I ljuset av en upphovsrätt som har till syfte att skapa incitament för nyskapande, innovation och tillgå allmänheten med kultur krävs förändring av lagstiftningen på området. Detta för att säkerställa de ensamrättigheter, rätt till exemplarframställning samt rätt till tillgängliggörande för allmänheten, en upphovsman erhåller till dennes verk. Idag ger förvisso den gällande rätten dessa rättigheter skydd. Emellertid bryter många svenskar mot detta skydd och gör intrång i den till upphovsmannen eller rättighetsinnehavaren knutna upphovsrätten. Att en förändring är påkallat inom området står klart eftersom ytterst få av dem som gör intrång i upphovsrätten åläggs ansvar för gärningen.  Dock finns olika synpunkter på i vilken riktning förändringen ska ske. En stor opposition till upphovsrättens gällande lagstiftning som menar att stora delar av den bör ändras för att legalisera fildelning. Samtidigt försöker förespråkarna för upphovsrätten hindra utvecklingen som innebär att intrång i upphovsrätten sker genom ny restriktivare lagstiftning.  Uppsatsen behandlar de skäl och argument som de båda sidorna framställer. Vidare tar uppsatsen upp de olika förändringar och lösningar som skälen och argumenten har utmynnat i.

OurFileSystem (OFS) is a peer-to-peer file and metadata sharing program. Peers freely join the network, but must be granted access to groups in which metadata and files are shared. Any peer may create a group and grant others access to the group. Group members have different degrees of authority to grant others access and set their authority. Metadata for files is created by users within the context of a group and distributed to all members of the group in the form of a post. Post templates can be created to set fields of metadata. Templates are distributed to all members of a group, and one can be selected when creating a post or searching for files. Metadata in posts is indexed, and sophisticated search on the metadata can be performed locally to help users find files of interest quickly. Files found during a search may be downloaded from peers upon request. Pieces of files are downloaded from as many different peers as possible to maximize bandwidth. Peers within a group may also be marked as bad locally. If a user marks another peer as bad within the context of a group, posts from that peer to the group are deleted and not shared with others. Furthermore, any peer that was granted access by a peer marked as bad is also marked bad. No further posts or authorizations are ever accepted from any peer marked as bad. OFS also supports small public and private messages, which are distributed to all peers in the network. Private messages are encrypted so only the intended peer can decrypt the message. Lastly OFS integrates well with anonymous overlay networks that support SOCKS proxies, such as TOR. I2P support has also been explicitly added. / text

This thesis details the integration of a common collaboration technique, desktop sharing, into a virtual world environment. Previous literature shows no intersection between these fields. This thesis will illustrate that existing collaboration technology can be integrated into virtual worlds with a minimal amount of effort. Outlined in this thesis are the developmental and procedural challenges encountered in demonstrating seamless desktop sharing in a virtual environment and a stress test of the integrated system revealing that the inclusion of desktop sharing resulted in minor performance loss. The Problem Current virtual world technology has limited capability for collaboration because of a lack of collaboration tools. This thesis proposes that it is feasible to take a common collaboration tool such as desktop sharing and introduce it into a virtual world. / Department of Computer Science

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

With network enabled consumer devices becoming increasingly popular, the number of connected devices and available services is growing considerably - with the number of connected devices es- timated to surpass 15 billion devices by 2015. In this increasingly large and dynamic environment it is important that users have a comprehensive, yet efficient, mechanism to discover services. Many existing wide-area service discovery mechanisms are centralised and do not scale to large numbers of users. Additionally, centralised services suffer from issues such as a single point of failure, high maintenance costs, and difficulty of management. As such, this Thesis seeks a Peer to Peer (P2P) approach. Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) are well known for their high scalability, financially low barrier of entry, and ability to self manage. They can be used to provide not just a platform on which peers can offer and consume services, but also as a means for users to discover such services. Traditionally DHTs provide a distributed key-value store, with no search functionality. In recent years many P2P systems have been proposed providing support for a sub-set of complex query types, such as keyword search, range queries, and semantic search. This Thesis presents a novel algorithm for performing any type of complex query, from keyword search, to complex regular expressions, to full-text search, over any structured P2P overlay. This is achieved by efficiently broadcasting the search query, allowing each peer to process the query locally, and then efficiently routing responses back to the originating peer. Through experimentation, this technique is shown to be successful when the network is stable, however performance degrades under high levels of network churn. To address the issue of network churn, this Thesis proposes a number of enhancements which can be made to existing P2P overlays in order to improve the performance of both the existing DHT and the proposed algorithm. Through two case studies these enhancements are shown to improve not only the performance of the proposed algorithm under churn, but also the performance of traditional lookup operations in these networks.

File sharing is a significant activity of enterprise computer use. In organizations, files are usually shared using e-mail attachments. However, large media files cannot be shared using e-mail, due to file size limitations. Instead, different external file sharing systems are used to share large files. The use and size of media files will continue to increase, which requires file sharing mechanisms that can handle this. For organizations today, it is difficult to find a file sharing application that fulfills all requirements and needs of the users. Especially for large media rich organizations, where the file sharing scenarios are many and files can be shared internally and externally with dissimilar feature and security requirements. An example of such an organization is Baggie, a fashion company where large media files are shared daily, using various file sharing systems. The inconsistency of what system to use, leads to confusion and frustration among its users. Additionally, their current file sharing systems do not fulfill all of Baggie’s users’ requirements and no system is integrated with their media asset management system. This master thesis aims to solve the challenges of file sharing within large organizations, particularly media rich organizations such as Baggie by centralize file sharing to one application. By performing a theoretical study and user studies, thirteen design guidelines for file sharing applications have been established. The guidelines focuses on usability, security and users’ requirements regarding media file sharing. Based on the studies, a prototype have been designed for a new file sharing application: BShare. BShare aims to replace Baggie’s current file sharing systems and the application fulfills all requirements of Baggie users. The BShare prototype can be seen as a reference design for file sharing applications.

This thesis examines the transformations of music circulation and consumption brought about by new media platforms. Specifically, it shows how the social and technical design of online music platforms link the consumption of music immanently to its circulation. The thesis makes contributions to ethnomusicology, media studies, and digital anthropology, as well as to the study of music's technical cultures. It is based on a comparative ethnographic study of music circulation and consumption within two field sites: the commercial streaming service Spotify and the extralegal, unlicensed peer to peer platform 'Jekyll'. Governance comes to the fore in both sites: the study shows how practices of music curation, collection and consumption are regulated by the technical design of these platforms. Surprisingly, music consumption and circulation on Jekyll generates a variety of social relations, including pronounced social hierarchies. This is far less apparent on Spotify, due to the platform's individuated mode of address. The subjectivities of online music consumers are mediated by both their personal histories and by the broader technical genealogies of the platforms they use. The thesis illuminates the mutual interdependencies of the licensed and extralegal spheres, two domains often portrayed as not only separate but antagonistic. It also provides insight into the hybrid modes of exchange that generate digital music platforms. Through examining the entailments of circulatory participation, the study offers new insights into digital polymedia and to labour, exchange and governmentality online, as well as providing nuanced understandings of the ownership and collection of music in digital environments. Moreover, it advances new concepts to identify core aspects of digital music cultures, namely 'circulatory maintenance' and 'circumvention technology'. The thesis shows overall how Spotify and Jekyll are not merely emblematic of emergent consumption practices engendered by new media, but are bound up in the mutual co-creation of culture, engendering novel musical subjectivities, practices, socialities and ideologies. The complex musical, technical and social assemblages formed around music circulation online point to the affective potentials of music itself, producing inalienable attachments to the objects through which music is formatted, experienced, and circulated.

No description available.

P2P Grid computing seeks the convergence of Grid and P2P technologies. Deploying a P2P Grid middleware on a set of computers enables an organization to automatically barter computing time with other Internet-connected organizations. Such P2P exchanges of computing time enable individual Peers, i.e. organizations, to transparently aggregate large amounts of computational power with minimal infrastructure requirements or administrative cost. Challenges arise from the requirement for scalability and robustness. Individual worker nodes are unreliable, as P2P Grids operate on unmanaged desktop computers. A specificity of P2P Grids is that each Peer can reclaim at any time the computational power of worker nodes supplied to other Peers, leading to bursts of execution preemption. These are the major contributions of our dissertation: * Firstly, we propose a new P2P Grid architecture, the Lightweight Bartering Grid (LBG). Through systematic cooperation between Grid nodes, the reliability of execution of computational requests is greater than the sum of the reliabilities of worker nodes. * Secondly, we propose a highly scalable data transfer architecture. It is based both on the BitTorrent P2P file sharing protocol and on the removal of the temporal cost of downloading redundant copies of input data files. * Thirdly, besides a middleware implementation of LBG, we also provide an implementation of a discrete-event simulator. Its originality resides in the weaving of the simulator code into the bartering code of the middleware, which is made possible through the virtualization of Grid nodes. This enables reproducible testing and accurate performance evaluation of the bartering policies because the Peers of a simulated Grid make the same bartering decisions as Peers deployed on real computers. The LBG architecture exhibits the following remarkable features: * The scheduling model supports the queueing of external requests and the architecture enables a flexible study of bartering policies. * The architecture is open, flexible, lightweight and facilitates software engineering. It enables the easy development, testing, evaluation and deployment of combinations of scheduling policies. * The architecture is fully P2P.

Šio magistro darbo „File sharing sistemos: autorių teisių aspektai“ objektas yra autorių teisių reglamentavimo ir apsaugos specifika bei problematika P2P programų pagrindu veikiančiose file sharing sistemose. Darbe analizuojama esama teisinė situacija, akcentuojamos probleminės nagrinėjamos temos sritys, lyginant JAV ir ES (tame tarpe ir Lietuvos) autorių teisės doktrinas, principus, esamas teisės normas bei jų pritaikymą teismų praktikoje. Šį darbą sudaro trys dalys. Pirmoje darbo dalyje, atsižvelgiant į aktualius klausimus bei problematiką autorių teisių srityje, pateikiama file sharing sistemų samprata, glaustai paaiškinant šių sistemų technologinį veikimo principą, aptariant pagrindinius sistemų tipus bei apibrėžiant pagrindines sąvokas. Antroje darbo dalyje išsamiai nagrinėjami P2P programų gamintojų (file sharing paslaugų teikėjų) netiesioginės atsakomybės aspektai autorių teisėje, lyginant JAV ir ES teisines pozicijas, kurias formuoja skirtingos teisės doktrinos, teisės normos bei teisminė praktika. Trečioji darbo dalis apima P2P file sharing programų vartotojų tiesioginės atsakomybės už autorių teisių pažeidimus taikymo aspektus, aptariant, kokios išimtinės autorių teisės yra pažeidžiamos naudojantis P2P file sharing programomis bei analizuojant galimas atsakomybės netaikymo išimtis, analogiškai antrajai darbo daliai – lyginant JAV ir ES teisines pozicijas. Trečioje darbo dalyje taip pat trumpai įvertinama esama probleminė situacija bei apsvarstomos galimos problemos... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / An object of the following Master’s thesis “File sharing systems: the aspects of copyright” is the particularity and problematic of copyright regulation and protection in the file sharing systems performing on the basis of P2P programs. The work analyses the present legal situation, emphasizes the problem areas analyzed by comparing the USA and EU (including Lithuania’s) copyright doctrines, principles, present legal norms and their application in the practice of courts. This Master`s thesis consists of three parts. According to the actual questions and problematic in the field of copyright, the first work part presents the conception of file sharing systems, by briefly explaining the technological performance principle of such systems, describing the main types of systems and defining the main conceptions. The second work part analyses comprehensively the indirect liability aspects of the manufacturers of P2P programs (file sharing services providers) in the copyright law, when comparing the legal positions of the USA and EU, formed by different law doctrines, legal norms and court practice. The third work part includes the application aspects of direct liability for the copyright infringements made by the end-users of P2P file sharing programs, by discussing what exclusive copyrights are infringed when using the P2P file sharing programs, and analyzing the possible liability exceptions; the analysis is made parallel to the second work part – by comparing the USA and EU... [to full text]