Computer Ethics, Summer 2011

LT 412;  6:00-9:00 TTh, June 2, Class 4

Read Baase, chapter 2


Cases related to DMCA/OCILLA

Youtube was sued in 2007 by Time-Warner; negotiations are continuing but Youtube has apparently agreed to the principle of some kind of cut of revenues. In December 2008 [?], Warner was back to demanding that its music videos not be available. (I'm not completely certain of the dates). On August 19, 2009, the parties announced a settlement that would allow Warner to post lots of their clips on Youtube, subject to the following:
It looks like Warner finally gave up on the last item.

See http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Time-Warner-and-YouTube-Reach-iw-2585532384.html?x=0&.v=1.

How does http://www.vidtomp3.com affect this issue? Does it matter where vid2mp3.com is? Are they the bad guys here? Should we even be discussing vidtomp3.com?



YouTube: is it an example of "good" sharing or "bad" sharing??

See Baase pp 219-222

 

Viacom v Youtube

filed March 2007

Viacom also sued Youtube, and held out for more than Warner. This case has not yet come to trial (though it may nonetheless be over). Google (Youtube's owner) has cited OCILLA in its defense; Viacom is still trying to claim statutory damages. Question: does Youtube try to "induce" users to upload protected stuff? This remains a major unsettled issue; see MGM v Grokster.

YouTube was founded in early 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. The original model was as a forum for funny home videos, but this did not quite attract the attention for which the founders had hoped.

Here's a July 2008 BusinessWeek article on the case:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2008/tc2008073_435740.htm.

Here's a January 2009 blog on the case:
http://copyrightsandcampaigns.blogspot.com/2009/01/viacom-v-youtube-viacoms-anti-piracy.html.

Here's a March 2009 blog, addressing (among other things) the fact that Viacom's discovery motions involve in excess of 12 terabytes of data: http://www.digitalmedialawyerblog.com/2009/03/controlling_discovery_in_digit.html.

Here's a March 2010 story, including several internal youtube emails about how aggressive they should be on rejecting copyrighted content: http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/company-news/viacom-v-youtube-google-a-piracy-case-in-their-own-words/19407896. For example:

On July 19, Chen wrote to Hurley and Karim: "Jawed, please stop putting stolen videos on the site. We're going to have a tough time defending the fact that we're not liable for the copyrighted material on the site because we didn't put it up when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it." Four days later, Karim sent a link to the other founders, and Hurley told him that if they rejected it, they needed to reject all copyrighted material. Karim's reply: "I say we reject this one but not the others. This one is totally blatant."

A July 29 email conversation about competing video sites laid out the importance to YouTube of continuing to use the copyrighted material. "Steal it!" Chen said , and got a reply from Hurley, "hmmm, steal the movies?" Chen's answer: "we have to keep in mind that we need to attract traffic. how much traffic will we get from personal videos? remember, the only reason our traffic surged was due to a video of this type."

Here's another March 2010 blog, which makes some interesting points about how time is on Youtube's side, and how Viacom has made some major tactical errors: http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2010/03/viacom_v_youtub.htm.

First, YouTube has repositioned itself over the years from "video grokster" to Good Internet Citizen, with Predominately Non-Infringing Uses:

Perhaps more importantly, the intervening time has been good to YouTube as a business and as a brand. In this sense, compare Grokster to YouTube. At the time of the Grokster cases, it was still very much an open question whether Grokster would ever evolve into a tool where legitimate activity dominated. While we might still have had that same question about YouTube in 2006, by 2010 YouTube has answered that question resoundingly. YouTube’s business practices have matured, everyone has had positive legitimate experiences with YouTube (even behind-the-curve judges), and it’s clear that major legitimate players have adopted YouTube as a platform for their legitimate activities. For example, YouTube’s brief makes the point that all of the 2008 presidential candidates published YouTube videos as part of their campaign. I’m guessing no 2004 presidential candidates used Grokster for campaign purposes.

But Viacom has  tremendously undermined their case that Youtube should have been able to tell which Viacom videos were forbidden, by being unable to tell themselves!

In YouTube’s case, I could not get over that Viacom has TWICE withdrawn clips from its complaint. I thought the first time Viacom did that was embarrassing and damaging to Viacom’s case, but then Viacom admitted that it didn’t catch all of its errors on the first withdrawal and therefore had to make a second withdrawal of clips. WTF? How hard it is for Viacom to accurately determine which clips it has not permitted to show on YouTube? Whether it intended to or not, Viacom has answered that question to its detriment: hard enough that an entire brigade of extremely expensive lawyers obligated to do factual investigations by Rule 11 can’t get the facts right the first OR SECOND time. For me, this undercuts Viacom’s credibility to its core. ... Viacom’s failings have proven to the judge that it’s too hard—too hard for lawyers charging upwards of $1k an hour despite having unrestricted access to accurate information in their clients’ possession, and clearly too hard for YouTube’s slightly-above-minimum-wage customer support representatives with no such information advantages.

Finally, there is an allegation (at the dailyfinance.com site above, not the ericgoldman.org site) that Viacom itself was doing much of the uploading of its material, for marketing purposes:

Google's brief recites in great detail Viacom's use of YouTube as a promotional engine for its products, explaining how Viacom hired at least 18 marketing firms to upload video on its behalf in order to distance itself from the uploading and make it appear that the videos were genuine, grassroots uploads. Viacom would "rough up" the video to make it look pirated, and would even send its employees off-site to places like Kinko's so that uploading would occur from computers untraceable to Viacom.

Discussion

What do you think of the OCILLA defense here? One point that has been made is that, while OCILLA might block a financial claim, it might not block a Viacom request for a court restraining order that Youtube desist completely. But that was before Viacom's mistake, above.

Now consider www.vidtomp3.com. Many bands allow music videos to be uploaded to youtube, as "advertising", likely on the assumption that the music will be difficult to download; Youtube has certainly (and intentionally) chosen a setup to make downloading of video nonobvious. But vidtomp3.com makes downloading easy! It is true that the encoding rate is usually relatively low (64kbps?), but it's still a great deal.

Also note vidtomp3's disclaimer:

This site is in no way associated with myspace, youtube or any of the other video sites we support. This tool is designed to be used in compliance with each sites ToS and local and national copyright laws. We do not support piracy. Only rip the sound or use youtube downloader from none-copyrighted sources.

Is this an honest sentiment, or is it a "grokster defense"?

Finally, note that vidtomp3 has run into significant problems in recent years (since 2010 sometime?) with unrestrained advertisers. One strategy is advertisers who display a button that says click here to download, which is either more prominent than the actual button or entirely obscures it.


Viacom v Google ruling, June 2010

US District Court, Southern District of New York

Judge Stanton

Dated June 23, 2010

Summary Judgement was granted to Google (owner of Youtube): Viacom's case cannot continue. (Viacom has appealed this ruling to the Second Circuit; more at http://news.viacom.com/news/Pages/youtubelitigation.aspx.)

From the decision (at http://cs.luc.edu/pld/ethics/viacom_v_youtube_sj_2010.pdf)


From plaintiff's submissions on the motions, a jury could find that the defendants not only were generally aware of, but welcomed, copyright-infringing material being placed on their website. Such material was attractive to users, whose increased usage enhanced defendants' income from advertisements displayed on certain pages of the website, with no discrimination between infringing and non-infringing content.

Plaintiffs claim that .. "Defendants had 'actual knowledge' and were 'aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity [was] apparent,' but failed to do anything about it."

However, defendants designated an agent, and when they recieved specific notice that a particular item infringed a copyright, they swiftly removed it. It is uncontroverted that all the clips in the suit are off the YouTube website, most having been removed in response to DMCA takedown notices.

Thus, the critical question is whether the statutory phrases "actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network is infringing," and "facts or circumstances from which infrining acttivity is apparent" in §512(c)(1)(A)(i) mean a general awareness that there are infringements (here, claimed to be widespread and common), or rather mean actual or constructive knowledge of specific and identifiable infringements of individual items.

Here is §512(c)(1)(A) of the copyright act:

(c) Information Residing on Systems or Networks at Direction of Users.—

(1) In general. — A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the storage at the direction of a user of material that resides on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider, if the service provider -

(A)(i) does not have actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network is infringing;

(ii) in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent; or

(iii) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;

The judge ruled that YouTube/google did not meet the standard of (A)(i): actual knowledge doesn't mean that you know it's going on wink wink nudge nudge, but that you have knowledge of specific infinging items.

In other words, the judge upheld the OCILLA takedown defense very strictly.



Update on part (ii) above, from page 10 of the decision. The House Report on the OCILLA part of the law described this clause as

a 'red flag' test. A service provider need not monitor its service or affirmatively seek facts indicating infringing activity. However, if the service provider becomes aware of a 'red flag' from which infringing activity is apparent, it will lose the limitation of liability if it takes no action.

This could be interpreted as a looser standard than "actual knowledge [of specific infringing content]" test of part (i), that Google prevailed on. Later [p 13], again quoting the House Report,

Under this standard, a service provider would have no obligation to seek out copyright infringement, but it would not qualify for the safe harbor if it had turned a blind eye to "red flags" of obvious infringement.

YouTube/Google did just that. But then [p 14], quoting the House Report,

The important intended objective of this standard is to exclude sophisticated "pirate" directories -- which refer Internet users to other selected Internet sites where pirate software, books, movies, and music can be downloaded or transmitted -- from the safe harbor. Such pirate directories ... are obviously infringing because they typically use words such as "pirate", "bootleg', or slang terms in their URLs and header information to make their illegal purpose obvious to ... Internet users. ... Because the infringing nature of such sites would be apparent from even a brief and casual viewing, safe harbor status ... would not be appropriate.

So what does a "red flag" have to be? YouTube was not "obviously" a pirate site, but certainly the existence of infringing content was very well known. Although parts of the Congressional Reports quoted above do suggest that YouTube/Google had met the "red flag" test, existing case law generally suggests otherwise. And a "safe harbor" provision is of little use if it does not come with an "objective standard" (a term used in the Congressional Report).

On page 15, Judge Stanton concludes from all this that

The  tenor of  the  foregoing provisions  is that  the phrases “actual knowledge that the material or an activity” is infringing, and “facts or circumstances” indicating infringing activity, describe knowledge of specific and identifiable infringements of particular individual items.  Mere knowledge of prevalence of such activity in general is not enough. ... To let knowledge of a generalized practice of infringement in the industry, or of a proclivity of users to post infringing materials, impose responsibility on service providers to discover which of their users’ postings infringe a copyright would contravene the structure and operation of the DMCA.

On page 20 of the decision the judge says "General knowledge that infringement is 'ubiquitous' does not impose a duty on the service provider to monitor or search its service for infringements."

What would have happened had the judge ruled the other way?


Here's a blog that identifies the principle of least-cost avoidance as a general legal rule:
    http://larrydownes.com/viacom-v-youtube-the-principle-of-least-cost-avoidance
The idea is that, given the conflict between Viacom and Google, the judge should consider who can address the situation more economically. For Google, denying OCILLA protection would mean that they would have to review every post to YouTube. For Viacom, it would mean that they'd have to review those posts on YouTube which turned up in tag searches for Viacom content. Viacom has less work; ergo, they lose.

Discussion

What do you think of this rule?
And is it even true, in this particular case?

Are there other legal principles at stake? What about the "least-disruptive solution"? Should we count disruption to users who while away their days watching YouTube?


Tiffany v Ebay

Judge Stanton in the Viacom v Google case cited this one, from the Second Circuit. EBay merchants sold counterfeit Tiffany merchandise on the site. Tiffany sued them, and also eBay.

Should eBay be liable here? How on earth would they police the authenticity of all merchandise offered?

How is this different from Viacom v YouTube? Do the similarities override the differences?

The court ruled that the burden of protecting a trademark falls properly on the mark holder: policing is a job that comes with the territory. Also, in this case, it is hard to see what eBay might have done differently.

Another subtle issue, not addressed here, is that Tiffany (like most manufacturers of high-end consumer goods) would really like to ban  eBay entirely. High-end manufacturers generally only sell to stores that agree to charge "list price" (sometimes sales are allowed, but they are generally tightly regulated, which sometimes leads to "storewide sales" with fine print listing brands that could not be discounted). Still, there is a vast "grey market" out there, where vendors purchase luxury (and not-so-luxury) items from distributors, from bankruptcy sales, and oversees, and resell them. Disallowing such sales strikes at the heart of the free market, but note that such online sales have no clear jurisdictional boundaries.


Some sites once devoted to file-sharing and copy-protection technologies:

musicview.com: GONE!
dontbuycds.org: GOING GREAT! Well, maybe not so great, but it's still there. No change since 2008.
Oh, and check out darknoisetechnologies.com
(oops, how about http://news.cnet.com/SunnComm-buys-music-antipiracy-company/2100-1027_3-5153609.html)
Original idea was to add some subaudible "hiss" to recordings. It was subaudible when you listened directly, but when you tried to save a copy, or even record with a microphone from your speakers, the music would be ruined.
   
 
Project Gutenberg: http://gutenberg.org
 
Eldred v Ashcroft: Eric Eldred maintained a website of public-domain books unrelated to Project Gutenberg's, although he did do some scanning/typing for them.

What does it mean for copyrights if Congress extends the term continuously?



Amazon has now scanned in most of the books they sell, and offers full-text search of the book contents. This is intended as providing an online equivalent of browsing in a physical bookstore. They apparently did not get a lot of publisher permissions to do this.

Apparently, however, no major lawsuit has ever been filed!

Note that what Amazon has done arguably earns them zero DMCA shield: they've actively scanned the books, and keep the images on their servers.

Clearly, "effect on the market" must be presumed POSITIVE. However, see http://www.authorslawyer.com/c-amazon.shtml.

ASCAP [omit?]

How music copyrights are "supposed" to work: ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors, & Publishers). See ascap.com.
 
ASCAP: collects on behalf of all members, = original songwriters.
 
To perform, you need a license from ASCAP, BMI, & third one (SESAC?). See ascap.com/licensing. Even if you write your own songs and perform only them, you still may be asked to show you have these licenses! While that sounds appalling to some, it's based on the not-implausible idea that the nightclub/venue where you play is the entity to actually pay the fees, and they have no guarantee you won't whip out an old Beatles song. [Richard Hayes Phillips, a musician who plays only his own and traditional material, did apparently beat BMI here. But not without a prolonged fight.]
 
Blanket performance licenses are generally affordable, though not negligible.

Generally ASCAP licenses do not allow:
That is, a university with regular chamber-music concerts (not covered by copyright) must pay ASCAP just as if these were copyrighted music.
 
You need a license to play recorded music at public places, too.  You do not get this right automatically when you buy a CD. Nor does purchasing sheet music provide you with any performance right.
 
ASCAP collects your money, keeps about 12%, and sends the rest off to its members. At one time this was in proportion to their radio play, which meant that if you play music no longer found on the radio, the original songwriters will get nothing. The rules have changed, however; now, ASCAP licensees have to supply information about what was played in order to ensure proper crediting.
 
ASCAP and BMI continue to support the idea of a strict difference between public and private listening. While there are grey areas here, it is hard to see that technology or file-sharing has contributed any new ones.

They are very concerned about web radio, and have had reasonable success in making it unaffordable for any but commercial stations with traditional formats.

TRANSFORMATIVE use

This describes copying where the "purpose .. of the use" (factor 1) is wholly different from the purpose of the original. Typically it may be important that the new use offer something to the public that was otherwise unavailable.

Parodies are usually considered transformative use.

Another example: from Diebold v Online Policy Group, & some Swarthmore students: (Actually, they were suing Diebold; the students had posted some internal Diebold memos, and Diebold was wildly filing DMCA takedown notices. The students, and the EFF, felt these were an abuse of the DMCA process.)

From the judge's opinion:
Finally, Plaintiffs' ... use was transformative: they used the email archive to support criticism that is in the public interest, not to develop electronic voting technology. Accordingly, there is no genuine issue of material fact that Diebold, through its use of the DMCA, sought to and did in fact suppress publication of content that is not subject to copyright protection.

The Kelly and Perfect 10 cases below address this doctrine of "transformative". We'll return to this under "Free Speech"

Kelly and Perfect 10

Baase p 232-233:
    Kelly v Arriba Soft: 2002
    Perfect 10 v Google: 2006 -- ??

Kelly was a photographer incensed that Arriba Soft's "ditto.com" search engine was displaying thumbnails of his images. (There still is a ditto.com, but I have no idea whether it is connected to the original one.) The 9th Circuit ruled thumbnails were fair use, but not links to full-sized images. They later reversed that last point.
  
Four-factor analysis:
   

Now to the Perfect 10 case. Perfect 10 sold nude images; they claimed to have a business plan to sell thumbnail images to cellphone users. Note that, on the face of it, this last point undermines the Kelly reasoning on effect on the market.

This question goes pretty much to the heart of Google's ability to provide image searching.

images.google.com is an image-based search engine; it frames full-sized images, and caches thumbnails.

P10's images came up on google only when some third party posted them (at some third-party site), apparently without authorization.

District court:

The District Court ruled that links were ok, but thumbnails were not. More precisely, the court granted an injunction against the thumbnails, but not against the links. The case is still not decided completely (and probably won't be).

Wikipedia documents the District Court ruling in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_10_v._Google_Inc.
   
Judge Howard Matz (emphasis added):

The first, second, and fourth fair use factors weigh slightly in favor of P10. The third weighs in neither party’s favor. Accordingly, the Court concludes that Google’s creation of thumbnails of P10’s copyrighted full-size images, and the subsequent display of those thumbnails as Google Image Search results, likely do not fall within the fair use exception. The Court reaches this conclusion despite the enormous public benefit that search engines such as Google provide. Although the Court is reluctant to issue a ruling that might impede the advance of internet technology, and although it is appropriate for courts to consider the immense value to the public of such technologies, existing judicial precedents do not allow such considerations to trump a reasoned analysis of the four fair use factors.

Note that Judge Matz does not believe that value to the public has priority over the fair-use factors.

Google then appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit.

Ninth Circuit

Ninth Circuit then reversed, ruling all of it is likely enough (as of 2008) fair use that P10 loses their injunction!!
Their preliminary decision at http://webpages.cs.luc.edu/~pld/ethics/Perfect10vGoogle9thCir12-2007.pdf.

The bottom line was that Google's use was TRANSFORMATIVE.

Google might still be liable for contributory infringement. However, it appears that P10 has mostly abandoned the case.

Appeals court ruling points:
1. Google DMCA defense
2. P10's "display right" and "distribution right" are at issue.
3. [server test: whose server are the images really on?]

From the preliminary decision:
Applying the server test, the district court concluded that Perfect 10 was likely to succeed in its claim that Google’s thumbnails constituted direct infringement but was unlikely to succeed in its claim that Google’s in-line linking to full-size infringing images constituted a direct infringement. Id. at 84345. As explained below, because this analysis comports with the language of the Copyright Act, we agree with the district court’s resolution of both these issues. [15458 (15), last ¶]

Google isn't doing it (the server test):
[6] Google does not, however, display a copy of full-size infringing photographic images for purposes of the Copyright Act when Google frames in-line linked images that appear on a user’s computer screen.[15460 (17)]

Contributory infringement is not at issue.
Perfect 10 incorrectly relies on Hotaling v. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and Napster for the proposition that merely making images “available” violates the copyright owner’s distribution right. [15463 (20)]
   
Isn't this "making available" a core issue for file sharers?

At this point the appeals court turns to Google's Fair Use defense
       
In applying the fair use analysis in this case, we are guided by Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., ... In Kelly, a photographer brought a direct infringement claim against Arriba, the operator of an Internet search engine. ... We held that Arriba’s use of thumbnail images was a fair use primarily based on the transformative nature of a search engine and its benefit to the public. Id. at 818-22. We also concluded that Arriba’s use of the thumbnail images did not harm the photographer’s market for his image. [15466 (23)]

Recall the District Court judge's reluctance to put much stock in "benefit to the public"

Purpose and Character: Again, use is transformative. Very much so.  Just what is this??
District Court: this was diminished, in terms of Google's use of thumbnails, by P10's plan to sell thumbnails. Also, google's use is commercial.
     
9th Circuit: "In conducting our case-specific analysis of fair use in light of the purposes of copyright,": this is an explicit acknowledgement of the Copyright Clause. [15470 (27), ¶ starting in middle of page]

Bottom line: Purpose & Character goes from DC's "slightly in favor of P10" to Ninth's "heavily in favor of Google"

Also note, same paragraph:

The Supreme Court, however, has directed us to be mindful of the extent to which a use promotes the purposes of copyright and serves the interests of the public.

One of the cases cited as evidence of this directive is Sony. Another is the 1993 Campbell case (about a 2 Live Crew parody of the Roy Orbison song Pretty Woman), in which the Supreme Court stated that "the more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of other factors, like commercialism, that may weigh against a finding of fair use". [15471 (28)]. (See http://supreme.justia.com/us/510/569/case.html. A major element of the Campbell case was that the Supreme Court backed away from the idea that commercial use would seldom qualify as "Fair use"; compare this with the earlier Sony quote "although every commercial use of copyrighted material is presumptively an unfair exploitation of the monopoly privilege that belongs to the owner of the copyright,...." Another point was that the Campbell song was intended to poke fun directly at Orbison's song, not to be general social satire.

Also:  

we note the importance of analyzing fair use flexibly in light of new circumstances [15471 (28)]

   
Nature of work: no change; still "slightly in favor of Kelly". Part of the "slightly" was that the images were already published.

Amount & Substantiality: irrelevant; whole image must be copied; see [15473 (30)]

Effect on market: P10 did not prove their market for thumbnail images was harmed. So this didn't count. But how would they ever do that?? More precisely, "the district court did not find that any downloads for mobile phone use had taken place." [15470 (27), last line of page]. There were echoes of this issue in the Sony case: Universal Studios did not prove that they were harmed, because the market for home sales of movie videotapes did not exist, because Sony's Betamax was the first VCR on the consumer market.

Whoa! Is that last issue really fair? Did the DC even consider that point?

More at [15474 (31)], end of 1st and 2nd paragraphs

We conclude that Google is likely to succeed in proving its fair use defense and, accordingly, we vacate the preliminary injunction regarding Google’s use of thumbnail images."

Note how the appellate court sort of finessed the "effect on the market" issue.
 
Another option: why were P10's images ever found? Because users uploaded them illegally. There is another path here: to allow google to provide thumbnails and links only so long as the originals are present. Then, P10 can go after the originals.

An interesting question: if P10 had been selling something more socially acceptable than soft-core pornography, might this decision have gone the other way? There's an old legal saying that "bad cases make bad law"; is this an example?


Dozier Internet Law, http://www.cybertriallawyer.com


1. Lots of solid mainstream copyright cases:
    architectural designs
    jewelry designs
    advertising work (sitforthecure.com)
    stolen websites for:
        gamers sites
        physicians
        small businesses
         
2. Their AMAZING user agreement:
    http://dozierinternetlaw.cybertriallawyer.com

We do not permit you to view such [website html] code since we consider it to be our intellectual property.

Where are they coming from?
  
3. Dozier Internet Law and Sue Scheff

Sue Scheff was a client of Dozier Internet Law, which we looked at last week. She won an $11.3 million dollar verdict in her internet-defamation case; she later wrote a book Google Bomb. The defendant was Carey Bock of Louisiana.

But see http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-10-10-internet-defamation-case_x.htm. It turns out Ms Bock couldn't afford an attorney, as she was at the time of the case a displaced person due to Hurricane Katrina, and she did not appear in the case at all.

So we don't really know what happened. However, it is clear that at this point Ms Scheff has become a master at reversing being google-bombed; if you google for her name, her multiple blogs touting her book will likely lead the list.


Kindle case

see:
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123419309890963869.html
    http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/11/know-your-rights-does-the-kindle-2s-text-to-speech-infringe-au
    http://mbyerly.blogspot.com/2009/02/authors-guild-versus-amazon-kindle-2.html

The kindle is intended primarily for letting people read e-books. However, it also has a feature to read the book to you, using a synthesized voice. This potentially affects the audiobook market.

The Authors Guild has protested vehemently. But they apparently did not actually file a lawsuit against Amazon.

pro-kindle arguments:

anti-kindle arguments

Privacy

What is privacy all about? Baase (p 45) says it consists of
Are these all? Note that Baase put control of information as #2; I moved it to #1.

In some sense the second one is really a different category: the need to get away from others. A technological issue here is the prevalence of phones, blackberries, and computers and the difficulty of getting away from work.

The third one is to some degree a subset of the first: who gathers information about us, and how is it shared? Another aspect of the third one is freedom from GOVERNMENTAL spying. Privacy from the government is a major part of Civil Liberties.

Privacy is largely about our sense of control of who knows what about us. We willingly put info onto facebook, and are alarmed only when someone reads it who we did not anticipate.

Privacy from:
Sometimes, when we try to argue for our privacy, we get asked what do you have to hide? Is this fair?

On the other hand, should we care at all about privacy? Or is it just irrelevant?

Strange history: once upon a time we were mostly concerned about privacy from the government, not from private commercial interests.


Once upon a time, concern about privacy was on the decline. People knew about the junk-mail lists that marketers kept, but it did not seem important, especially to younger people.

In the last few years, privacy has become a significant issue. Why is this?

Psychologists have ways of defining general personality traits, eg the OCEAN set of
(The Myers-Briggs system has four dimensions, and classifies you as at one end or the other (eg extraverted or introverted) on each axis.)

Are we approaching the point that outsiders can create a psychological profile of us using online data only?

Is this even what we mean by losing our privacy? Psychologists have suggested that "getting to know someone" is based significantly on

Or is it much simpler: perhaps the marketing information about us was too remote for us to be concerned, but that Facebook has ushered in a new era of online information about our social situation: friends, events, likes, and that these are the things that are relevant in our day-to-day interactions with others.


What do computers have to do with privacy?

Old reason: they make it possible to store (and share) so much more data
Newer reasons: 
 
Baase, p 45: Communist East-German secret police Stasi, and non-computerized privacy invasion

Fourth amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.

Baase p 47: computers "make it easy to produce detailed profiles of our personal characteristics, relationships, activities, opinions, and habits"

Maybe also of what sales pitches we're likely to respond to??
 
Some non-governmental privacy issues:


Maybe some of the most sensitive information gathered about us today is our location, typically from a cellphone. Traditional phones do not necessarily track GPS in real time, unless an emergency call is placed, but "smartphones" do this continuously in order to display advertisements for nearby businesses. What undesireable things could be done with this information?

We will return to this later.

 
http://pleaserobme.com, listing twitter/foursquare announcements that you will not be At Home (now "off"; I wish I'd kept some sample data)


In ~1990, a big privacy issue was Caller ID. Whose privacy was at stake?
 
Facebook and MySpace have made us our own worst privacy leakers.

Facebook and college admissions, employment, any mixed recreational & professional use


Some things we may want to keep private:
In keeping these sorts of things private, are we hiding something?

Sometimes we want to keep things private simply to avoid having someone else misinterpret them.

Is this list what is really important to us in terms of privacy? Or are we really only concerned with more intangible attributes?


Why do we care about privacy? Is it true that we wouldn't care if we had nothing to hide? What about those "minor transgressions"  on the list? Are they really minor?

Or is is true that "we live 'in a nation whose reams of regulations make almost everyone guilty of some violation at some point'" [Baase p 69]

Once upon a time (in the 1970's) there was some social (and judicial) consensus that private recreational drug use was reasonably well protected: police had to have some specific evidence that you were lighting up, before they could investigate. Now, police are much more free to use aggressive tactics (eg drug-sniffing dogs without a warrant, though they can't use thermal imaging without a warrant).

Is this a privacy issue?

On page 47, Baase quotes Edward J Bloustein as saying that a person who is deprived of privacy is "deprived of his individuality and human dignity". Dignity? maybe. But what about individuality? Is there some truth here? Or is this overblown?

On page 67, Baase quotes Justice William O. Douglas as saying, in 1968,

In a sense a person is defined by the checks he writes. By examining them agents get to know his doctors, lawyers, creditors, political allies, social connections, religious affiliation, educational interests, the papers and magazines he reads, and so on ad infinitum.

Nowadays we would add credit-card records. Is Douglas's position true?

Privacy from the government

This tends not to be quite as much a COMPUTING issue, though facial recognition might be an exception. "Matching" was an exception once upon a time. Interception of electronic communications generally fits into this category; the government has tried hard to make sure that new modes of communication do not receive the same protections as older modes. They have not been entirely successful.
   
To large extent, we'll deal with this one later.

One of the biggest issues with government data collection is whether the government can collect data on everyone, or whether they must have some degree of "probable cause" to begin data collection. On p 73 of Baase there is a paragraph about how the California Department of Transportation photographed vehicles in a certain area and then looked up the registered owners and asked them to participate in a survey on highway development in that area. Why might that be a problem?

Canadian position: government must have a "demonstrable need for each piece of personal information collected".
   

Commercial data, based on transaction history
    Primary use is some sort of marketing

Other data
    legal, workplace, medical, etc
    Traditional "paper" data;
    The computerization issue is easy/universal access to such data
   
personal
    facebook, etc
     

Some data collection that we might not even be aware of:

Google Buzz

Google Buzz is google's new social-networking site. When it was first introduced, your top gmail/gchat contacts were made public as "friends". For many, the issue isn't so much that yet another social-networking site made a privacy-related goof, but that it was google, which has so much private information already. Google has the entire email history for many people, and the entire search history for many others. The Google Buzz incident can be interpreted as an indication that, despite having so much personal information, Google is "clueless" about privacy. At the very least, Google used personal data without authorization.

For many people, though, the biggest issue isn't privacy per se, but the fact that their "google profile" overnight became their buzz page, without so much as notification.

See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/technology/internet/15google.html.
Or http://searchengineland.com/how-google-buzz-hijacks-your-google-profile-36693.

Tyler Clementi

On September 19, 2010, Rutgers University Tyler Clementi asked his roommate to be out of the room for the evening. Clementi then had a sexual encounter with another male. The roommate, meanwhile, turned on his webcam remotely from a friend's room, watched the encounter, and streamed it live over the internet.
(More at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101001/ap_on_re_us/us_student_taped_sex.)

Three days later Clemente leapt to his death from the George Washington bridge, presumably because he felt "outed".

How much is this about harassment of homosexuals?

How much is this about bullying?

How much is this about invasion of privacy?

Would the situation be seen differently if  Clemente's tryst had been with a woman?

Is this at all about "cyber harassment"?

Is it about abuse of "social media"?

What about "outing" that was once relatively common within the gay community?

What about Erin Andrews, the ESPN reporter who was videoed while undressed in her New York hotel room, allegedly by Michael Barrett, apparently now convicted? This video too was circulated on the internet; the case made headlines in July 2009 (though when the videos were actually taken is unclear). Barrett got Andrews' room number from the hotel, reserved a room next to hers, and either modified the door peephole somehow, or drilled a hole through the wall and added a new peephole.

Is Andrews' situation any different from Clementi's? (Aside from the part about damages to hotel property).

What should the law say here? Is it wrong to place security cameras on your business property? Is it wrong to place "nannycams" inside your house? What sort of notice do you have to give people?

When we record the ACM lectures at Loyola, what sort of notice do we have to give the audience? The speakers?

Note that in Illinois it is a felony to record conversations without the consent of all parties, even in a public place. But there is a downside to this: you also cannot record the police if they stop or harass you, and you cannot record others who harass you (eg in the workplace). More at http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2010/08/aclu-challenges-illinois-eavesdropping-act.html. For a stronger slant on the recording-police issue, see http://gizmodo.com/5553765/are-cameras-the-new-guns (there is at least some evidence that the Illinois law in question was intended to disallow recording of police).


Note: Under New Jersey’s invasion-of-privacy statutes, it is a fourth degree crime to collect or view images depicting nudity or sexual contact involving another individual without that person’s consent, and it is a third degree crime to transmit or distribute such images. The penalty for conviction of a third degree offense can include a prison term of up to five years.

New Jersey lists "nudity" and "sexual contact" as entitled to privacy; some other states list "expectation of privacy".

One final note: if Clementi killed himself simply because he had been "outed", then any sex partner could have outed him legally. Sex partners could not legally have filmed him without his consent, but (like the Paris Hilton sex tape) a lover could later release a tape that had been made with consent, or simply release a textual narrative.

AOL search leak, 2006

Baase p 48: search-query data: Google case, AOL leak.
In August 2006, AOL leaked (actually, released) 20,000,000 queries from ~650,000 people. MANY of the people involved could be individually identified, because they:
Many people searched for medical issues.

Wikipedia: "AOL_search_data_scandal"
    Thelma Arnold

Mirror site: http://gregsadetsky.com/aol-data/
   
An article:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/06/aol-proudly-releases-massive-amounts-of-user-search-data

Google strongly resisted releasing "anonymized" search data to the government.

What would make search data sufficiently anonymous?

Question: Is it ethical to use the actual AOL data in research? What guidelines should be in place?

Are there other ways to get legitimate search data for sociological research?

Where is google-search-history stored on your computer?

What constitutes "consent" to a privacy policy?
Are these binding? (Probably yes, legally, though that is still being debated)

Have we in any way consented to having our search data released?