Copyright holders have been investigating technological solutions to prevent distribution of copyrighted materials in peer-to-peer file sharing networks. A particularly popular technique consists in “poisoning” a specific item (movie, song, or software title) by injecting a massive number of decoys into the peer-to-peer network, to reduce the availability of the targeted item. In addition to poisoning, pollution, that is, the accidental injection of unusable copies of files in the network, also decreases content availability. In this paper, we attempt to provide a first step toward understanding the differences between pollution and poisoning, and their respective impact on content availability in peer-to-peer file sharing networks. To that effect, we conduct a measurement study of content availability in the four most popular peer-to-peer file sharing networks, in the absence of poisoning, and then simulate different poisoning strategies

Many important economic questions hinge on the extent to which new goods either crowd out or complement consumption of existing products. Recent methods for studying new goods are based on demand models that rule out complementarity by assumption, so their applicability to these questions has been limited. I develop a new model that relaxes this restriction, and use it to study the specific case of competition between print and online newspapers. Using new micro data from the Washington DC market, I show that the major print and online papers appear to be strong complements in the raw data, but that this is an artifact of unobserved consumer heterogeneity. I estimate that the online paper reduced print readership by 27,000 per day, at a cost of $5.5 million per year in lost print profits. I find that online news has provided substantial welfare benefits to consumers and that charging positive online prices is unlikely to substantially increase firm profits. JEL classification:C25,L82

Abstract. We use a 1998-2002 cross-section dataset to analyze the claim of losses due to internet piracy made by the record industry. The results suggest that internet piracy played a significant role in the decline in music sales during the early days of file-sharing networks. 1.

Abstract: Inadvertent disclosure of sensitive business information represents one the largest classes of recent security breaches. We examine a specific instance of this problem – inadvertent disclosures through peer-to-peer file sharing networks. We characterize the extent of the security problem for a group of large financial institutions using a direct analysis of leaked documents. We also characterize the threat of loss by examining search patterns in peer-topeer networks. Our analysis demonstrates both a substantial threat and vulnerability for large financial firms. We find a statistically significant link between leakage and firm employment base. Key Words: inadvertent disclosure, intellectual property leaks, data breaches, security, risk management, peer-to-peer networks, file sharing.

The economics of information security has recently become a thriving and fast-moving discipline. As distributed systems are assembled from machines belonging to principals with divergent interests, we find incentives becoming as important to de-pendability as technical design is. The new field provides valuable insights not just into ‘security ’ topics such as privacy, bugs, spam, and phishing, but into more gen-eral areas such as system dependability (the design of peer-to-peer systems and the optimal balance of effort by programmers and testers), policy (particularly digital rights management) and more general security questions (such as law-enforcement strategy). 1

Technologies for reproducing and redistributing digital goods have made it more difficult to earn profits from their sale, leading to concerns that socially valuable digital products with non-convex production technologies may not be brought to market. However, digital

Bloom filters are a probabilistic data structure used to evaluate set membership. A group of hash functions are used to map elements into a Bloom filter and to test elements for membership. In this paper, we propose using multiple groups of hash functions and selecting the group that generates the Bloom filter instance with the smallest number of bits set to 1. We evaluate the performance of this new Best-of-N method using order statistics and an actual implementation. Our analysis shows that significant reduction in the probability of a false positive can be achieved. We also propose and evaluate a new method that uses a Random Number Generator (RNG) to generate multiple hashes from one initial “seed ” hash. This RNG method (motivated by a method from Kirsch and Mitzenmacher) makes the computational expense of the Best-of-N method very modest. The target application is a power management proxy for P2P applications executing in a resource-constrained “SmartNIC”.

The economics of information security has recently become a thriving and fast-moving discipline. As distributed systems are assembled from machines belonging to principals with divergent interests, incentives are becoming as important to dependability as technical design. The new field provides valuable insights not just into ‘security’ topics such as privacy, bugs, spam, and phishing, but into more general areas such as system dependability (the design of peer-to-peer systems and the optimal balance of effort by programmers and testers), and policy (particularly digital rights management). This research program has been starting to spill over into more general security questions (such as law-enforcement strategy), and into the interface between security and sociology. Most recently it has started to interact with psychology, both through the psychology-and-economics tradition and in response to phishing. The promise of this research program is a novel framework for analyzing information security problems – one that is both principled and effective.

doi 10.1287/mnsc.1070.0699

Copyright in the cultural sphere can act as a barrier to the dissemination of high-quality information. On the other hand it protects works of art that might not be made available otherwise. This dichotomy makes the area of copyright difficult, especially when it applies to the digital arena of the web where copying is so easy and natural. Here we present a snapshot of the issues for online copyright, with particular emphasis on the relevance to cultural institutions. We concentrate on Europe and the US; as an example we include a special section dedicated to the situation in Italy.