Three songs and you are disconnected from cyberspace??? Not in Germany where the industry may ‘turn piracy into profit’

in European Journal of Law and Technology (2012), 3(1),

Musical and cinematographic works are shared on a large scale via the Internet, often disrespecting copyrights. State initiatives seek to curtail online copyright infringements in different ways; the ... [more ▼]

Musical and cinematographic works are shared on a large scale via the Internet, often disrespecting copyrights. State initiatives seek to curtail online copyright infringements in different ways; the latest being graduated response schemes, where the alleged infringer is initially warned twice before he is sanctioned. In this context questions arise inter alia as regards the identification of the actual infringer, information rights of the rightsholder, reliability of tracking methods or judicial review of the allegations. In this context, it is of some interest to see how these questions are dealt with under similar regimes. This paper outlines how these questions and online copyright infringements in general are targeted under German civil law and how this has become a profitable tool of the music and film industry, in particular following the introduction of further information rights by the Enforcement Directive. It critically evaluates the recent developments in Germany and argues for a more restrictive interpretation of the relevant provision of the German Copyright Act. [less ▲]

Verification of Data Location in Cloud Networking

in IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (2011)

Cloud computing aims to provide services and resources on a pay-as-you-use basis with additional possibilities for efficient adaptation of the required resources to the actual needs. Cloud networking ... [more ▼]

Cloud computing aims to provide services and resources on a pay-as-you-use basis with additional possibilities for efficient adaptation of the required resources to the actual needs. Cloud networking extends this approach by providing more flexibility in the placement, movement, and interconnection of these virtual resources. Depending on the use, customers however require the data to be located under a certain jurisdiction. To ensure this without the need of trusting the cloud operator, we propose a geolocation approach based on network coordinate systems and evaluate the accuracy of three prevalent systems. Even if the cloud operator uses supplemental measures like traffic relaying to hide the resource location, a high probability of location disclosure is achieved by the means of supervised classification algorithms. [less ▲]

Measuring anonymity using network coordinate systems

in International Symposium on Communications and Information Technologies (ISCIT), 2011 (2011)

Popularity and awareness of anonymisation systems increased tremendously over the past years, however only a very few systems made it from research to production. These systems usually add intermediate ... [more ▼]

Popularity and awareness of anonymisation systems increased tremendously over the past years, however only a very few systems made it from research to production. These systems usually add intermediate nodes in the communication path aiming to hide user identities. Several attacks against these systems exist, like timing attacks or exploitation of latency information. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to disclose users of current popular anonymisation systems in practice by the means of virtual network coordinate systems, a widely accepted method for latency prediction and network optimisation. Mapping physical nodes to a n-dimensional space can reveal a geographical proximity that is used to disclose users, who expect to stay anonymous. We define a model that leverages network coordinates in order to measure quantitatively the anonymity services and evaluate it on the Planet-Lab research network. The basic idea is to analyse the relative distance between nodes and to calculate the probability of nodes being hosted in the same location. Evaluation proves that our proposed model can be used as a measure of anonymity. [less ▲]