III in using meaningful images and text with large amounts of data. Contrary to what is found in literature, this work shows that the green-channel is better than the blue-channel to host the watermarks. A more general and comprehensive test bed besides a broad band of performance evaluation is used to fairly judge the algorithms.

Darbe analizuojamas erdvinio prekių ženklo ir dizaino tarpusavio santykis. Ši analizė paremta dviejų skirtingų pramoninės nuosavybės objektų apsaugos sistemų palyginimu. Tema yra aktuali tuo, jog prekių ženklo apsauga, kaip ir dizaino apsauga, yra galima prekės išoriniam vaizdui, t.y. erdvinei formai. Dėl šios priežasties, gamintojui, norinčiam teisinėmis priemonėmis apsaugoti savo produkto formą, atsiranda kelios galimybės. Tinkamai pasirinkti apsaugos kelią yra svarbu dėl to, jog nuo šio pasirinkimo gali priklausyti objekto apsaugos apimtis. Iš kitos pusės teorijoje pripažįstama, jog dizaino ir prekių ženklo apsaugos objektai vis dėlto privalo būti atriboti, kadangi abi apsaugos sistemos paremtos skirtingais tikslais, kurie iš esmės siejasi su pagrindiniais intelektinės nuosavybės teisės principais – užtikrinti skirtingų interesų pusiausvyrą. Teigiama, jog, neesant aiškios takoskyros, ši pusiausvyra gali būti greitai pažeista. Siekdamas išsiaiškinti šias problemas autorius gilinasi į prekių ženklo bei dizaino apsaugos teisinio reguliavimo ypatumus, t.y. reikalavimus objektams, suteikiamas teises, teisių pažeidimo nustatymo kriterijus, apsaugos terminą bei tam tikras teisės aktuose nustatytas išimtis. Išanalizavus teisinį reguliavimą, išaiškėja pagrindiniai dizaino ir prekių ženklo apsaugos privalumai ir trūkumai, bei erdvinio prekių ženklo ir dizaino atribojimo klausimai. / This paper concentrates on analysis of a correlation between three-dimensional trademark and design. Such an analysis is based on a comparison between separate systems of industrial property protection. The relevance of a subject is that trademark protection, as well as design, can be achieved on the same object – three-dimensional shape of an article. For that reason, proprietor has a several possibilities when he seeks a legal protection for a shape of product. It is important for proprietor to make a reasonable decision because the scope of protection may depend on which way of protection will be chosen. However, it is recognized that the trademark and design objects of protection has to be delimitated. It is argued that such an overlap between three-dimensional trademark and design jeopardizes the basic principles of an intellectual property law which is a balance of different public interests. In order to clarify these problems author analyzes the legal framework of trademark and design, i.e. requirements for objects, rights given by registration, test of infringement, term of protection and certain exclusions from registration. Such a review of a legal regulation will reveal the basic advantages and disadvantages of these different registration systems and help to resolve the issues of delimitation of three-dimensional trademarks and design.

This study critically investigated the argument whether intellectual property rights over life forms and processes would ensure food security. It only considered the issue from the perspective of developing countries, as they are the ones who are hardest hit by recurrent drought and food insecurity. Protections within TRIPS (Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights) and debates underpinning it formed the essence of the research.

Démontrer la possible émergence d'une nouvelle régulation économique mondiale est l'objectif de ce travail. Notre étude a envisagé les législations internationales et nationales relatives aux droits économiques, sociaux et culturels à la lumière de l'important problème des droits de propriété industrielle.Cette régulation, fondée sur le droit à la conditionnalité universelle, offre une application effective du droit à l'alimentation par le biais d'une transformation de la répartition de la production agricole et par le biais d'une législation en matière de propriété industrielle permettant l'accès aux denrées alimentaires à tous. / Demonstrate the possible emergence of a new global economic regulation is the objective of this work. Our study considered the international and national laws relating to economic, social and cultural rights in light of the significant problem of industrial property law. This regulation, based on the universal right to cross-compliance, provides an effective implementation of the right to food through a change in the distribution of agricultural production and through legislation on industrial property to access to food at all.

Intellectual property has gained more attention in recent decades because innovations have become one of the most important resources. This paper implements a probabilistic topic model using nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) to discover some of the key elements in computer patent, as the industry grew from 1990 to 2009. This paper proposes a new “shrinking model” based on NMF and also performs a close examination of some variations of the base model. Note that rather than studying the strategy to pick the optimized number of topics (“rank”), this paper is particularly interested in which factorization (including different kinds of initiation) methods are able to construct “topics” with the best quality given the predetermined rank. Performing NMF to the description text of patent features, we observe key topics emerge such as “platform” and “display” with strong presence across all years but we also see other short-lived significant topics such as “power” and “heat” which signify the saturation of the industry.

"Mémoire présenté à la Faculté des études supérieures en vue de l'obtention du grade de maîtrise en droit des technologies de l'information" / Le présent mémoire se penche sur trois questions liées à la distribution d'oeuvres cinématographiques par Internet au Canada. Ces questions sont le reflet des principales préoccupations d'une industrie en pleine expansion et sont abordées sous un aspect pratique. La première question concerne l'applicabilité de la loi canadienne sur le droit d'auteur. L'aspect mondial du réseau Internet soulève en effet d'importantes questions de droit international privé. Il s'agit donc de connaître, à travers l'analyse de différentes hypothèses, les circonstances d'application et la portée de la loi canadienne. La deuxième question s'intéresse à la portée de la protection offerte. Les différents droits dévolus aux auteurs en vertu de la loi sont effectivement issus d'un environnement technique différent de celui proposé par Internet. Il s'agit donc d'analyser l'application de ces différents droits à la distribution d'oeuvres par Internet. Enfin, la troisième question se penche sur l'identité du titulaire des droits d'auteur sur une oeuvre cinématographique. La loi n'apporte en effet aucune réponse définitive à cette question et le processus de création particulier à la production d'une oeuvre cinématographique rend d'autant plus complexe la détermination du titulaire. Encore une fois, le présent mémoire tente de répondre à la question de la titularité par l'analyse successive de différentes hypothèses. / This work addresses three questions related to the distribution of cinematographic works by Internet in Canada. Those questions reflects the fundamental concerns of a budding industry and are examined under a practical angle. The first question deals with the applicability of the Canadian law regarding copyright. Indeed, the global aspect of Internet raises important issues related to international private law. We examine different scenarios in order to determine the scope and the circumstances under which the Canadian law applies. The second question examines the scope of the protection provided for under the Canadian law. The different rights provided to authors under the Canadian law were adopted before the Internet era and it is important to verify the applicability of those rights to the specifie technical environment of Internet. Finally, the third question addresses the issue of the ownership of a copyright related to a cinematographic work. The Canadian law doe not provide for an express answer to that question. Moreover, it is complicated by the specifie creation process leading to the production of a cinematographic work. This work undertakes to answer the question by examining different scenarios.

‘Additive’ goods and services are defined as those that improve with use. They are not naturally rival, or even non-rival, but are “anti-rival.” Information is an example. Information can be made excludable through the use of patents and copyrights, however this does not necessarily lead to socially optimal production and allocation. A more flexible, open access, and decentralized process for the production and allocation of information could improve social welfare. This dissertation describes the challenges and problems with privatizing and restricting access to information and reviews alternative mechanisms for its allocation. Two particular issues at opposite ends of the access spectrum are: (1) strict barriers to private industry databases and (2) quality perception and control of open access information. The first chapter discusses our current system of producing and distributing information and potential ways to stimulate the transition to a new regime. This paper concludes that some of the ideas to seed such a transition include: (1) redefining wellbeing metrics; (2) ensuring the wellbeing of populations during the transition; (3) reducing complexity and increase resilience within institutions; (4) expanding the “commons sector”; and (4) using the internet to remove communication barriers and improve democracy. The second chapter discusses our current system of determining which information to produce, which resources to allocate towards the production of information, and how to distribute that information once produced. The paper concludes that alternative incentive methods, both inside and outside of the market, of producing information and new methods for distributing it to those that can make best use of it, would improve social welfare. These include: (1) prizes; (2) non-monetary incentives; (3) capping salaries; (4) research consortium; and (5) publicly funded research. Chapter 3 explores the difficulty in determining basic energy information under the current proprietary information system using an analysis of the energy return on investment (EROI) of wind energy. It utilizes a meta-analysis of the energy return on investment (EROI) to obtain basic information about the energy inputs and outputs necessary for the manufacturing, installing, operating, and decommissioning of wind turbines. This analysis shows an average EROI for all studies (operational and conceptual) of 25.2 (n=114; std. dev.=22.3). It concludes that making information proprietary severely limits the accuracy of EROI estimates and increases the difficulty of making the best social choices. Chapter 4 explores the perceived credibility of web-based information using an experiment with Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, and the Encyclopedia of Earth. Compared to Encyclopedia Britannica, both Encyclopedia of Earth and Wikipedia were found to provide a statistically negative perception of credibility. The other factors analyzed (presence or absence of an author, references, a biased sponsor, or an award) contribute to “brand equity” a composite characteristic that takes significant time to develop. The relatively new Encyclopedia of Earth has not yet developed enough brand recognition to affect credibility one-way or the other, but its positive characteristics should help build the brand and credibility over time.

This thesis explores the intersection of freedom of expression (as protected in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Charter)) and copyright in Canada. In this thesis, I argue that both lower Canadian courts and the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) should reconsider their approaches to this intersection. Lower Canadian courts have consistently rejected arguments that provisions of Canada's Copyright Act unjustifiably infringe the Charter right to freedom of expression. The SCC, on the other hand, has consistently interpreted provisions of the Copyright Act in such a manner as to result in expanded protection for the expression interests of non-copyright owning parties. It has done so not by relying explicitly on the Charter right to freedom of expression, but through a process of statutory interpretation. I argue that both approaches merit reconsideration. Specifically, I argue that the approaches adopted by lower Canadian courts to the intersection of the Charter right to freedom of expression and copyright are based on now-invalidated approaches to both copyright and to freedom of expression, and are thus themselves invalid; that to the extent to which the SCC's approach to this intersection assumes that the Charter right to freedom of expression can be protected, in the context of copyright, through statutory interpretation alone, that it fails to adequately protect the Charter right to freedom of expression; that other leading national courts from which the SCC has previously sought assistance have explicitly engaged with this intersection, and that the SCC should follow suit; and that the SCC's own copyright and freedom of expression jurisprudence suggests that provisions of the Copyright Act may unjustifiably infringe the Charter right to freedom of expression. These four arguments, taken together, suggest that the time is ripe for reconsideration of this intersection.

Many scholars have suggested that current copyright law is ill-equipped to the challenges of determining the authorship of collaborative work. This thesis analyses four case studies of large scale collaboration (Wikipedia, Indigenous art, scientific collaborations and film) in order to consider how best to determine the authorship of the creative works that they produce for the purposes of copyright law. Current scholarship and much of the case law has tended to favour a restrictive approach to the grant of joint authorship status, in order to minimise the number of potential authors of a work. This is motivated by instrumental/pragmatic concerns related to the ease of exploiting a copyright work. As joint authors are often joint first owners of copyright, proponents of this approach fear that a minor contributor might cause hold-up problems by refusing to consent to licence or assign their copyright interest. This thesis argues that an instrumental/pragmatic approach to the application of the joint authorship test is undesirable, because it distances the test both from the creativity reality of collective authorship and from copyright’s notion of the author. In addition, the instrumental/pragmatic approach relies upon assumptions about creators, the creative process and the exploitation of creative works which are not borne out in the case studies. Building on the insights from the four case studies, the thesis argues that the best approach to applying the joint authorship test to works of collective authorship is one that is inclusive (of all those who have made a more than de minimis contribution of creative choices to the protected expression) and contextual (in that it takes the context of creativity into account). In coming to this conclusion the thesis also offers broader lessons about the nature of authorship and the ongoing relevance of copyright law standards for the regulation of collaborative creativity.

The aim of this master's thesis is to probe into copyright, especially the moral rights that are inevitably included. Due to the complexity of terminology in intellectual property law, which includes the copyright, it is first provided an overview of intellectual property rights and somewhat as highlighting of some changes that were caused by the adoption of the new Civil Code, particularly with regards to the change of perspective in the conception of a thing in a legal sense. After this lets say general introduction to intellectual property rights the main focus passes to the definition of basic copyright terminology and there are outlined the principles by which is our copyright controlled. For a better understanding of moral rights in copyright it is explained what the nature of those rights actually is, together with the definition of basic approaches to moral rights and property rights as well and of course in relation to differentiation from general personality rights, i.e. those that lack the aspect of the creative nature. Due to the recodification of private law, especially the inheritance law, it is also pointed out that according to the current regulation author's commands not to disclose his particular work is not for the purposes of inheritance proceedings just a wishful thinking, but...