Technovana

Yesterday the European Court of Justice issued an important ruling that has the tech policy world buzzing about privacy, search engines and personal history. In short, the court ruled that the EU Data Protection Directive gives a person the right to demand that old information be purged from search results. The particular case involves an attorney seeking removal of links to announcements about a real-estate auction connected with a debt settlement in 1998. While the ECJ made a number of interesting moves in the case (including a welcome argument that the distinction between data processors and data controllers does not make as much sense today as it did in 1995 when the Directive went into effect), the big consequence everyone is talking is the right to be forgotten. The long memory of the Internet is a feature it's hard not to love and fear at the same time. Whether you have something to hide or not, if it's on the Internet, it stays on the Internet (most of the time, at l...

Since it's so much on my mind, I thought I would devote today's post to a brief round-up of three key Supreme Court decisions coming out this week. Each case has some serious civil rights implications, so taking a look at how these decisions go will give us a picture of the current state of various struggles for equality in the US. The three cases being decided this week are: Fisher v University of Texas at Austin : on affirmative action Shelby County v Holder : on the Voting Rights Act Hollingsworth v Perry & United States v Windsor (together): on Prop 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) respectively, both concern gay marriage There are extensive analogies of all cases, so I won't go into deep detail. If you want more in-depth analysis, I point you to the ACLU ( http://www.aclu.org/blog ) or the SCOTUS blog itself ( http://www.scotusblog.com/ ). Instead, I'll gesture at the general temperature of the rulings so far. On Fisher , the Court returned the case to...

I alluded to this problem in the initial fair use post, but it deserves a bit more attention. While Weird Al has indeed made a fortune on parody, not all aspiring satirists are so lucky. The Air Pirates certainly did not get away with their parodies of Disney characters. While the courts have been reluctant to hear fair use cases, the cost of litigation makes the possibility of losing any challenge risky. As a result, parody, and other instances of what would appear to be fair use, is not as protected as you might think. If a copyright-holder takes exception to the material and decides to sue for infringement, the defendant must weigh his or her own resources against those of the plaintiff. For the most part, settlement often looks like a rational decision. James Boyle's The Public Domain contains an excellent example of such calculations. I won't reproduce the story in full (Boyle has released the book under a Creative Commons license, so feel free to look it up yourself)...

Continuing on this week's topic of first sale and digital distribution, I thought I would discuss emerging distribution strategies for digital media. The outline below comes from my observations on new media technologies, some of which can be found in an earlier entry  here . As far as I can tell, digital distribution strategies can be divided into three categories according to salient features. Access-Based distribution (“cloud” based services) the customer subscribes to a service the subscription entitles the customer to access content stored on the provider's servers content is remotely stored, though some items may be remotely cached for offline use when the subscription is terminated, the customer loses access to all content the content provider can exercise a great deal of control over what content is offered; the selection of content may vary over time, meaning that the customer is only guaranteed access to the cloud, not any particular item in the...

The previous entry ended on the note that to discuss file sharing, there must be some discussion of first sale in the age of digital content. At base, first sale is a straightforward concept. A copyright-holder has the exclusive right to make and sell copies of the work, but that right to sell is exhausted after the first sale. Once a consumer has purchased a copy, she has the right to resell the copy, give it away, lend it out, or even destroy it. First sale typically makes content both more available and more affordable. Content is made more affordable by the creation of secondary markets for used copies. Libraries also rely on first sale rights to lend copies to the public (or to members, students, etc), lowering the cost of access by distributing the cost of copies over a population (of tax-payers, tuition-payers, etc). First sale increases availability of content by allowing the owners of copies to continue to circulate (through sale or gift) their copies even after the work is...

When the CTEA passed in 1998, and the Supreme Court defended it from challenge just two years later, the accepted term for copyright was once again extended. The council for the plaintiffs attempted several arguments to show that the CTEA unconstitutionally extended copyright terms, and that if such legislation was a sign of a trend in IP legislation, the sense of copyright as a limited monopoly would be eroded bit by bit until all copyrights were rendered perpetual. Unfortunately, the Court rejected those arguments. As of now, copyright protection is guaranteed for the life of the author plus 70 years for works of individual authorship. Works of corporate authorship are treated differently, protected for 120 years from date of creation, or 95 years from date of publication, whichever is earlier. It would be convenient if the story ended there. However, the ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission extended broad rights of free speech to corporations, entities whi...

As I mentioned in the last post, my dissertation concerns intellectual property rights. I am currently writing a chapter on the information commons in which I argue that the information commons should be understood as a collection of memes. As such, agents must have some presumptive rights to access the information commons. Otherwise agents would not have presumptive access to the contents of their own minds. To understand why this should be so, a little bit of unpacking is required. “Information commons” is a way of talking about generally known or available information. The information commons includes inchoate ideas as well as complete works, both public domain and protected works. Intellectual property scholars invoke various metaphors to explain what the information commons is, why it is so important, and how it should be preserved. The most straightforward model, the one which the very term arises, comes by way of analogy to a physical commons. The information commons is a st...

I'd like to draw your attention to the license text at the bottom of this page. I might not normally take the time to point out licensing, but it is a matter of professional interest. My dissertation concerns intellectual property rights, and I argue for a fairly open intellectual property system, in hopes of providing some argument against current trends. I place myself on the side of free culture. Culture is the product of basic human activities, the ways we connect to one another and come to understand ourselves and our fellows. As such, creative works provide a key benefit to the public at large. They allow us to express ourselves and communicate with others, to show our own struggles and reflection, to offer our own perspective. What is most interesting to me is that the value of intellectual objects is maximized by sharing, not hoarding. An invention unsold, a story unpublished, can bring some passing benefit to a single person, but once released to the public, circulated ...

What follows is a mission statement, a rough outline of the stance I tend to take in response to social issues, and therefore the stance I am likely to take in many of my posts. In its current form it is rough, a bit ranty, and somewhat incomplete. I really don't think it's possible for a rational person to sum up all of their views quickly, so I invite readers to simply tuck in for the ride and see where it takes them. For now, this, I believe: This blog will be a place for me to give air to ideas as I develop them, in hopes of working toward more refined arguments. The title refers to a general belief of mine that technology and technological advancement offer our most sure prospect for realizing ideals like justice, compassion, and liberty for all human beings. While moved by utopian dreams, my observation of the world has steeped me in cynicism. Political machines are hijacked by pirates and robber barons. Virtuous leaders fight entrenched systems of privilege, and ma...