Müllensiefen & Pendzich on Court Decisions on Music Plagiarism and the Predictive Value of Similarity Algorithms

Professor Daniel Müllensiefen of Goldsmiths College, University of London, Departments of Computing & Psychology, & Professor Marc Pendzich of the University of Hamburg Institute of Musicology
have published Court Decisions on Music Plagiarism and the Predictive Value of Similarity Algorithms in Musicae Scientiae, Discussion Forum 4B, 257-295 (2009).
Here is the abstract:

“Tune plagiarism in pop music is a common and often feverishly debated phenomenon which surely has to do with the vast amounts of money that individual melodies are able to generate in today’s pop music business. The similarity between melodies is assumed to be a very important factor in a court’s decision about whether a new tune is an illegitimate version of a pre-existing melody. Despite the wide-spread belief that there is a fixed and simple limit to the number of corresponding notes between two melodies, actual court decisions are based on far more complex considerations regarding the musical material.

“This paper first sketches the legal framework and principal features of the legal processing of cases of alleged melodic plagiarism with a focus on US copyright law and discusses selected cases to highlight the corresponding legal practices. In the empirical part of this paper, we model court decisions for cases of alleged melodic plagiarism employing a number of similarity algorithms. As a ground truth dataset we use a collection of 20 publicly available cases from the last 30 years of US jurisdiction. We compare the performance of standard similarity algorithms (edit distance and n-gram similarity measures) to several new similarity algorithms that make use of statistical information about the prevalence of chains of pitch intervals in a large pop music database. Results indicate that these statistically informed algorithms generally outperform the comparison algorithms. In particular, algorithms based on Tversky’s (1977) concept of similarity show a high performance of up to 90% of court decisions correctly predicted. We discuss the performance and structure of the algorithms in relation to a few interesting example cases and give an outlook on the potential and intricacies of our approach.”

A version of this paper was also presented under the title Court Decisions on Music Plagiarism and the Predictive Value of Similarity Algorithms at the 7th Triennial Conference of the European Society of the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM 2009), University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

A September 25, 2009 Goldsmiths College press release describing this research is available here.

Bommarito et al. on Distance Measures for Dynamic Citation Networks

Michael James Bommarito II, Daniel Martin Katz, & Jon Zelner, all of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Center for Study of Complex Systems, & Professor James H. Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, Department of Political Science, have published Distance Measures for Dynamic Citation Networks on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

“Acyclic digraphs arise in many natural and artificial processes. Among
the broader set, dynamic citation networks represent a substantively
important form of acyclic digraphs. For example, the study of such
networks includes the spread of ideas through academic citations, the
spread of innovation through patent citations, and the development of
precedent in common law systems. The specific dynamics that produce
such acyclic digraphs not only differentiate them from other classes of
graphs, but also provide guidance for meaningful distance measures for these networks. We apply our sink based distance measure and the single-linkage hierarchical clustering algorithm to the first quarter century of decisions of the United States Supreme Court. Despite applying the simplest distance measure and a straight forward clustering algorithm, qualitative analysis reveals that accurate clusterings are produced by this scheme.”

Legal Education at the Crossroads Assessment Conference Resources

This blog will occasionally comment on legal educational assessment methods, because those methods are legal information systems, and because those methods apply to legal educational programs and systems (such as law schools and continuing legal education programs), which are also legal information systems.

Here are some resources respecting Legal Education at the Crossroads Version 3.0: A Conference on Assessment, held September 11-13, 2009 at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law.

• Videos and materials for many of the conference presentations are available here;
• The ABA Student Learning Outcomes Subcommittee’s draft of the revised ABA “300″ Standards, from the ABA Standards for the Approval of Law Schools, is available, as presented by President Steve Bahls (see President Bahls’s presentation here) (HT Vice President Rensberger);
• Vice President Jeffrey L. Rensberger has written a series of comments about the conference at the Law by the Numbers blog;
• Professor Carolyn Grose’s report on the conference is available here; it is published on the Best Practices in Legal Education blog.

FLACOS 2009 Proceedings Available

Proceedings are now available for FLACOS 2009: The Third Workshop on Formal Languages and Analysis of Contract-Oriented Software, held September 24-25, 2009 at Toledo, Spain, and organized by the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Department of Computer Science, Real-Time and Concurrent Systems Research Group.

Videos Available for Jornada eJusticia = eJustice Seminar, Trujillo & México DF

Videos are now available for many of the presentations and panels of the I Jornada eJusticia: Hacia un sistema de justicia transparente = 1st Seminar on eJustice: Toward a Transparent System of Justice, held Sept 24, 2009, simultaneously in Trujillo, Spain & México D.F.

The conference was organized by Centro Extremeño de Tecnologías Avanzadas (CETA), Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación (TE México), & Fundación Ciencias de la Documentación (FCD).

Symposium: Scientific Data for Evidence Based Policy & Decision Making

Scientific Data for Evidence Based Policy and Decision Making: A Public Symposium Sponsored by the Board on Research Data and Information, was held September 24, 2009 at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. Audio of the symposium is available here (HT Cheryl Williams Levey of the National Academies), and slides for several of the presentations are available here (scroll down).
The speakers were:

• Beth Noveck, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President
• Vivek Kundra, Chief Information Officer, Office of Management and Budget, Executive Office of the President;
• Janet Woodcock, Director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Food and Drug Administration; and
• Peter Preuss, Director of the National Center for Environmental Assessment, Environmental Protection Agency.

The symposium’s organizers described the event as follows: “The symposium … feature[d] presentations by high-level Administration officials on the use of scientific data in federal regulations and policymaking, scientific information policy for promoting better decision making and innovation, new mechanisms for public access to federal data, and examples of high-value applications of scientific data for drug approval and for environmental policymaking. These presentations w[ere] … followed by a panel discussion of the invited speakers and several Board members, and which … provide[d] an opportunity for interaction with the audience.”

2009 Futures Conference at COLPM

The 2009 Futures Conference, held in conjunction with the COLPM (College of Law Practice Management) Annual Meeting, is taking place September 25-26 at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law in Denver, Colorado, USA. The conference addresses the future of the legal profession and the practice of law, including the use of information technology. Here are links to information about the conference:

• The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #colpm;
• Simon Chester is liveblogging the conference for sLaw (HT @jordan_law21;
• The conference Website is available here;
• The conference brochure/program is available here.

Barendrecht on Justice Policies and Transaction Costs

Professor J.M. (Maurits) Barendrecht of the Tilburg University Faculty of Law has published Growing Justice: Justice Policies and Transaction Costs in the TISCO Working Paper Series on Civil Law & Conflict Resolution Systems ; No. 009/2009. Here is the abstract:

“This paper reviews the literature on policies aiming to improve the rule of law and the operation of a legal system. It takes a bottom up perspective of clients seeking access to justice and uses transaction costs on the market for justice as a criterion to evaluate justice policies. Most justice is created through ‘justice transactions,’ including informal help from friends, legal advice, information about law, ADR services, other forms of informal justice, and adjudication. Such transactions are seriously hampered by three major transaction cost problems, however. Justice policies include codification, setting up courts and reforming them, financing of courts, legal aid, ADR, developing rules of procedure, and regulation of the legal profession. The transaction cost perspective explains why many traditional justice policies do a poor job to increase access to justice or to diminish the costs of civil justice. More promising justice policies enable justice to emerge bottom up, in the interactions between clients and providers of justice services (microjustice, legal empowerment). These policies focus on the information needs of disputants, low cost default procedures, choice for plaintiffs, accountability towards clients, gradual, needs-based formalization of legal relationships, and strengthening informal compliance mechanisms.”

CTC 2009: Court Technology Conference

[NOTE: Updated on 24 September 2009 to link to videos of many of the programs.]

CTC 2009, the 2009 Court Technology Conference, organized by the National Center for State Courts, is being held this week, September 22-24, 2009, at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, Colorado, USA. Here are some information resources for the conference:

• Videos of many of the programs are available here (HT Jim McMillan at Court Technology Bulletin);
• The main conference Website is available here;
• The conference program is available here;
• The conference blog is available here;
• There appear to be multiple Twitter hashtags for the conference, including #CTC, #CTC09, and #CTC2009. [If you know of additional Twitter hashtags for the conference, please mention them in the comments.]

We send our best wishes to our colleagues attending the conference.

Recent Developments in DRM & Rights Expression Languages

Here are some recent developments respecting digital rights management:

• ACM-DRM 2009, the 9th ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management will be held November 9, 2009, in Chicago;
• Nicolas Jondet’s article, co-authored with Professor Jane K. Winn, entitled A “New Deal” for End Users? Lessons from a French Innovation in the Regulation of Interoperability, is forthcoming in the November 2009 issue of William & Mary Law Review;
• Nicolas Jondet gave a paper paper entitled France: The Land of the Linux? The Case of DRM Interoperability and Reverse-engineering, at GikII 2009 (also known as Gikii 4), a conference sponsored by the Institute for Information Law (IViR) of the Faculty of Law, University of Amsterdam, held September 17-18, 2009 at the Institute;
• Professor Min-Jen Tsai & Yuan-Fu Luo, both of the National Chiao Tung University’s Institute of Information Management, have published Service-Oriented Grid Computing System for Digital Rights Management (GC-DRM), in 36 Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal 10708 (2009);
• Dr. Valentina Moscon of the University of Trento Department of Legal Studies, gave a presentation on her dissertation, entitled Copyright Law, Contract Law, Rights Expression Languages and Value-Contered Design Approach, at the Doctoral Workshop on Law & Technology, held June 5, 2009 at the European University Institute in Florence;
• Claudio Prandoni, Marlis Valentini, and Martin Doerr plan to deliver a paper entitled Formalising a Model for Digital Rights Clearance at ECDL2009: The 13th European Conference on Digital Libraries, to be held in Corfu, Greece, September 27 to October 2, 2009;
• Dr. Patrícia Akester of the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law has made available Technological Accommodation of Conflicts Between Freedom of Expression and DRM: The First Empirical Assessment (2009);
• Hirotsugu Kinoshita, Tetsuya Morizumi, & Kazuhiro Suzuki have published Financial Securitization with Digital Rights Management System in SAINT 2009: Proceedings of the 2009 Ninth Annual International Symposium on Applications and the Internet, at 197 (2009);
• Nicholas Paul Sheppard, Reihaneh Safavi-Naini, & Mohammad Jafari have published A Digital Rights Management Model for Healthcare in POLICY 2009: Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks at 106 (2009);
• Dr. Shiguo Lian, of France Telecom R and D (Orange Labs) in Beijing, has published Secure Video Distribution Scheme Based on Partial Encryption, in 19 International Journal of Imaging Systems and Technology 227 (2009);
• Professor Roberto García & Professor Rosa Gil of Universitat de Lleida published Copyright Licenses Reasoning an OWL-DL Ontology in Law, Ontologies and the Semantic Web: Channelling the Legal Information Flood 145 (2009);
• Professor Casey O’Donnell of the University of Georgia has published Production Protection to Copy(right) Protection: From the 10NES to DVDs, in 31 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 1058 (2009);
• ACM-DRM 2008, the 8th ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management was held in October 2008;
• Here are other citations for recent articles or monographs on DRM, from OCLC WorldCat.