Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ Category
The Right to Data Portability (RDP) as a Per Se Anti-tying Rule
posted by Peter Swire
Yesterday I gave a presentation on “The Right to Data Portability: Privacy and Antitrust Analysis” at a conference at the George Mason Law School. In an earlier post here, I asked whether the proposed EU right to data portability violates antitrust law.
I think the presentation helped sharpen the antitrust concern. The presentation first develops the intuition that consumers should want a right to data portability (RDP), which is proposed in Article 18 of the EU Data Protection Regulation. RDP seems attractive, at least initially, because it might prevent consumers getting locked in to a software platform, and because it advances the existing EU right of access to one’s own data.
Turning to antitrust law, I asked how antitrust law would consider a rule that, say, prohibits an operating system from being integrated with software for a browser. We saw those facts, of course, in the Microsoft case decided by the DC Circuit over a decade ago. Plaintiffs asserted an illegal “tying” arrangement between Windows and IE. The court rejected a per se rule against tying of software, because integration of software can have many benefits and innovation in software relies on developers finding new ways to put things together. The court instead held that the rule of reason applies.
RDP, however, amounts to a per se rule against tying of software. Suppose a social network offers a networking service and integrates that with software that has various features for exporting or not exporting data in various formats. We have the tying product (social network) and the tied product (module for export or not of data). US antitrust law has rejected a per se rule here. The EU proposed regulation essentially adopts a per se rule against that sort of tying arrangement.
Modern US and EU antitrust law seek to enhance “consumer welfare.” If the Microsoft case is correct, then a per se rule of the sort in the Regulation quite plausibly reduces consumer welfare. There may be other reasons to adopt RDP, as discussed in the slides (and I hope in my future writing). RDP might advance human rights to access. It might enhance openness more generally on the Internet. But it quite possibly reduces consumer welfare, and that deserves careful attention.
May 17, 2012 at 3:56 pm
Tags: Antitrust, Privacy, right to data portability
Posted in: Administrative Law, Antitrust, Cyberlaw, Economic Analysis of Law, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Web 2.0
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Recommended Reading: Harlan Yu and David Robinson on The New Ambiguity of “Open Government”
posted by Danielle Citron
Last week, we had an engrossing discussion of Julie Cohen’s Configuring The Networked Self, which embraces three key principles for protecting the structural conditions of human flourishing, including transparency of networked architecture which routes, shapes, and determines the collection, use, and flow of information. Harlan Yu of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy and David Robinson of the Yale Information Society Project have done important work puzzling through the question of transparency, and the related concerns of privacy and civil engagement, in “open government” efforts. Their conclusion:
Separating technological from political “openness”—separating the ideal of adaptable data from that of transparent politics—will yield benefits for all sides. New technologies, cut free from the heavy political burdens they have recently been made to carry, will be free to assume their widely varied natural roles, spreading throughout government in nimble and unpredictable ways, and helping governments at every level pursue all kinds of objectives. The Internet will still help, where it can, to make regimes more transparent.
At the same time, a clearer focus on transparency will give political reformers, who will no longer be shoehorned together with technologists, more freedom to focus on the political questions that motivate them in the first place. From their perspective, technology will do what it always does when working well: fade into the background and make room for human concerns.
When I spoke at Princeton about my work on Technological Due Process, Robinson and Yu helped me puzzle through my privacy concerns about Government 2.0, which I then developed in “Fulfilling Government 2.0′s Promise with Robust Privacy Protections,” 78 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 822 (2010). They are exciting thinkers, and their newest piece helps us appreciate and conceptualize calls for transparency and open government and the appropriate role technologists and technology can and should play.
March 16, 2012 at 8:38 am
Posted in: Administrative Law, Cyberlaw, Politics, Privacy, Technology, Web 2.0
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Pakistan Scrubs the Net
posted by Derek Bambauer
Pakistan, which has long censored the Internet, has decided to upgrade its cybersieves. And, like all good bureaucracies, the government has put the initiative out for bid. According to the New York Times, Pakistan wants to spend $10 million on a system that can block up to 50 million URLs concurrently, with minimal effect on network speed. (That’s a lot of Web pages.) Internet censorship is on the march worldwide (and the U.S. is no exception). There are at least three interesting things about Pakistan’s move:
First, the country’s openness about its censorial goals is admirable. Pakistan is informing its citizens, along with the rest of us, that it wants to bowdlerize the Net. And, it is attempting to do so in a way that is more uniform than under its current system, where filtering varies by ISP. I don’t necessarily agree with Pakistan’s choice, but I do like that the country is straightforward with its citizens, who have begun to respond.
Second, the California-based filtering company Websense announced that it will not bid on the contract. That’s fascinating – a tech firm has decided that the public relations damage from helping Pakistan censor the Net is greater than the $10M in revenue it could gain. (Websense argues, of course, that its decision is a principled one. If you believe that, you are probably a member of the Ryan Braun Clean Competition fan club.)
Finally, the state is somewhat vague about what it will censor: it points to pornography, blasphemy, and material that affects national security. The last part is particularly worrisome: the national security trump card is a potent force after 9/11 and its concomitant fallout in Pakistan’s neighborhood, and censorship based on it tends to be secret. There is also real risk that national security interests = interests of the current government. America has an unpleasant history of censoring political dissent based on security worries, and Pakistan is no different.
I’ll be fascinated to see which companies take up Pakistan’s offer to propose…
Cross-posted at Info/Law.
March 8, 2012 at 3:03 pm
Posted in: Architecture, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Google and Search Engines, Intellectual Property, Politics, Privacy (National Security), Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0
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Stanford Law Review Online: In Search of Cyber Peace
posted by Stanford Law Review
The Stanford Law Review Online has just published an Essay by Scott J. Shackelford entitled In Search of Cyber Peace: A Response to the Cybersecurity Act of 2012. In the wake of recent events with the group Anonymous and other “hacktivists,” Shackelford discusses the pressing need for improved cybersecurity and explains why the proposed Cybersecurity Act is a step in the right direction–but doesn’t go far enough:
The Cybersecurity Act of 2012, which was recently introduced in the Senate Homeland Security and Governance Affairs Committee, is the latest legislative attempt to enhance the nation’s cybersecurity. If enacted, the bill would grant new powers to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to oversee U.S. government cybersecurity, set “cybersecurity performance requirements” for firms operating what DHS deems to be “critical infrastructure,” and create “exchanges” to promote information sharing. In its current form, the bill is a useful step in the right direction but falls short of what is required. Fundamentally the bill misconstrues the scale and complexity of the evolving cyber threat by defining critical infrastructure too narrowly and relying too much on voluntary incentives and risk mitigation strategies. The Act might improve on the status quo, but it will not foster genuine and lasting cybersecurity. Still, it is preferable to the softer alternative SECURE IT Act proposed by senior Republicans.
He concludes:
If we want to change the status quo, accountability and responsibility must be increased throughout the system. Government regulations are a necessary part of that process. But given political realities and the magnitude of the problem, reform must also include relying on the competitive market whenever possible to proactively foster best practices, providing market-based incentives and cyber risk mitigation techniques to firms operating [critical national infrastructure (CNI)], negotiating new international norms, and educating users to avoid becoming victims of social-engineering attacks like phishing. Cybersecurity cannot truly be enhanced without addressing the myriad governance gaps, which include incomplete regulation of CNI; technical vulnerabilities in the physical, logical, and content layers of the Internet; and legal ambiguities ranging from liability for data breaches to the applicability of international law to cyber attacks. One Act cannot accomplish all that—not even close. But being honest about the magnitude of the problems we face would help to begin a national conversation about what needs to happen next.
In 3001: The Final Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke envisions a future in which humanity had the foresight to rid the world of its worst weapons of mass destruction by placing them in a vault on the moon. A special place in this vault was reserved for the malignant computer viruses that, in Clarke’s speculative fiction, had caused untold damage to humanity over the centuries. Before new cyber attacks do untold damage to our information society, it is in our interest to educate and regulate our way to a steady state of cybersecurity. Part of this process involves broadening the definition of CNI in the Cybersecurity Act and deepening public-private partnerships through more robust information sharing. Science fiction teaches us that our future world can be either a wonderful or a dystopian place. Whether or not the future includes the security and prosperity of cyber peace is up to us—including, for better or worse, the U.S. Congress.
Read the full article, In Search of Cyber Peace: A Response to the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 by Scott J. Shackelford, at the Stanford Law Review Online.
March 8, 2012 at 12:42 pm
Posted in: Cyberlaw, Law Rev (Stanford), Politics, Science Fiction, Technology, Web 2.0
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Santorum: Please Don’t Google
posted by Derek Bambauer
If you Google “Santorum,” you’ll find that two of the top three search results take an unusual angle on the Republican candidate, thanks to sex columnist Dan Savage. (I very nearly used “Santorum” as a Google example in class last semester, and only just thought better of it.) Santorum’s supporters want Google to push the, er, less conventional site further down the rankings, and allege that Google’s failure to do so is political biased. That claim is obviously a load of Santorum, but the situation has drawn more thoughtful responses. Danny Sullivan argues that Google should implement a disclaimer, because kids may search on “Santorum” and be disturbed by what they find, or because they may think Google has a political agenda. (The site has one for “jew,” for example. For a long time, the first result for that search term was to the odious and anti-Semitic JewWatch site.)
This suggestion is well-intentioned but flatly wrong. I’m not an absolutist: I like how Google handled the problem of having a bunch of skinheads show up as a top result for “jew.” But I don’t want Google as the Web police, though many disagree. Should the site implement a disclaimer if you search for “Tommy Lee Pamela Anderson”? (Warning: sex tape.) If you search for “flat earth theory,” should Google tell you that you are potentially a moron? I don’t think so. Disclaimers should be the nuclear option for Google – partly so they continue to attract attention, and partly because they move Google from a primarily passive role as filter to a more active one as commentator. I generally like my Web results without knowing what Google thinks about them.
Evgeny Morozov has made a similar suggestion, though along different lines: he wants Google to put up a banner or signal when someone searches for links between vaccines and autism, or proof that the Pentagon / Israelis / Santa Claus was behind the 9/11 attacks. I’m more sympathetic to Evgeny’s idea, but I would limit banners or disclaimers to situations that meet two criteria. First, the facts of the issue must be clear-cut: pi is not equal to three (and no one really thinks so), and the planet is indisputably getting warmer. And second, the issue must be one that is both currently relevant and with significant consequences. The flat earthers don’t count; the anti-vaccine nuts do. (People who fail to immunize their children not only put them at risk; they put their classmates and friends at risk, too.) Lastly, I think there’s importance to having both a sense of humor and a respect for discordant, even false speech. The Santorum thing is darn funny. And, in the political realm, we have a laudable history of tolerating false or inflammatory speech, because we know the perils of censorship. So, keeping spreading Santorum!
Danielle, Frank, and the other CoOp folks have kindly let me hang around their blog like a slovenly houseguest, and I’d like to thank them for it. See you soon!
Cross-posted at Info/Law.
February 29, 2012 at 5:54 pm
Posted in: Advertising, Architecture, Bright Ideas, Culture, Current Events, Cyberlaw, Education, First Amendment, Google and Search Engines, Humor, Innovation, Just for Fun, Law Talk, Media Law, Politics, Psychology and Behavior, Technology, Web 2.0
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Ubiquitous Infringement
posted by Derek Bambauer
Lifehacker‘s Adam Dachis has a great article on how users can deal with a world in which they infringe copyright constantly, both deliberately and inadvertently. (Disclaimer alert: I talked with Adam about the piece.) It’s a practical guide to a strict liability regime – no intent / knowledge requirement for direct infringement – that operates not as a coherent body of law, but as a series of reified bargains among stakeholders. And props to Adam for the Downfall reference! I couldn’t get by without the mockery of the iPhone or SOPA that it makes possible…
Cross-posted to Info/Law.
February 27, 2012 at 2:14 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Architecture, Culture, Current Events, Cyberlaw, DRM, Education, Google and Search Engines, Innovation, Intellectual Property, Interviews, Media Law, Movies & Television, Politics, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0
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Stealing the Throne
posted by Derek Bambauer
Ever-brilliant Web comic The Oatmeal has a great piece about piracy and its alternatives. (The language at the end is a bit much, but it is the character’s evil Jiminy Cricket talking.) It mirrors my opinion about Major League Baseball’s unwillingness to offer any Internet access to the postseason, which is hard on those of us who don’t own TVs (or subscribe to cable). Even if you don’t agree with my moral claims, it’s obvious that as the price of lawful access diverges from the price of unlawful access (which is either zero, or the expected present value of a copyright suit, which is darn near zero), infringement goes up.
So, if you want to see Game of Thrones (and I do), your options are: subscribe to cable plus HBO, or pirate. I think the series rocks, but I’m not paying $100 a month for it. If HBO expects me to do so, it weakens their moral claim against piracy.
Unconvinced? Imagine instead that HBO offers to let you watch Game of Thrones for free – but the only place on Earth you can view the series is in the Kodak Theater in Hollywood. You’re located in rural Iowa? Well, you’ve no cause for complaint! Fly to LA! I suspect that translating costs into physical costs makes the argument clearer: HBO charges not only for the content, but bundles it with one particular delivery medium. If that medium is unavailable to you, or unaffordable, you’re out of luck.
Unless, of course, you have broadband, and can BitTorrent.
As a minimum, I plan not to support any SOPA-like legislation until the content industries begin to offer viable Internet-based delivery mechanisms that at least begin to compete with piracy…
Cross-posted at Info/Law.
February 22, 2012 at 12:21 pm
Posted in: Architecture, Culture, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, DRM, Innovation, Intellectual Property, Legal Ethics, Media Law, Movies & Television, Politics, Technology, Web 2.0
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Cyberbullying and the Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys
posted by Derek Bambauer
(This post is based on a talk I gave at the Seton Hall Legislative Journal’s symposium on Bullying and the Social Media Generation. Many thanks to Frank Pasquale, Marisa Hourdajian, and Michelle Newton for the invitation, and to Jane Yakowitz and Will Creeley for a great discussion!)
Introduction
New Jersey enacted the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights (ABBR) in 2011, in part as a response to the tragic suicide of Tyler Clementi at Rutgers University. It is routinely lauded as the country’s broadest, most inclusive, and strongest anti-bullying law. That is not entirely a compliment. In this post, I make two core claims. First, the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights has several aspects that are problematic from a First Amendment perspective – in particular, the overbreadth of its definition of prohibited conduct, the enforcement discretion afforded school personnel, and the risk of impingement upon religious and political freedoms. I argue that the legislation departs from established precedent on disruptions of the educational environment by regulating horizontal relations between students rather than vertical relations between students and the school as an institution / environment. Second, I believe we should be cautious about statutory regimes that enable government actors to sanction speech based on content. I suggest that it is difficult to distinguish, on a principled basis, between bullying (which is bad) and social sanctions that enforce norms (which are good). Moreover, anti-bullying laws risk displacing effective informal measures that emerge from peer production. Read the rest of this post »
February 21, 2012 at 10:20 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Blogging, Bright Ideas, Civil Rights, Conferences, Constitutional Law, Culture, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Education, First Amendment, Media Law, Politics, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Psychology and Behavior, Race, Religion, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0
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The Memory Hole
posted by Derek Bambauer
On RocketLawyer’s Legally Easy podcast, I talk with Charley Moore and Eva Arevuo about the EU’s proposed “right to be forgotten” and privacy as censorship. I was inspired by Jeff Rosen and Jane Yakowitz‘s critiques of the approach, which actually appears to be a “right to lie effectively.” If you can disappear unflattering – and truthful – information, it lets you deceive others – in other words, you benefit and they are harmed. The EU’s approach is a blunderbuss where a scalpel is needed.
Cross-posted at Info/Law.
February 17, 2012 at 12:01 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Architecture, Civil Rights, Consumer Protection Law, Culture, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Google and Search Engines, Innovation, Media Law, Political Economy, Politics, Privacy, Technology, Web 2.0
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Cary Sherman and the Lost Generation
posted by Derek Bambauer
The RIAA’s Cary Sherman had a screed about the Stop Online Piracy and PROTECT IP Acts in the New York Times recently. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick brilliantly gutted it, and I’m not going to pile on – a tour de force requires no augmentation. What I want to suggest is that the recording industry – or, at least, its trade group – is dangerously out of touch.
Contrast this with at least part of the movie industry, as represented by Paramount Pictures. I received a letter from Al Perry, Paramount’s Vice President Worldwide Content Protection & Outreach. He proposed coming here to Brooklyn Law School to
exchange ideas about content theft, its challenges and possible ways to address it. We think about these issues on a daily basis. But, as these last few weeks [the SOPA and PROTECT IP debates] made painfully clear, we still have much to learn. We would love to come to campus and do exactly that.
Jason Mazzone, Jonathan Askin, and I are eagerly working to have Perry come to campus, both to present Paramount’s perspective and to discuss it with him. We’ll have input from students, faculty, and staff, and I expect there to be some pointed debate. We’re not naive – the goal here is to try to win support for Paramount’s position on dealing with IP infringement – but I’m impressed that Perry is willing to listen, and to enter the lion’s den (of a sort).
And that’s the key difference: Perry, and Paramount, recognize that Hollywood has lost a generation. For the last decade or so, students have grown up in a world where content is readily available via the Internet, through both licit and illicit means; where the content industries are the people who sue your friends and force you to watch anti-piracy warnings at the start of the movies you paid for; and where one aspires to be Larry Lessig, not Harvey Weinstein. Those of us who teach IP or Internet law have seen it up close. In another ten years, these young lawyers are going to be key Congressional staffers, think tank analysts, entrepreneurs, and law firm partners. And they think Hollywood is the enemy. I don’t share that view – I think the content industries are amoral profit maximizers, just like any other corporation – but I understand it.
And that’s where Sherman is wrong and Perry is right. The old moves no longer work. Buying Congresspeople to pass legislation drafted behind closed doors doesn’t really work (although maybe we’ll find out when we debate the Copyright Term Extension Act of 2018). Calling it “theft” when someone downloads a song they’d never otherwise pay for doesn’t work (even Perry is still on about this one).
One more thing about Sherman: his op-ed reminded me of Detective John Munch in Homicide, who breaks down and shouts at a suspect, “Don’t you ever lie to me like I’m Montel Williams. I am not Montel Williams.” Sherman lies to our faces and expects us not to notice. He writes, “the Protect Intellectual Property Act (or PIPA) was carefully devised, with nearly unanimous bipartisan support in the Senate, and its House counterpart, the Stop Online Piracy Act (or SOPA), was based on existing statutes and Supreme Court precedents.” Yes, it was carefully devised – by content industries. SOPA was introduced at the end of October, and the single hearing that was held on it was stacked with proponents of the bill. “Carefully devised?” Key proponents didn’t even know how its DNS filtering provisions worked. He argues, “Since when is it censorship to shut down an operation that an American court, upon a thorough review of evidence, has determined to be illegal?” Because censorship is when the government blocks you from accessing speech before a trial. “A thorough review of evidence” is a flat lie: SOPA enabled an injunction filtering a site based on an ex parte application by the government, in contravention of a hundred years of First Amendment precedent. And finally, he notes the massive opposition to SOPA and PROTECT IP, but then asks, “many of those e-mails were from the same people who attacked the Web sites of the Department of Justice, the Motion Picture Association of America, my organization and others as retribution for the seizure of Megaupload, an international digital piracy operation?” This is a McCarthyite tactic: associating the remarkable democratic opposition to the bills – in stark contrast to the smoke-filled rooms in which Sherman worked to push this legislation – with Anonymous and other miscreants.
But the risk for Sherman – and Paramount, and Sony, and other content industries – is not that we’ll be angry, or they’ll be opposed. It’s that they’ll be irrelevant. And if Hollywood takes the Sherman approach, rather than the Perry one, deservedly so.
Cross-posted at Info/Law.
February 14, 2012 at 7:40 pm
Posted in: Architecture, Culture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, DRM, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Innovation, Intellectual Property, Media Law, Political Economy, Politics, Technology, Web 2.0
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Tempest in Tempe: First Amendment in the Desert
posted by Derek Bambauer
In the spirit of the excellent colloquy here about Marvin’s thinking on First Amendment architectures, I bring up this news item: Arizona State University blocked both Web access to, and e-mail from, the change.org Web site. ASU students had begun a petition demanding that the university reduce tuition. The university essentially made three claims as to why it did so (below, in order of increasing stupidity):
- It was a technical mistake;
- Change.org was spamming ASU; and
- ASU needs to “protect the use of our limited and valuable network resources for legitimate academic, research and administrative uses.”
#1 and #2 run together. If spam is the problem, you don’t need to block access to the Web site. However, if you are concerned that students are going to read the petition, and sign it, you do need to block access to the Web site.
For #2, sorry, ASU, this isn’t spam. Spam is unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail. Change.org is, allegedly, sending unsolicited political e-mail. And that’s protected by the First Amendment – see, for example, the Virginia Supreme Court’s analysis of that state’s anti-spam law that covered political messages. Potential political spammers have a sharp disincentive to fill recipient’s inboxes – it’s a sure-fire way to annoy them into opposing your position.
For #3, ASU doesn’t get to determine what academic and research uses are “legitimate.” If they throttle P2P apps, that’s fine. If they limit file sizes for attachments, no problem. But deciding that the message from Change.org is not “legitimate” is classic, and unconstitutional, viewpoint discrimination.
This looks like censorship. I think it’s more likely to be stupidity: someone in ASU’s IT department decided to block these messages as spam, and to filter outbound Web requests to the site contained within those messages. But: with great power over the network comes great responsibility. Well-intentioned constitutional violations are still unlawful. It would also help if ASU’s spokesperson simply admitted the mistake rather than engaging in idiotic justification.
As I mention in Orwell’s Armchair, public actors are increasingly important sources of Internet access. But when ASU and other public universities take on the role of ISP, they need to remember that they are not AOL: their technical decisions are constrained not merely by tech resources, but by our commitment to free speech. Let’s hope the Sun Devils cool off on the filtering…
Cross-posted at Info/Law.
February 10, 2012 at 5:10 pm
Posted in: Architecture, Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Politics, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0
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The Hardest Thing to Predict Is the Future
posted by Derek Bambauer
SOPA and PROTECT IP are dead… for now. (They’ll be back. COICA is like a wraith inhabiting PROTECT IP.) Until then, Michelle Schusterman has a terrific graphic about the movie industry’s predictions of doom with each new technological revolution. (Ditto the music industry: the player piano, radio, CDs, the MP3 player, etc., etc.) One reason for this is that it’s difficult to predict the effects of a new communications technology. People thought we’d use the telephone to listen to concerts from afar. But another reason is that content industries see advances not as an opportunity but as a threat – a threat that they deploy IP law to combat, or at least control. And in a policy space where lawmakers don’t demand actual data on threats before acting, trumped-up assertions of job loss and revenue loss can carry the day. This puts the lie to the theory that IP owners will move to exploit new communications media, if only they are protected against infringement. We didn’t get viable Internet-based music sales until iTunes in 2003, and Spotify is the first serious streaming app (the “celestial jukebox“). Think about prior efforts like Pressplay and MusicNow, and how terrible they were. Letting the content industry design delivery models is like letting Matt Millen draft your football team.
This is why piracy is a helpful pointer: it tells us what channels consumers want to use to access content. Sometimes this is just displacement of lawful consumption, as when college students with copious disposable income download songs via BitTorrent, but sometimes it indicates an unaddressed market niche (as with me and the baseball playoffs). To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, I think a little bit of infringement now and again is a good thing. It is only when there is a viable threat in a new medium that existing players innovate – or cut deals with those who do. In that regard, even if SOPA and PROTECT IP are effective at reducing infringement, we might not want them.
Cross-posted at Info/Law.
January 31, 2012 at 6:58 pm
Posted in: Architecture, Culture, Cyberlaw, DRM, Innovation, Intellectual Property, Media Law, Movies & Television, Politics, Technology, Web 2.0
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The E.U. Data Protection Directive and Robot Chicken
posted by Derek Bambauer
The European Commission released a draft of its revised Data Protection Directive this morning, and Jane Yakowitz has a trenchant critique up at Forbes.com. In addition to the sharp legal analysis, her article has both a Star Wars and Robot Chicken reference, which makes it basically the perfect information law piece…
January 25, 2012 at 4:32 pm
Posted in: Advertising, Architecture, Civil Rights, Consumer Protection Law, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Google and Search Engines, Innovation, Politics, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0
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Cybersecurity Puzzles
posted by Derek Bambauer
Cybersecurity is in the news: a network intrusion allegedly interfered with railroad signals in the Northwest in December; the Obama administration refused to support the Stop Online Piracy Act due to worries about interfering with DNSSEC; and the GAO concluded that the Department of Homeland Security is making things worse by oversharing. So, I’m fortunate that the Minnesota Law Review has just published the final version of Conundrum (available on SSRN), in which I argue that we should take an information-based approach to cybersecurity:
Cybersecurity is a conundrum. Despite a decade of sustained attention from scholars, legislators, military officials, popular media, and successive presidential administrations, little if any progress has been made in augmenting Internet security. Current scholarship on cybersecurity is bound to ill-fitting doctrinal models. It addresses cybersecurity based upon identification of actors and intent, arguing that inherent defects in the Internet’s architecture must be remedied to enable attribution. These proposals, if adopted, would badly damage the Internet’s generative capacity for innovation. Drawing upon scholarship in economics, animal behavior, and mathematics, this Article takes a radical new path, offering a theoretical model oriented around information, in distinction to the near-obsession with technical infrastructure demonstrated by other models. It posits a regulatory focus on access and alteration of data, and on guaranteeing its integrity. Counterintuitively, it suggests that creating inefficient storage and connectivity best protects user capabilities to access and alter information, but this necessitates difficult tradeoffs with preventing unauthorized interaction with data. The Article outlines how to implement inefficient information storage and connectivity through legislation. Lastly, it describes the stakes in cybersecurity debates: adopting current scholarly approaches jeopardizes not only the Internet’s generative architecture, but also key normative commitments to free expression on-line.
Conundrum, 96 Minn. L. Rev. 584 (2011).
Cross-posted at Info/Law.
January 24, 2012 at 4:13 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Architecture, Articles and Books, Current Events, Cyberlaw, Innovation, Intellectual Property, Law Rev (Minnesota), Military Law, Politics, Privacy (National Security), Technology, Web 2.0
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Goldilocks and Cybersecurity
posted by Derek Bambauer
It may seem strange in a week where Megaupload’s owners were arrested and SOPA / PROTECT IP went under, but cybersecurity is the most important Internet issue out there. Examples? Chinese corporate espionage. Cyberweapons like Stuxnet. Anonymous DDOSing everyone from the Department of Justice to the RIAA. The Net is full of holes, and there are a lot of folks expert in slipping through them.
I argue in a forthcoming paper, Conundrum, that cybersecurity can only be understood as an information problem. Conundrum posits that, if we’re worried about ensuring access to critical information on-line, we should make the Net less efficient – building in redundancy. But for cybersecurity, information is like the porridge in Goldilocks: you can’t have too much or too little. For example, there was recent panic that a water pump burnout in Illinois was the work of cyberterrorists. It turned out that it was actually the work of a contractor for the utility who happened to be vacationing in Russia. (This is what you get for actually answering your pager.)
The “too little” problem can be described via two examples. First, prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001, the government had information about some of the hijackers, but was impeded by lack of information-sharing and by IT systems that made such sharing difficult. Second, denial of service attacks prevent Internet users from reaching sites they seek – a tactic perfected by Anonymous. The problem is the same: needed information is unavailable. I think the solution, as described in Conundrum, is:
increasing the inefficiency with which information is stored. The positive aspects of both access to and alteration of data emphasize the need to ensure that authorized users can reach, and modify, information. This is more likely to occur when users can reach data at multiple locations, both because it increases attackers’ difficulty in blocking their attempts, and because it provides fallback options if a given copy is not available. In short, data should reside in many places.
But there is also the “too much” problem. This is exemplified by the water pump fiasco: after 9/11, the federal government, including the Department of Homeland Security, began a massive information-sharing effort, such as through Fusion Centers. The difficulty is that the Fusion Centers, and other DHS projects, are simply firehosing information onto companies who constitute “critical infrastructure.” Much of this information is repetitive or simply wrong – as with the water pump report. Bad information can be worse than none at all: it distracts critical infrastructure operators, breeds mistrust, and consumes scarce security resources. The pendulum has swung too far the other way: from undersharing to oversharing. Finding the “just right” solution is impossible; this is a dynamic environment with constantly changing threats. But the government hasn’t yet made the effort to synthesize and analyze information before sounding the alarm. It must, or we will pay the price of either false alarms, or missed ones.
(A side note: I don’t put much stock in which federal agency takes the lead on cybersecurity – there are proposals for the Department of Defense, or the Department of Energy, among others – but why has the Obama administration delegated responsibility to DHS? Having the TSA set Internet policy hardly seems sensible. Beware of Web-based snow globes!)
Cross-posted at Info/Law.
January 21, 2012 at 7:38 pm
Posted in: Architecture, Cyberlaw, Government Secrecy, Innovation, Intellectual Property, Technology, Web 2.0
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Censorship on the March
posted by Derek Bambauer
Today, you can’t get to The Oatmeal, or Dinosaur Comics, or XKCD, or (less importantly) Wikipedia. The sites have gone dark to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act, America’s attempt to censor the Internet to reduce copyright infringement. This is part of a remarkable, distributed, coordinated protest effort, both online and in realspace (I saw my colleague and friend Jonathan Askin headed to protest outside the offices of Senators Charles Schumer and Kirstin Gillibrand). Many of the protesters argue that America is headed in the direction of authoritarian states such as China, Iran, and Bahrain in censoring the Net. The problem, though, is that America is not alone: most Western democracies are censoring the Internet. Britain does it for child pornography. France: hate speech. The EU is debating a proposal to allow “flagging” of objectionable content for ISPs to ban. Australia’s ISPs are engaging in pre-emptive censorship to prevent even worse legislation from passing. India wants Facebook, Google, and other online platforms to remove any content the government finds problematic.
Censorship is on the march, in democracies as well as dictatorships. With this movement we see, finally, the death of the American myth of free speech exceptionalism. We have viewed ourselves as qualitatively different – as defenders of unfettered expression. We are not. Even without SOPA and PROTECT IP, we are seizing domain names, filtering municipal wi-fi, and using funding to leverage colleges and universities to filter P2P. The reasons for American Internet censorship differ from those of France, South Korea, or China. The mechanism of restriction does not. It is time for us to be honest: America, too, censors. I think we can, and should, defend the legitimacy of our restrictions – the fight on-line and in Congress and in the media shows how we differ from China – but we need to stop pretending there is an easy line to be drawn between blocking human rights sites and blocking Rojadirecta or Dajaz1.
Cross-posted at Info/Law.
January 18, 2012 at 5:31 pm
Posted in: Advertising, Architecture, Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Culture, Current Events, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Google and Search Engines, Innovation, Intellectual Property, Media Law, Movies & Television, Politics, Technology, Web 2.0, Wiki
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Supporting the Stop Online Piracy Act Protest Day
posted by Danielle Citron
As my co-blogger Gerard notes, today is SOPA protest day. Sites like Google or WordPress have censored their logo or offered up a away to contact your congressperson, though remain live. Other sites like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Craigslist have shutdown, and more are set to shut down at some point today. There’s lots of terrific commentary on SOPA, which is designed to tackle the problem of foreign-based websites that sell pirated movies, music, and other products–but with a heavy hand that threatens free expression and due process. The Wall Street Journal’s Amy Schatz has this story and Politico has another helpful piece; The Hill’s Brendan Sasso’s Twitter feed has lots of terrific updates. Mark Lemley, David Levine, and David Post carefully explain why we ought to reject SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act in “Don’t Break the Internet” published by Stanford Law Review Online. In the face of the protest, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) vowed to bring SOPA to a vote in his committee next month. “I am committed to continuing to work with my colleagues in the House and Senate to send a bipartisan bill to the White House that saves American jobs and protects intellectual property,” he said. So, too, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) pushed back against websites planning to shut down today in protest of his bill. “Much of what has been claimed about the Senate’s PROTECT IP Act is flatly wrong and seems intended more to stoke fear and concern than to shed light or foster workable solutions. The PROTECT IP Act will not affect Wikipedia, will not affect reddit, and will not affect any website that has any legitimate use,” Chairman Leahy said. Everyone’s abuzz on the issue, and rightly so. I spoke at a panel on intermediary liability at the Congressional Internet Caucus’ State of the Net conference and everyone wanted to talk about SOPA. I’m hoping that the black out and other shows of disapproval will convince our representatives in the House and Senate to back off the most troubling parts of the bill. As fabulous guest blogger Derek Bambauer argues, we need to bring greater care and thought to the issue of Internet censorship. Cybersecurity is at issue too, and we need to pay attention. Derek may be right that both bills may go nowhere, especially given Silicon Valley’s concerted lobbying efforts against the bills. But we will have to watch to see if Representative Smith lives up to his promise to bring SOPA back to committee and if Senator Leahy remains as committed to PROTECT IP Act in a few weeks as he is today.
January 18, 2012 at 10:11 am
Posted in: Architecture, Civil Rights, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Law Talk, Media Law, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0
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The Fight For Internet Censorship
posted by Derek Bambauer
Thanks to Danielle and the CoOp crew for having me! I’m excited.
Speaking of exciting developments, it appears that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is dead, at least for now. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has said that the bill will not move forward until there is a consensus position on it, which is to say, never. Media sources credit the Obama administration’s opposition to some of the more noxious parts of SOPA, such as its DNSSEC-killing filtering provisions, and also the tech community’s efforts to raise awareness. (Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has been working overtime in reporting on SOPA; Wikipedia and Reddit are adopting a blackout to draw attention; even the New York City techies are holding a demonstration in front of the offices of Senators Kirstin Gillibrand and Charles Schumer. Schumer has been bailing water on the SOPA front after one of his staffers told a local entrepreneur that the senator supports Internet censorship. Props for candor.) I think the Obama administration’s lack of enthusiasm for the bill is important, but I suspect that a crowded legislative calendar is also playing a significant role.
Of course, the PROTECT IP Act is still floating around the Senate. It’s less worse than SOPA, in the same way that Transformers 2 is less worse than Transformers 3. (You still might want to see what else Netflix has available.) And sponsor Senator Patrick Leahy has suggested that the DNS filtering provisions of the bill be studied – after the legislation is passed. It’s much more efficient, legislatively, to regulate first and then see if it will be effective. A more cynical view is that Senator Leahy’s move is a public relations tactic designed to undercut the opposition, but no one wants to say so to his face.
I am not opposed to Internet censorship in all situations, which means I am often lonely at tech-related events. But these bills have significant flaws. They threaten to badly weaken cybersecurity, an area that is purportedly a national priority (and has been for 15 years). They claim to address a major threat to IP rightsholders despite the complete lack of data that the threat is anything other than chimerical. They provide scant procedural protections for accused infringers, and confer extraordinary power on private rightsholders – power that will, inevitably, be abused. And they reflect a significant public choice imbalance in how IP and Internet policy is made in the United States.
Surprisingly, the Obama administration has it about right: we shouldn’t reject Internet censorship as a regulatory mechanism out of hand, but we should be wary of it. This isn’t the last stage of this debate – like Wesley in The Princess Bride, SOPA-like legislation is only mostly dead. (And, if you don’t like the Obama administration’s position today, just wait a day or two.)
Cross-posted at Info/Law.
January 16, 2012 at 7:28 pm
Posted in: Architecture, Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Culture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Google and Search Engines, Intellectual Property, Media Law, Movies & Television, Politics, Technology, Web 2.0
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The idealization/practice nexus
posted by Biella Coleman
Inspired by Orin Kerr’s question (“is your work focused on the internal narratives and ideologies that people use to describe/justify what they do, or is it focused externally on the actual conduct of what people do?”) below I will give a sense of how I walk the line between what we might call idealism and practice among the geeks and hackers I study.
One of the toughest parts about working with the type of technologists I focus on— intelligent, opinionated, online a lot of the time—is that many will unabashedly dissect my every word, statement, and media appearance. This attribute of my research, unsurprisingly, has been the source of considerable anxiety, only made worse in recent times with Anonymous as I have to make “authoritative” statements about them in the midst studying them, in other words, in the midst of having incomplete information.
All of this is to say I am deliberate and diplomatic when it comes to word choice, framing, and arguments. But most of the time examining practice in light of or up against idealism does not take the somewhat noxious form of “exposing” secrets, the implication being that people are so mystified and deluded that you, the outsider, are there to inform the world of what is really going on (there is a a long standing tradition in the humanities and social sciences, loosely inspired by Karl Marx and especially Pierre Bourdieu, taking this stance, not my favorite strain of analysis unless done really when needed and very well).
Much of what I do is to unearth those dynamics which may not be natively theorized but are certainly in operation. Take for instance the following example at the nexus of law and politics: during fieldwork it was patently clear that many free software hackers were wholly uninterested in politics outside of software freedom and those aligned with open source explicitly disavowed even this narrowly defined political agenda. Many were also repelled by the law (as one developer put it, “writing an algorithm in legalese should be punished with death…. a horrible one, by preference”) and yet weeks into research it was obvious that many developers are nimble legal thinkers, which helps explain how they have built, in a relatively short time period, a robust alternative body of legal theory and laws. One reason for this facility is that the skills, mental dispositions, and forms of reasoning necessary to read and analyze a formal, rule-based system like the law parallel the operations necessary to code software. Both are logic-oriented, internally consistent textual practices that require great attention to detail. Small mistakes in both law and software—a missing comma in a contract or a missing semicolon in code—can jeopardize the integrity of the system and compromise the intention of the author of the text. Both lawyers and programmers develop mental habits for making, reading, and parsing what are primarily utilitarian texts and this makes a lot of free software hackers, who already must pay attention to the law in light of free software licenses, adept legal thinkers, although of course this does not necessarily mean they would make good lawyers.
January 15, 2012 at 11:52 am
Tags: Anonymous, Free Software, idealization, practice
Posted in: Philosophy of Social Science, Politics, Web 2.0
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BRIGHT IDEAS: Anita Allen’s Unpopular Privacy
posted by Danielle Citron
Lucky for CoOp readers, I had a chance to talk to Professor Anita Allen about her new book Unpopular Privacy, which Oxford University Press recently published. My co-blogger Dan Solove included Professor Allen’s new book on his must-read privacy books for the year. And rightly so: the book is insightful, important, and engrossing. Before I reproduce below my interview with Professor Allen, let me introduce her to you. She is a true renaissance person, just see her Wikipedia page. Professor Allen is the Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She is also a senior fellow in the bioethics department of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, a collaborating faculty member in African studies, and an affiliated faculty member in the women’s studies program. In 2010, President Barack Obama named Professor Allen to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. She is a Hastings CenterFellow. Her publications are too numerous to list here: suffice it to say that she’s written several books, a casebook, and countless articles in law reviews and philosophy journals. She also writes for the Daily Beast and other popular media.
Question: You began writing about privacy in the 1980s, long before the Internet and long before many of the federal privacy statutes we take for granted. What has changed?
I started writing about privacy when I was a law student at Harvard in the early 1980s and have never stopped. Unpopular Privacy, What Must We Hide (Oxford University Press 2011) is my third book about privacy in addition to a privacy law casebook Privacy Law and Society (West Publishing 2011). My original impetus was to understand and explore the relationships of power and control among governments, individuals, groups, and families. In the 1970s and 1980s, the big privacy issues in the newspapers and the courts related to abortion, gay sex, and the right to die. Surveillance, search and seizure, and database issues were on the table, as they had been since the early 1960s, but they often seemed the special province of criminal lawyers and technocrats.
To use a cliché, it’s a brave new world. Since my early interest in privacy, times have indeed changed, the role of electronic communications and the pervasiveness of networked technologies in daily life has transformed how personal data flows and how we think about and prioritize our privacy. Terms like webcam, “text messaging,” “social networking,” and “cloud computing” have entered the lexicon, along with devices like mobile, personal digital assistants, and iPads.
The public is just beginning to grasp ways in which genetics and neuroscience will impact privacy in daily life—I have begun to reflect, write, and speak more about these matters recently, including in connection with my work as a member of President Obama’s Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.
Question: Your book coins the phrase “unpopular privacy.” In what way is privacy unpopular?
First let me say that I think of “popular privacy” as the privacy that people in the United States and similar developed nations tend to want, believe they have a right to, and expect government to secure. For example, typical adults very much want privacy protection for the content of their telephone calls, e-mail, tax filings, health records, academic transcripts, and bank transactions.
I wrote this book because I think we need to think more about “unpopular” privacy. “Unpopular” privacy is the kind that people reject, despise, or are indifferent to. My book focuses on the moral and political underpinnings of laws that promote, require, and enforce physical and informational privacy that is unpopular with the very people that those laws are supposed to help or control. (I call such people the beneficiaries and targets of privacy laws.) “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” for instance, was an unpopular government mandated privacy for military service members. My book suggests that some types of privacy that should be popular aren’t and asks what, if anything, we should do about it.
Question: If people don’t want privacy or don’t care about it, why should we care?
We should care because privacy is important. I urge that we think of it as a “foundational” good like freedom and equality. Privacy is not a purely optional good like cookies and sports cars. Since the 1960s, when scholars first began to analyze privacy in earnest, philosophers and other theorists have rightly linked the experience of privacy with dignity, autonomy, civility, and intimacy. They have linked it to repose, self-expression, creativity, and reflection. They have tied it to the preservation of unique preferences and distinct traditions. I agree with moral, legal and political theorists who have argued that privacy is a right.
I go further to join a small group of theorists that includes Jean L. Cohen who have argued that privacy is also potentially a duty; and not only a duty to others, but a duty to one’s self. I believe we each have a duty to take into account the way in which one’s own personality and life enterprises could be affected by decisions to dispense with foundational goods that are lost when one decides to flaunt, expose, and share rather than to reserve, conceal, and keep.
If people are completely morally and legally free to pick and choose the degrees of privacy they will enter, they are potentially deprived of highly valued states that promote their vital interests, and those of their fellow human beings. For me, this suggests that we need to restrain choice—if not by law, then by ethics and other social norms. Respect for privacy rights and the ascription of privacy duties must comprise a part of a society’s formative project for shaping citizens. Read the rest of this post »
January 13, 2012 at 9:24 am
Posted in: Bright Ideas, Feminism and Gender, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Race, Technology, Web 2.0
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