A couple in Ohio who got threatened by the RIAA and settled out of court for $3000 have decided to sue the file sharing company that they reckon got them into the mess in the first instance.
"Sally and Jim Wilson were frightened in February when they learned the recording industry had sued them because their two teenage daughters had downloaded 653 songs - and that they could be liable to pay $750 for each...
The Cold Spring couple has agreed to settle for $3,000. Next week, the Wilsons plan to sue an Australian-based company, Sharman Networks Ltd., whose popular peer-to-peer Kazaa software the girls used."
The only thing that really surprises me about this is that it has taken so long for this kind of case to arise. Given the thousands of people subject to file sharing lawsuits who have handed over thousands of dollars to the RIAA I expected this to happen much sooner. It will be an interesting one to watch and though I don't hold out much hope of success for the Wilsons, the outcome of the Grokster supreme court case may have an influence.
Monday, April 25, 2005
Cornell recommendations
I just got some very interesting recommendations on useful law resources on the web from Jean Pajerek at Cornell
"Center for Individual Rights
http://www.cir-usa.org/
The Center for Individual Rights (CIR) is a nonprofit public interest law
firm dedicated to the defense of individual liberties, focusing on the
areas of Civil Rights, Free Expression, Religious Liberty, and
Federalism...
Copyright Management Center
http://www.copyright.iupui.edu/
The Copyright Management Center (CMC) website is a useful guide to
copyright issues specifically affecting teachers, researchers, and
librarians. Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis created CMC
in 1994 to provide its faculty and staff with clear guidelines to
understand the complex world of copyright protection...
Curiae.law.yale.edu: the Curiae Project http://curiae.law.yale.edu/
The Curiae Project, currently in beta testing, provides historic (pre-2000)
Supreme Court case materials free of charge. After selecting a case, the
user can link to the full text of the case (via FindLaw and LII), listen to
audio recordings of oral arguments before the Supreme Court (as available
via Oyez), and view records, briefs, and other printed documents related to
the case (as available via Curiae)...
Frederick K. Cox International Law Center War Crimes Research Portal http://law.case.edu/war-crimes-research-portal/
The Frederick K. Cox International Law Center War Crimes Research Portal
is a product of the Case Western Reserve University School of Law. The
Portal contains over a thousand links to websites related to international
humanitarian law and international criminal tribunals"
Cornell law librarians review and recommend useful web resources as part of their Insite service. The Yale Curiae project is particularly worth a look.
"Center for Individual Rights
http://www.cir-usa.org/
The Center for Individual Rights (CIR) is a nonprofit public interest law
firm dedicated to the defense of individual liberties, focusing on the
areas of Civil Rights, Free Expression, Religious Liberty, and
Federalism...
Copyright Management Center
http://www.copyright.iupui.edu/
The Copyright Management Center (CMC) website is a useful guide to
copyright issues specifically affecting teachers, researchers, and
librarians. Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis created CMC
in 1994 to provide its faculty and staff with clear guidelines to
understand the complex world of copyright protection...
Curiae.law.yale.edu: the Curiae Project http://curiae.law.yale.edu/
The Curiae Project, currently in beta testing, provides historic (pre-2000)
Supreme Court case materials free of charge. After selecting a case, the
user can link to the full text of the case (via FindLaw and LII), listen to
audio recordings of oral arguments before the Supreme Court (as available
via Oyez), and view records, briefs, and other printed documents related to
the case (as available via Curiae)...
Frederick K. Cox International Law Center War Crimes Research Portal http://law.case.edu/war-crimes-research-portal/
The Frederick K. Cox International Law Center War Crimes Research Portal
is a product of the Case Western Reserve University School of Law. The
Portal contains over a thousand links to websites related to international
humanitarian law and international criminal tribunals"
Cornell law librarians review and recommend useful web resources as part of their Insite service. The Yale Curiae project is particularly worth a look.
Boyle deconstructing IP stupidity
James Boyle was in full flow in last Thursday's FT.
"Thomas Macaulay told us copyright law is a tax on readers for the benefit of writers, a tax that shouldn’t last a day longer than necessary. What do we do? We extend the copyright term repeatedly on both sides of the Atlantic. The US goes from fourteen years to the author’s life plus seventy years. We extend protection retrospectively to dead authors, perhaps in the hope they will write from their tombs.
Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent of 20th century culture to benefit 4 per cent. The harm to the public is huge, the benefit to authors, tiny. In any other field, the officials responsible would be fired. Not here.
It is as if we had signed an international stupidity pact, one that required us to ignore the evidence, to hand out new rights without asking for the simplest assessment of need. If the stakes were trivial, no one would care. But intellectual property (IP) is important. These are the ground rules of the information society. Mistakes hurt us. They have costs to free speech, competition, innovation, and science. Why are we making them...
Let me be clear. IP is a good thing... Not all proposals to extend rights are silly, but if we do not start looking rigorously at evidence, we will never know which."
Wonderful.
It certainly generated some traffic at Slashdot. Frank Field has an insightful take on all this too:
"The power of ideology (which I would define as a simplified explanation of how the world works) is that it generally does work – that’s why it becomes accepted. Developing a good model gives one advantages – the ability to anticipate outcomes and act with confidence upon that expected outcome. However, that success also leads the user to confuse the model of reality with reality itself and, eventually, the ideology disappears – “Why is more copyright protection better? That’s just how things work, stupid.”
As long as the model works, that confusion is not a problem. But when the model starts to fail (as it inevitably must), the dogmatic ideologue is in serious trouble – the explanations for how the world works sudden no longer work, and the easiest response (and most typical) is to argue away (or ignore) the inconsistencies and press on.
That’s where we are now. The inconsistencies cited in Boyle’s article and elsewhere are all around us, but the ideologues just keep repeating their mantra “more control/property/market discipline is better.” The ideology is now visible, at least to those who do not accept it, and the inconsistencies keep piling up – and the non-dogmatists have started to develop a better, more refined model for reality, one that allows them to be more successful, and have started to move on.
The danger lies in spasms of the ideologues whose explanations no longer help, but who still have the power to construct structures that enforce their world-view."
Which nicely takes me back to our Open University course on all this. In there we deal with both the concept of models and the power of ideology and the need to be continually alert to both. We also felt that the power of rhetoric and the invisibility of underlying facts, values and beliefs are so important that we devoted a whole section of the course to this.
"Thomas Macaulay told us copyright law is a tax on readers for the benefit of writers, a tax that shouldn’t last a day longer than necessary. What do we do? We extend the copyright term repeatedly on both sides of the Atlantic. The US goes from fourteen years to the author’s life plus seventy years. We extend protection retrospectively to dead authors, perhaps in the hope they will write from their tombs.
Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent of 20th century culture to benefit 4 per cent. The harm to the public is huge, the benefit to authors, tiny. In any other field, the officials responsible would be fired. Not here.
It is as if we had signed an international stupidity pact, one that required us to ignore the evidence, to hand out new rights without asking for the simplest assessment of need. If the stakes were trivial, no one would care. But intellectual property (IP) is important. These are the ground rules of the information society. Mistakes hurt us. They have costs to free speech, competition, innovation, and science. Why are we making them...
Let me be clear. IP is a good thing... Not all proposals to extend rights are silly, but if we do not start looking rigorously at evidence, we will never know which."
Wonderful.
It certainly generated some traffic at Slashdot. Frank Field has an insightful take on all this too:
"The power of ideology (which I would define as a simplified explanation of how the world works) is that it generally does work – that’s why it becomes accepted. Developing a good model gives one advantages – the ability to anticipate outcomes and act with confidence upon that expected outcome. However, that success also leads the user to confuse the model of reality with reality itself and, eventually, the ideology disappears – “Why is more copyright protection better? That’s just how things work, stupid.”
As long as the model works, that confusion is not a problem. But when the model starts to fail (as it inevitably must), the dogmatic ideologue is in serious trouble – the explanations for how the world works sudden no longer work, and the easiest response (and most typical) is to argue away (or ignore) the inconsistencies and press on.
That’s where we are now. The inconsistencies cited in Boyle’s article and elsewhere are all around us, but the ideologues just keep repeating their mantra “more control/property/market discipline is better.” The ideology is now visible, at least to those who do not accept it, and the inconsistencies keep piling up – and the non-dogmatists have started to develop a better, more refined model for reality, one that allows them to be more successful, and have started to move on.
The danger lies in spasms of the ideologues whose explanations no longer help, but who still have the power to construct structures that enforce their world-view."
Which nicely takes me back to our Open University course on all this. In there we deal with both the concept of models and the power of ideology and the need to be continually alert to both. We also felt that the power of rhetoric and the invisibility of underlying facts, values and beliefs are so important that we devoted a whole section of the course to this.
Bono misses out
I hadn't noticed that Bono had been proposed, according to Anupam Chandler, as a possible president of the World Bank by the LA Times, prior to the US raliroading through Paul Wolfowitz's appointment.
New HRW Report
Human Rights Watch have called for "a special prosecutor to investigate the culpability of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and ex-CIA Director George Tenet in cases of detainee torture and abuse," in a report issued just prior to the first anniversary of the torture at Abu Ghraib prison coming to light.
On another front, which seems to have long since left the public arena, the Bush administration were criticised for leaking the identity of a CIA agent, Valerie Plame Wilson, the allegation at the time being that the leak was a malicious act arising in response to the administration's frustration at criticism by the agent's diplomat spouse, Joe Wilson.
A special prosecutor has been looking into the circumstances surrounding the leak and John Dean has an update on the investigation over at Findlaw. There are lots of interesting aspects of this case but the one Dean focusses on is the involvement of two journalists with an apparently peripheral involvement in the leak and the special prosecutor's attempts to get them to divulge sources to a grand jury. There is the strong framework of an investigative thriller in all this, when the story finally comes to be told.
On another front, which seems to have long since left the public arena, the Bush administration were criticised for leaking the identity of a CIA agent, Valerie Plame Wilson, the allegation at the time being that the leak was a malicious act arising in response to the administration's frustration at criticism by the agent's diplomat spouse, Joe Wilson.
A special prosecutor has been looking into the circumstances surrounding the leak and John Dean has an update on the investigation over at Findlaw. There are lots of interesting aspects of this case but the one Dean focusses on is the involvement of two journalists with an apparently peripheral involvement in the leak and the special prosecutor's attempts to get them to divulge sources to a grand jury. There is the strong framework of an investigative thriller in all this, when the story finally comes to be told.
Memex mention
John has a terrific column in the Observer this week about the BBC Creative Archive. Introducing it in his online diary, he says:
"My Observer column on the significance of the Creative Archive is here. The Open University, for which I work, is one of the Creative Archive partners, and is currently mulling over how it should contribute to it. In the meantime, one of my colleagues, Ray Corrigan, has released the materials for his course on Law, the Internet and Society under a Creative Commons licence. The course started life as part of my Relevant Knowledge programme, but was dropped when it came to the end of its designated life. It seemed crazy just to bury something that could be useful and interesting to many people simply because the university didn’t have space for it in its curriculum. So now it has a new lease of life, courtesy of the open content movement."
What he doesn't say is that he also wrote part of the course (which along with being highly regarded by experts from universities like Duke, Stanford and Cambridge should give you an idea of the quality of the material) but a mention on Memex 1.1 will, no doubt, have given the site readership a significant boost. Thanks John!
"My Observer column on the significance of the Creative Archive is here. The Open University, for which I work, is one of the Creative Archive partners, and is currently mulling over how it should contribute to it. In the meantime, one of my colleagues, Ray Corrigan, has released the materials for his course on Law, the Internet and Society under a Creative Commons licence. The course started life as part of my Relevant Knowledge programme, but was dropped when it came to the end of its designated life. It seemed crazy just to bury something that could be useful and interesting to many people simply because the university didn’t have space for it in its curriculum. So now it has a new lease of life, courtesy of the open content movement."
What he doesn't say is that he also wrote part of the course (which along with being highly regarded by experts from universities like Duke, Stanford and Cambridge should give you an idea of the quality of the material) but a mention on Memex 1.1 will, no doubt, have given the site readership a significant boost. Thanks John!
Friday, April 22, 2005
Google offer personal serch histories
Privacy advocates are concerned about the implications of Google's move to give people access to their search histories. But one commentator at Forbes, Arik Hesseldahl, thinks they should chill out.
Thursday, April 21, 2005
ISPs ordered to ID file sharers
A UK court, according to the Regsiter, has ordered 5 ISPs to hand over, to the British Phographic Industry, the personal details of 33 customers suspected of engaging in copyright infringement on P2P networks.
Don't place too much credence in the "research" that suggests P2P users would have spent £654m more on music CDs if they had not been downloading. It is currently impossible to tell what proportion of illegal downloads have led to the undermining of a possible purchase. There is a lot of alternative evidence that suggests music sampling on P2P networks has led to an increase in music CD sales. There is just not enough empirical evidence of the complex underlying patterns but there is no direct overall proven single causal link between use of P2P networks and a decrease in CD sales, no matter how intuitive the drawing of such a link might feel.
Don't place too much credence in the "research" that suggests P2P users would have spent £654m more on music CDs if they had not been downloading. It is currently impossible to tell what proportion of illegal downloads have led to the undermining of a possible purchase. There is a lot of alternative evidence that suggests music sampling on P2P networks has led to an increase in music CD sales. There is just not enough empirical evidence of the complex underlying patterns but there is no direct overall proven single causal link between use of P2P networks and a decrease in CD sales, no matter how intuitive the drawing of such a link might feel.
EDRI-gram 3.8
The latest EDRI-gram circular is now available and as usual has news of a range of important developments.
The French are following the UK lead and planning compulsory biometric ID cards. Cue my repetition of the usual questions:
What problem(/s) are they trying to solve?
A: Vague.
What does the architecture of the system look like?
A: Complex and unworkable.
How well do ID cards solve the problem?
A: Not at all.
How many other problems do they cause?
A: Lots.
How much does it cost (in cash and other trade offs)?
A: A lot.
Is it worth it?
A: No!
The French are following the UK lead and planning compulsory biometric ID cards. Cue my repetition of the usual questions:
What problem(/s) are they trying to solve?
A: Vague.
What does the architecture of the system look like?
A: Complex and unworkable.
How well do ID cards solve the problem?
A: Not at all.
How many other problems do they cause?
A: Lots.
How much does it cost (in cash and other trade offs)?
A: A lot.
Is it worth it?
A: No!
Passenger Lists Sought For Flights Over US - WP
The Washington Post has reported that
"The U.S. government plans to force foreign airlines flying over American soil to turn over the names of passengers on board or check the names against U.S. government watch lists in an effort to prevent terrorists from entering U.S. airspace."
Dutch airline KLM have allegedly partly started to comply with this requirement by checking passenger lists against US no fly lists. An airline spokesman said,
"It is not up to an airline to judge the security measures of individual countries"
"The U.S. government plans to force foreign airlines flying over American soil to turn over the names of passengers on board or check the names against U.S. government watch lists in an effort to prevent terrorists from entering U.S. airspace."
Dutch airline KLM have allegedly partly started to comply with this requirement by checking passenger lists against US no fly lists. An airline spokesman said,
"It is not up to an airline to judge the security measures of individual countries"
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Open University and Creative Commons
The Open University have released our Internet law course, based on Larry Lessig's book, The Future of Ideas, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.
Unfortunately you need to register to get into the site but otherwise it is openly accessible. Your chosen user ID and verifiable email address will only be used by server administrators to monitor site usage and will not be used for any other purpose.
The course originally formed part of the Relevant Knowledge programme of undergraduate technology short courses at the Open University, but is no longer offered as a credit-bearing option which can count towards an Open Unversity degree.
Given the importance of the ideas of of people like Larry to the future of our information society, however, I'd be keen to see the site widely read. It is pitched at a lay audience and so do encourage friends, family and colleagues to dip into at least some parts of the site. It's worth a look if only for the cartoons!
This is the first Open University course to be made available under a creative commons license but I hope it is the first of many.
Unfortunately you need to register to get into the site but otherwise it is openly accessible. Your chosen user ID and verifiable email address will only be used by server administrators to monitor site usage and will not be used for any other purpose.
The course originally formed part of the Relevant Knowledge programme of undergraduate technology short courses at the Open University, but is no longer offered as a credit-bearing option which can count towards an Open Unversity degree.
Given the importance of the ideas of of people like Larry to the future of our information society, however, I'd be keen to see the site widely read. It is pitched at a lay audience and so do encourage friends, family and colleagues to dip into at least some parts of the site. It's worth a look if only for the cartoons!
This is the first Open University course to be made available under a creative commons license but I hope it is the first of many.
Prison for file swappers
Yet another copyright law is hitting the books in the US. This time it is the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005.
"(Sec. 103) Establishes criminal penalties for willful copyright infringement by the distribution of a computer program, musical work, motion picture or other audiovisual work, or sound recording being prepared for commercial distribution by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if the person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution."
The criminal penalties referred to are 3 years in jail (and there is also the provision for large fines) for any P2P file sharers found offering a single copy of eg a film on pre-release (or "being prepared for commercial distribution").
As Peter Jaszi said: "I don't think this is an approach that is well calculated to create respect for the system." You certainly must question the proportionality of this.
The "family entertainment" bit of the act makes it legal for viewers to edit out gratuitous sex or violence and for commercial entities to create technologies to automatically cut these parts out to facilitate home produced family friendly versions of films. This was in response to the Directors Guild of America suing ClearPlay for making this kind of software, the popularly labelled "clean flicks" case.
"(Sec. 103) Establishes criminal penalties for willful copyright infringement by the distribution of a computer program, musical work, motion picture or other audiovisual work, or sound recording being prepared for commercial distribution by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if the person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution."
The criminal penalties referred to are 3 years in jail (and there is also the provision for large fines) for any P2P file sharers found offering a single copy of eg a film on pre-release (or "being prepared for commercial distribution").
As Peter Jaszi said: "I don't think this is an approach that is well calculated to create respect for the system." You certainly must question the proportionality of this.
The "family entertainment" bit of the act makes it legal for viewers to edit out gratuitous sex or violence and for commercial entities to create technologies to automatically cut these parts out to facilitate home produced family friendly versions of films. This was in response to the Directors Guild of America suing ClearPlay for making this kind of software, the popularly labelled "clean flicks" case.
Monday, April 18, 2005
DRM = Choice
Patrick Ross at IPCentral seems to think DRM = Consumer choice. I'll leave that hanging because I don't know whether he really believes it (though there is a good chance he does) or is just trolling.
Blawg Review
"Welcome to a world where inexperienced editors make articles about the wrong topics worse." - Judge Posner's funny introduction to Blawg Review.
WIPO spin lockout on Development agenda
David Tannenbaum is not pleased at the World Intellectual Property Organisation's media advisory is
"putting some heavy spin on the lock-out of civil society NGOs. The media advisory suggests that while "The WIPO secretariat has taken note of non-accredited NGOs that have requested to participate in the [development agenda meetings], on an ad hoc basis," the secretariat isn't going to do much about these requests. The advisory says, "Any departure from the original General Assembly decision on this question rests firmly within the hands of the member states," and refers to the General Assembly decision that "WIPO-accredited IGOs and NGOs are invited to participate as observers in the meetings."
This media advisory suggests that the General Assembly language binds the secretariat to close out civil society NGOs, but the restrictive gloss on this language is a creation of the secretariat alone."
"putting some heavy spin on the lock-out of civil society NGOs. The media advisory suggests that while "The WIPO secretariat has taken note of non-accredited NGOs that have requested to participate in the [development agenda meetings], on an ad hoc basis," the secretariat isn't going to do much about these requests. The advisory says, "Any departure from the original General Assembly decision on this question rests firmly within the hands of the member states," and refers to the General Assembly decision that "WIPO-accredited IGOs and NGOs are invited to participate as observers in the meetings."
This media advisory suggests that the General Assembly language binds the secretariat to close out civil society NGOs, but the restrictive gloss on this language is a creation of the secretariat alone."
P2P spread the word
The Death in the Afternoon blog has a plan for defending the legitimacy of P2P services.
SCO litigation summary
Martin Keegan posted a nice summary (last November) of the complex SCO litigation.
Stewart Brand reckons "Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbanization, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power."
He might even be right about GMOs and nuclear power.
He might even be right about GMOs and nuclear power.
Taxonomy of privacy
James Grimmelmann is impressed with Daniel Solove latest law review article, A Taxonomy of Privacy. From Prof. Solove's conclusions:
"Too many courts and policymakers struggle with recognizing privacy problems. Privacy is certainly not an absolute value, but neither are the countervailing interests. Thus protecting privacy requires careful balancing. Unforunately, due to conceptual confusion, courts and legislatures are failing to recognize privacy problems, and if one is not recognized, no balancing takes place. This does not mean that privacy should win in the balance, but it should not simply be dismissed because it is ignored or misconstrued.
When translated into the legal system, privacy is a form of protection against certain harmful or problematic activities. The activities that affect privacy are not necessarily bad or worthy of sanction or prohibition. This fact is what makes addressing privacy issues so complex. In many instances, there is no evil wrongdoer, no villain whose activities have no value or make no social contribution. Instead many privacy problems arise as a result of efficacious activities, much like pollution is an outgrowth of inductrial activity."
The full 61 pages are not for the faint hearted but for those of you with an interest in privacy in our information age, this is better value for your efforts than most law review articles,
"Too many courts and policymakers struggle with recognizing privacy problems. Privacy is certainly not an absolute value, but neither are the countervailing interests. Thus protecting privacy requires careful balancing. Unforunately, due to conceptual confusion, courts and legislatures are failing to recognize privacy problems, and if one is not recognized, no balancing takes place. This does not mean that privacy should win in the balance, but it should not simply be dismissed because it is ignored or misconstrued.
When translated into the legal system, privacy is a form of protection against certain harmful or problematic activities. The activities that affect privacy are not necessarily bad or worthy of sanction or prohibition. This fact is what makes addressing privacy issues so complex. In many instances, there is no evil wrongdoer, no villain whose activities have no value or make no social contribution. Instead many privacy problems arise as a result of efficacious activities, much like pollution is an outgrowth of inductrial activity."
The full 61 pages are not for the faint hearted but for those of you with an interest in privacy in our information age, this is better value for your efforts than most law review articles,
Senate transcript
The transcript of the Senate hearing on "securing electronice personal data", following the recently highly publicised leaks of personal information by companies like ChoicePoint, LexisNexis, Citibank and Bank of America is now available online.
Makes interesting reading. The lawmakers in this instance seem to be moving towards a federal requirement that when there is a security leak of personal data then the company hosting the data should notify people whose personal details have been compromised, as is the case in California.
Makes interesting reading. The lawmakers in this instance seem to be moving towards a federal requirement that when there is a security leak of personal data then the company hosting the data should notify people whose personal details have been compromised, as is the case in California.
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