In the last decade of the 20th Century Somalia made the headlines around the world as the place where a UN force had been withdrawn from due to losses inflicted on US and other troops by members of groups associated with two warlords. In the latter part of the first decade of the 21st Century Somalia was again in the global headlines, but this time associated with acts of piracy committed off its coastline. Behind these headlines lay a complex mixture of problems stretching back as far as the early colonisation of the lands that became Somalia and populated with western European concepts ill suited to the peoples of those lands. The loss of effective government opened the door to neo colonial issues of illegal fishing and hazardous waste dumping that contributed to the piracy problem. Finely interwoven amongst all these issues runs a thread of international law. This thesis examines that thread as it runs through the concept of state failure and asks if it is a legal term and what legal consequences, if any, are attached to it. It examines the international legal frameworks that support fishing and hazardous waste dumping and seeks to understand why they have not prevented illegal fishing and the illegal dumping of hazardous waste off the coast of Somalia. This thesis then examines the concept of piracy as applied to Somalian pirates and seeks answers to questions as to what it is and how it has been applied. It looks at the use of private security as a response and seeks to find the legitimation for their actions in relation to pirates. Sewn throughout is a comparison of responses and suggestions for improvement to international law.

For digital media, the risk of piracy is aggravated by the ease to copy and distribute the content. Watermarking has become the technology of choice for discouraging people from creating illegal copies of digital content. Watermarking is the practice of imperceptibly altering the media content by embedding a message, which can be used to identify the owner of that content. A watermark message can also be a set of instructions for the display equipment, providing information about the content’s usage restrictions. Several applications are considered and three watermarking solutions are provided. First, applications such as owner identification, proof of ownership, and digital fingerprinting are considered and a fast content-dependent image watermarking method is proposed. The scheme offers a high degree of robustness against distortions, mainly additive noise, scaling, low-pass filtering, and lossy compression. This method also requires a small amount of computations. The method generates a set of evenly distributed codewords that are constructed via an iterative algorithm. Every message bit is represented by one of these codewords and is then embedded in one of the image’s 8 × 8 pixel blocks. The information in that particular block is used in the embedding so as to ensure robustness and image fidelity. Two watermarking schemes designed to prevent theatre camcorder piracy are also presented. In these methods, the video is watermarked so that its display is not permitted if a compliant video player detects the watermark. A watermark that is robust to geometric distortions (rotation, scaling, cropping) and lossy compression is required in order to block access to media content that has been recorded with a camera inside a movie theatre. The proposed algorithms take advantage of the properties of the dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DT CWT). This transform offers the advantages of both the regular and the complex wavelets (perfect reconstruction, approximate shift invariance and good directional selectivity). Our methods use these characteristics to create watermarks that are robust to geometric distortions and lossy compression. The proposed schemes are simple to implement and outperform comparable methods when tested against geometric distortions.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S. in Operations Research)--Naval Postgraduate School, September 2009. / Thesis Advisor(s): Lin, Kyle Y. "September 2009." Description based on title screen as viewed on 5 November 2009. Author(s) subject terms: Piracy, game theory, Bayesian update. Includes bibliographical references (p. 37-38). Also available in print.

Violence at sea has long been a problem for the international community, although the nature and preponderance of incidents has evolved over time. This issue was dealt with in a cursory manner in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and therefore states have had to develop the legal framework through other instruments in order to address growing problems of maritime violence. This thesis examines mechanisms of change in the development of international law concerning maritime violence. It considers how international law has responded to this threat, and analyses a variety of different law-making techniques. This study observes that major international law-making activities concerning maritime violence in the recent decades have been in response to international incidents and crises, such as the Achille Lauro, the September 11 attacks, and the Somali piracy crisis. Counterfactually speaking, such law-making acts would not have taken place if these crises had not happened. The study also notes another shift of focus in making international rules aiming to tackle maritime violence away from customary international law and multilateral treaties towards an incremental dependence on United Nations Security Council resolutions, International Maritime Organization’s initiatives, regional cooperative measures, and treaty interpretation techniques for filling the gaps left in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. With this shift in law-making in mind, the thesis first explores gaps in law regarding piracy and terrorism at sea and reviews the negotiation of two major maritime terrorism treaties, i.e. the 1988 Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Maritime Navigation and its 2005 Protocol. Secondly, it then inspects the United Nations Security Council’s law-making activities in combating terrorism and piracy. Thirdly, it surveys the creation and evolution of the Proliferation Security Initiative and also scrutinises the United States-led bilateral ship-boarding agreements for combating transportation of weapons of mass destruction. Finally, it compares and contrasts the regional approaches across Asia, Africa and Europe in the fight against piracy and armed robbery at sea. The thesis contends that each of the law-making technique employed in fighting maritime violence is not alternative or optional to one another, but rather used in a supplementary fashion to the overarching framework of the law of the sea.

abstract: Family economics uses economic concepts such as productions and decision making to understand family behavior. Economists place emphasis on the rule of families on labor supply, human capital investment, and consumption. In a household, the members choose the optimal time allocations between working, housework and leisure, and money between consumption of different members and savings. One-Child policy and strong inter-generational connections cause unique family structure in China. Households of different generations provide income transfer and labor support to each other. Households consider these connections in their savings, labor supply, human capital investment, fertility and marriage decisions. Especially, strong intergenerational relationships in China are one cause of the high level of young female labor supply and high saving rate. I will investigate the rules of intergenerational relationships on household economic behavior. Affirmative Action allocates college seats to a separate group. To evaluate the distribution effects of AA on discrete groups, we need to study household's strategic reactions on the rule of college seats allocation. The admission system of National College Entrance Examination in China is a type of AA. That distributes college seats by regions. I will use the rapid expansion of Chinese college enrollment as a natural experiment to check the households' reaction on AA and college expansion. Media economics utilizes economic empirical and theoretical tools to figure out the social, cultural, and economic issues in media industries. The impact of online piracy on genuine products sales is under debate, because people cannot find representing proxies to evaluate piracy levels. I will use Chinese data to study the effects of online piracy on theater revenue. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Economics 2017

Face à la chute brusque dans le volume de ventes de disques qui déjà persistait depuis ledébut des années 2000, les sociétés du secteur phonographique brésilien ont fait appelau Pouvoir Législatif Brésilien dans la tentative de dépasser la crise qui affrontaient.L'instrument d'interaction entre l'État et le secteur phonographique a été la Propositiond'Amendement Constitutionnel (PEC), qui a eu transaction initiée en 2007. Laproposition connue comme PEC de la Musique a été approuvé en 2013 et, commeconséquence, l'industrie phonographique brésilienne a été incluse entre petit grouped'activités sociales et culturelles qui reçoivent immunité fiscale enregistrée directementdans la Constitution Fédérale. Devant ce contexte, l'objectif central de cette recherche aété enquêter quelles conditions sont déterminant pour qu'une crise sectorielle soitcomprise comme un problème public qui justifie de l'intervention de l'État. Commeoption théorique-méthodologique, ce travail a proposé l'Approche Discursive del'Action Publique, en réunissant les conceptions d'État et des acteurs de la Sociologie del'Action Publique, ainsi que les conceptions de langue et le sujet de l'Analyse deDiscours Française. Les principaux matériels d'analyse ont été la Propositiond'Amendement Constitutionnel 98/2007 et les transcriptions des audiences publiquesqui ont débattu le thème, au-delà des documents historiques qui ont été utilisés pourreconstruire partie des moments de consolidation du modèle d’affaires de l'industriephonographique. Pour comprendre comme s'il construit l'approbation de PEC de laMusique, cette recherche a initialement analysé historicité du discours qui a établi et aconsolidé le modèle d’affaires de l'industrie phonographique. Ensuite, en deuxièmepartie du travail, ont été analysés les réseaux de formulation qui ont soutenu lesglissements de sens exposés au moment de discussion. Donc, cette recherche prouveque deux facteurs ont contribué au succès en la transformation d'une crise sectorielledans problème public : en premier lieu, le joint des mémoires discursives quisuggéraient une relation directe et indiscutable entre musique et le marché de lamusique, en effaçant que cette forme d'appropriation de la musique a été construite àpartir d'une technologie contrôlée par un groupe petit de sociétés et que l'intermédiationentre des artistes et de l'audience s'est donnée dans environnement où les sociétés plusgrand pouvoir de financier contrôlaient l'exposition des productions et les artistes pourle grand public ; et, en deuxième lieu, l'utilisation minutieuse des glissements de senspendant les moments d'audience, qui a rendu possible de généraliser les effets de lacrise, en convainquant que la fin du modèle d’affaires représentait la fin de laproduction musicale au Brésil et que les principaux endommagés par la piraterie étaientles artistes brésiliens en général. / In the face of the sharp fall in the record sales amount that had persisted since thebeginning of the 2000s, companies in the Brazilian music sector turned to the BrazilianLegislative Branch in an attempt to overcome the crisis they faced. The instrument ofinteraction between the State and the phonographic sector was one ConstitutionalAmendment Proposal (PEC, initials in Portuguese), which began its procedures in 2007.The proposal known as “Music PEC” was approved in 2013 and, as a consequence, inBrazil the music industry was included among the small group of social and culturalactivities that receives fiscal immunity, directly registered in the Federal Constitution. Inview of this context, the main objective of this research was to investigate whatconditions are determinant for a sectoral crisis, such to be understood as a public issuethat justifies State intervention. As a methodological-theoretical option, this workproposed the Discursive Approach of Public Action, bringing together the Stateconceptions and actors of the Public Action Sociology, as well as the language andsubject conceptions from French Discourse Analysis. The main analysis materials werethe Constitutional Amendment Proposal 98/2007 and the transcriptions from the publichearings that debated the theme, as well as historical documents that were used toreconstruct part of the moments from the music industry business model consolidation.To understand how the approval of the Music PEC was built, this research initiallyanalyzed the discourse historicity that founded and consolidated the music industrybusiness model. Then, in the second part of the work, we analyzed the formulationnetworks that sustained the sense displacements exposed in the discussion moments.Therefore, this research shows that two factors contributed to the successfultransformation of a sectoral crisis into a public issue: first, the articulation of discursivememories that suggested a direct and indisputable relationship between music and themusic market, erasing that this music appropriation way was constructed from atechnology controlled by a small group of companies, and that the inter mediationbetween artists and audience occurred in an environment in which these greaterfinancial power companies controlled the productions and artists exhibition to thegeneral public; and, secondly, the meticulous use of sensory displacements duringmoments of audience, which made it possible to generalize the crisis effects, convincingthat the end of the business model represented the end of musical production in Braziland that the main affected by piracy were, in general, the Brazilian artists and, therefore,that the PEC approval was unavoidable.

There are many contexts where an "everybody else is doing it" attitude is relevant. We evaluate the impact of this attitude in a multi-threshold public goods game. We use a lab experiment to study the role of providing information about contribution behavior to targeted subsets of individuals, and its effect on coordination. Treatments include one in which no information is provided and three others that vary in whom we provide information to: a random sample of subjects; those whose contributions are below the average of their group, and those whose contributions are above the average of their group. We find that the random provision of information is no different than not providing information at all. More importantly, average contributions improve with targeted treatments. Coordination waste is also lower with targeted treatments. The insights from this research are relevant more broadly to contexts including piracy, open innovation, and crowdfunding.

For digital media, the risk of piracy is aggravated by the ease to copy and distribute the content. Watermarking has become the technology of choice for discouraging people from creating illegal copies of digital content. Watermarking is the practice of imperceptibly altering the media content by embedding a message, which can be used to identify the owner of that content. A watermark message can also be a set of instructions for the display equipment, providing information about the content’s usage restrictions. Several applications are considered and three watermarking solutions are provided. First, applications such as owner identification, proof of ownership, and digital fingerprinting are considered and a fast content-dependent image watermarking method is proposed. The scheme offers a high degree of robustness against distortions, mainly additive noise, scaling, low-pass filtering, and lossy compression. This method also requires a small amount of computations. The method generates a set of evenly distributed codewords that are constructed via an iterative algorithm. Every message bit is represented by one of these codewords and is then embedded in one of the image’s 8 × 8 pixel blocks. The information in that particular block is used in the embedding so as to ensure robustness and image fidelity. Two watermarking schemes designed to prevent theatre camcorder piracy are also presented. In these methods, the video is watermarked so that its display is not permitted if a compliant video player detects the watermark. A watermark that is robust to geometric distortions (rotation, scaling, cropping) and lossy compression is required in order to block access to media content that has been recorded with a camera inside a movie theatre. The proposed algorithms take advantage of the properties of the dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DT CWT). This transform offers the advantages of both the regular and the complex wavelets (perfect reconstruction, approximate shift invariance and good directional selectivity). Our methods use these characteristics to create watermarks that are robust to geometric distortions and lossy compression. The proposed schemes are simple to implement and outperform comparable methods when tested against geometric distortions. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of / Graduate

Diploma thesis characterises the most important kinds of computer crime, economically evaluates incurred harms, presents factual examples and a prognosis of the possible way of developement of this kind of crime in the future. Thesis includes legislation regarding the computer crime and possible ways of defending against it. In the end, in the form of a questionary, the thesis monitors the knowledge of students of the Faculty of management in Jindřichův Hradec about the field of computer crime and interprets these results using graphs.