Company that sues aggressively to protect its own copyrights is equally aggressive when infringing someone elses: @Techmeme: “AFP Back To Claiming That Twitter’s Terms Of Service Allow It To Take And Sell Anyone’s Twitpic Photos”: http://t.co/qQQ4Yedqhttp://t.co/eJnj2sNO
“HBO Has Only Itself To Blame For Record ‘Game Of Thrones’ Piracy” (by limiting itself to cable distribution and not adopting broader distribution through Netflix & Hulu) – Forbes
@brainpicker: RIDICULOUS! A publisher just pitched me a book, but then said I could only use 3 images in the article and had to PAY for more. #facepalm
“Google’s Internet search engine receives more complaints about websites believed to be infringing on Microsoft’s copyrights than it does about material produced by entertainment companies pushing for tougher online piracy laws.”
A beauty: “A few years ago, Brian helped a friend, who was running for mayor, create an intentionally silly campaign jingle and commercial, which they uploaded to YouTube. Two years later, they heard from another friend that the video had appeared on the Jay Leno Show as part of a segment about local campaign commercials. They just got a kick out of it, and moved on—until now, another three years later. Brian discovered that the YouTube video had been taken down on a copyright claim… by NBC (most likely as the result of a ContentID match as NBC uploaded old episodes into the system).”
Techdirt: Copylaundering: “Jay Leno Airs Campaign Video From YouTube, NBC Claims Ownership Of Original”
Great article about what relinquishing personal privacy to technology brings & doesn’t bring | “Living in Public: What Happens When You Throw Privacy Out the Window”
Dominic Grieve, the UK Attorney General has said that he agrees with privacy injunctions being served on Internet companies, but has also warned of ‘excessive regulation’. UK Attorney General Seeks Injunctions on Internet Firms:
“Leave only footprints: how Google’s ethical ignorance gets it in trouble: Google’s “rogue” engineer was too informed about privacy violations to act alone.” – by Casey Johnston – May 6 2012, 11:30am PDT
“The article, called “War, Peace, or Stalemate: Wargames, Wardialing, Wardriving, and the Emerging Market for Hacker Ethics,” was written by Patrick S. Ryan, then an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado. (Ryan has been a Google “policy counsel on the open Internet” since 2011.) In the article, Ryan attempts to locate the legal and ethical lines around wardriving activity. He concluded that legally and culturally acceptable wardriving activity included the use of tools to log WiFi network names (SSIDs) and to link them to specific geographic locations. Wardrivers used this information to create maps of open WiFi networks, a pursuit that Google later hoped to replicate using its Street View vehicles—the company even used the same “wardriving” terminology.”
Right to bear arms & fight back?: ‘Stand Your Cyberground’ Law: A Novel Proposal for Digital Security – Atlantic Mobile
“The Curious Case of Internet Privacy: Free services in exchange for personal information. That’s the “privacy bargain” we all strike on the Web. It could be the worst deal ever.” – June 6, 2012 – Cory Doctorow – MIT Technology Review
“But if it’s a bargain, it’s a curious, one-sided arrangement. To understand the kind of deal you make with your privacy a hundred times a day, please read and agree with the following:
By reading this agreement, you give Technology Review and its partners the unlimited right to intercept and examine your reading choices from this day forward, to sell the insights gleaned thereby, and to retain that information in perpetuity and supply it without limitation to any third party.
Actually, the text above is not exactly analogous to the terms on which we bargain with every mouse click. To really polish the analogy, I’d have to ask this magazine to hide that text in the margin of one of the back pages. And I’d have to end it with This agreement is subject to change at any time. What we agree to participate in on the Internet isn’t a negotiated trade; it’s a smorgasbord, and intimate facts of your life (your location, your interests, your friends) are the buffet.
Why do we seem to value privacy so little? In part, it’s because we are told to. Facebook has more than once overridden the privacy preferences set by its users, replacing them with new system-wide defaults. Facebook then responds to the inevitable public outcry by restoring something that’s like the old system, except slightly less private. And it adds a few more lines to an inexplicably complex privacy dashboard.”
“Alberta Court of Appeal finds application of Personal Information Protection Act to union’s activities unconstitutional” : Canadian Technology & IP Law – illustrates preference of freedom of expression over privacy in certain circumstances;
“In its constitutional analysis, the Court of Appeal concurred with the trial court’s finding that the picket line and its related videotape recordings were an expressive activity. Meanwhile, in considering the potential justifications for infringement, the Court of Appeal found there to be a pressing and substantial concern in the potential misuse of personal information, as well as a rational connection between the PIPA’s provisions limiting the use of personal information and the objectives of the Act.
The Court found fault, however, when it considered the proportionality of the provisions to the legislative objectives. Specifically, the Court asserted that PIPA exhibited substantial over-breadth in a number of ways, including with respect to its narrow definition of “publicly available” information, its lack of a general exemption for information collected and used for free expression, and the lack of an exemption allowing organizations to reasonably use personal information required in the legitimate operation of their businesses.
The Court of Appeal maintained that the salutary effects of PIPA did not outweigh its deleterious effects. Specifically, the Court found that “[w]hile the protection of personal information is important, it is no more important than collective bargaining and the rights of workers to organize. It is also no more important than the right of the union to communicate its message to the public.” In this case, privacy interests were minimal, as those who were videotaped were in a public place and crossing an obvious picket line in the face of warning signs that their images were being collected. Privacy expectations were therefore low, and holding people accountable for what they do or do not do in public was considered to be a component of the right to free expression.”
Michael Geist – “Seeking Solutions to the Mounting Social Media Privacy Concerns”:
@mgeist: “4 key areas of action on privacy: 1) Finish what gov’t started on anti-spam, C-12; (2) Devil in the defaults; (3) Recognize link between lawful access & social media privacy concerns; (4) Stronger measures on do-not-track.”
“Wising Up to Facebook” – Bill Keller, June 10,2012 – The New York Times; The Opinion Pages:
“What’s the difference, I asked a tech-writer friend, between the billionaire media mogul Mark Zuckerberg and the billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch?
When Rupert invades your privacy, my friend e-mailed back, it’s against the law. When Mark does, it’s the future……”
@ViliLe: New paper: “Gendered Economic Disparity in Two Massive Online Games” with @raratan @netwoman #EVEonline #EQ2
- Paper investigates what happens to wealth creation in the on-line MMO world where social expectations and mechanisms related to gender roles are malleable and meritocracy trumps identity. The paper strongly suggests that gendered economic disparities existing in the off-line world are potentially significantly reduced in a massively on-line environment.
D. RECONCILING PRIVACY, PIRACY & (IP) PROTECTIONS: The “Holy Grail”
The Betraying Contradictions
It is worth examining the contradictions prevailing today (and which are exaggerated by & through the expanding omnipresence of social media) within and between concepts of IP & privacy.
Generally:
Celebrities seems to feel the right to Twitter anything they feel like, but get more then annoyed when they are criticized for doing so;
Tech companies generally don’t seem to value Hollywood’s IP, but sure seem to value their own;
Hollywood and the music industry are hugely protective of their IP but treat creators IP with disdain (even borderline fraud) – long list of cases;
In the end there appears to exist the curious phenomenon of an inverse relationship between valuing IP and valuing privacy – often along political lines. IP literalists’ tend not to be privacy literalists’ and vice versa. A bit is not a bit apparently. There seem to 1st class and 2nd class bits depending on where you stand. The age of Digital Apartheid is apparently upon us.
The Piracy/Privacy Dichotomy: It is striking that very often those who advocate copyright and IP protections being taken most literally, seem to advocate much more flexibility when it comes to privacy protections. Likewise privacy protection maximalists are often more minimalists when it comes to IP law. For example, those who are anti-spam tend to be anti-copyright. And vice versa. How curious.
So, what we have in fact are the same people treating equivalent 1’s & 0’s in vastly different ways. Why would someone be cavalier about certain kinds of data, and treat other kinds of data as gold? Why would others simply reverse that position?
Supportive of this possibility is that there may in fact be a missing link between privacy and expression? Solitude is according to research a necessary prerequisite to creativity (not the only one, but one of…) – @brainpicker: Susan Cain on the power of introverts and the importance of solitude in innovation and creativity http://t.co/BRboHq6y #TED
Which begs the question: Can a consistent principled approach be devised? Can common principles be found? Is there a “Unified Theory” possible since the basic question is the same – how to responsibly deal with content? The ethical key in unraveling this seeming contradiction is perhaps to closely examine how data is treated. After all data is digital and at least as 1’s & 0’s all made of equivalent bits. The distinctions between bits therefore must be human-made, bound in psychology, culture, technology and politics.
That is to ask, what is the connection between privacy and expression? If indeed free expression is superior to IP protections – i.e. that is to say that if IP laws on balance have a negative impact on expression, what is the impact of privacy on expression? Is it simply neutral, or are privacy and expression somehow positively intertwined? Where does piracy fit in? Where does anti-spam fit in?
A Possible Way Through
What happens if we can identify the core common denominator of privacy & IP in the digital age? In fact there is such a common starting point for both privacy and IP – information. IP is in fact information/data designated as having been created by someone and therefor ascribed as belonging to that someone. Personal information similarly is felt by individuals to be created by them, personal to them and therefor belonging to them.
The commonality is that when it comes to both intellectual property and privacy, someone feels that information “belongs” to them – “That is mine, not yours.”
There is a critical consequence that flows from this. It establishes that there is an underlying equivalency to IP and Privacy that should allow them to be treated similarly with fair consequences. Implicit in this lies the very real possibility that proper ethical principles of dealing with information/data can be logically identified and implemented across the board – a unified field theory of information/data – so to speak.
This of course begs the question of exactly what might those principles be?
A Common Approach?
What approaches might be the same, or at least congruent, whether applied to private data or intellectual property?
A first question is to ask whether we in fact own what we think we own, in either realm. As is clear from examples cited herein, intellectual property hardly ever arises as wholly unique, without precedent and previous inspiration drawn from elsewhere. Likewise, perhaps data is not wholly personal and to some extent must necessarily be understood as at least in part what we are entitled to know, sometimes even need to know about each other.
Some common principles which on further analysis might commend themselves: *Explicit Prior Permission; *Withdrawal of permission @ will; and * Embedded tracking through technology for credit, attribution, payment or misuse.
Or alternatively, when dealing with infringements of copyright and privacy, consider a “No-Fault” approach. Unless there is harm, which falls to the party being harmed to prove, permission is not required while all rights are reserved if there is harm down the road?
A potential distraction and perhaps incorrect path (as appealing as it may initially seem) may be if we treat privacy as a consumer protection issue. Would it be better to allow privacy to be a personal expressive right that can be asserted? Consumer protection approach may inadvertently restrict both enforcement and consequences. The proper approach may be to articulate principles in consumer- based legislation so long as private right of action is empowered and unrestricted.
