Trading of intangible goods

Abstract

With the increasing digitalization of data used in daily life, like digital audio and video, documents, and newspapers, the trading of intangible goods becomes increasingly important in electronic commerce. In contrast to trading tangible goods - where electronic procedures such as advertising, ordering, and payment are only complementing the physical provision and delivery of goods - the trading of intangibles involves electronic procedures from the establishment of the initial contact between consumers and merchants up to post-sales support and dispute handling. Production, storage, administration, advertisement, ordering, delivery, accounting, billing, payment, and even quality control and customer care - all can be done and is being done by electronic means and on the basis of Internet and advanced information and communication technology.The paper of Konstantas and Morin introduces the rules of the game. Taking digital documents as an example, it describes the difference of the commercialization terms between the trading of a tangible good, i.e. the printed information, and the trading of the related intangible good, i.e. the digital document. The meaning and limits of purchasing, accessing, redistribution, copying, user anonymity, and the protection of providers' and consumers' rights are discussed. An outline of a framework and pilot system exemplifies how the requirements that a commercialization system for intangible goods should fulfill can be satisfied within a specific application area.Gunter and Gisler describe a case study related to a specific type of intangible goods, namely intellectual properties such as patents and trademarks. In the first part of their paper the authors describe an initiative of several European patent offices aiming at the creation of a message based intellectual property exchange which is to be a step towards managing patents and trademarks electronically by means of Internet technology. The second part of the paper discusses legal aspects of trading intellectual property rights and first steps towards a legal framework that includes the government in the entire e-commerce process of selling governmental rights to citizens.The paper of Luxem discusses business aspects of trading digital products and specifically concentrates on the implications on retail information systems. The Retail-H-Model, originally developed as a framework for retail information systems in traditional application areas, is discussed with respect to the specific requirements of procurement, warehousing, and distribution of intangible goods. A closer look is taken on the specific changes in goods receipt, accounts receivable, and warehousing.Zacharia, Moukas, Boufounos, and Maes present an approach to the use of software agents that assist buyers and sellers during the pre-sales phase of trading of intangible goods. In a marketplace of digital products additional complexities during the process of bidding and negotiation, like measuring seller competency and performance, must be considered. The authors present the framework for an agent mediated knowledge marketplace in which the buying agents try to maximize their owners' utilities based on the expected performance of the sellers and the demanded compensations while selling agents are bidding based on their owners reputation, their time availability, the difficulty of the task and the current demand on the marketplace. The co-ordination and control of the main activities during the process of trading intangible goods is discussed by the paper of Giordani, Mejia, and Mendes. An event-oriented workflow engine in combination with a process definition language is proposed as a suitable mechanism to be used for the control of processes involved in transactions between buyers and sellers as well as for the co-ordination of activities between business partners involved in the provision of combined services and bundled digital goods.Commercial transactions across different technical and organizational domains are typical for trading intangible goods, particularly during the exchange of order and payment information as well as during delivery of goods via the network. The paper of Tezuka, Sasaki, and Kataoka discusses seamless object authentication in different security policy domains and describes a technical solution of how Java and CORBA can share the same signature schema.With these papers the minitrack highlights some technical, business, and legal aspects of Trading of Intangible Goods. However, the area is much more complex and, therefore, is open for further work as well as intensive discussions between researchers and practitioners during the conference.