Using Social Factors in Sharing and Usage Control in Online Systems

Digital media has become the preferred approach for producing, selling, and consuming information goods such as books, software, movies, and songs. Information objects produced in digital form can be easily modified, copied, and can be effortlessly distributed using the Internet. Today, online social networking systems have become one of the most popular ways for sharing and distributing content. Despite their growing popularity, many unsolved problems exist with regard to digital object distribution in online social networks. A key problem related to sharing of information goods is usage control of the shared good. Another problem related to usage control is digital rights management, where the usage conditions set by the content creator need to be enforced.;In digital rights management, the content distributor wants to maintain control over the access and usage of the content. To deal with this problem, we propose Social Distribution Network (SDN) a novel distribution system that uses economic and social factors to incentivize the users to conform to copyright restrictions. SDN leverages ideas from group lending to encourage users to segregate into groups. The groups receive economic incentives in the form of discounts based on their purchase and piracy histories. We use utility based analysis to establish certain conditions that are necessary for proper functioning of the SDN. Also, using simulations, we examine the evolution of incentives with time under dynamic network conditions.;In this thesis, we propose new solutions that leverage social factors in order to address the sharing control and rights management problems. In information sharing problem, the owner of a data object wants to share the object with another party in the social network and enforce usage conditions on the shared object. To address this problem, we propose a Social Sharing Control (SSC) scheme for information sharing in large-scale collaborative systems based on the risk involved in the sharing activity. The SSC utilizes game theoretic models for the sharing activities along with other factors in order to assess the sharing risk. Using simulation studies, we analyze the effects of the social network structure and evolution on the SSC scheme.