Computer Ethics, Summer 2012

Corboy Law 602; Tuesdays & Thursdays, 6:00-9:00
Week 2, Class 4
      

Readings

Read all of chapter 1 and the first three sections of chapter 4
  
Read Chapter 2, on privacy

Viacom v YouTube

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, along the legal-economics lines championed by our own Seventh Circuit's Richard Posner. 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?

One problem with Tiffany v Ebay as a standard is that eBay apparently does have a significant (read: expensive) mechanism in place to watch out for the sale of counterfeit merchandise. Should YouTube have had an anti-piracy mechanism in place?

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.

Tumblr sued for its users' copyright infringement in Perfect 10 v Tumblr

The above heading was from http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com, dated May 7, 2012. I read the actual complaint, and it states that Tumblr has ignored Perfect 10's DMCA notices. If true, this would be strange.


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

musicview.com: GONE!
dontbuycds.org: Now also gone. Somebody new took over in 2008, but never got around to any updates and apparently stopped renewing the domain in 2011.
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.

Music Sampling

This is widely done in the music industry, sometimes as an homage to the original artists, sometimes to connect a new musical work with an older one, sometimes as a form of social commentary, and sometimes, well, we don't know.

Consider the following news item, from http://origin.avclub.com/articles/guns-n-roses-sued-for-uncredited-ulrich-schnauss-s,33744:

by Josh Modell October 6, 2009
According to Reuters, the British label Independiente and the U.S. arm of Domino Records have filed suit against Guns N' Roses and the band's label, Interscope/Geffen/A&M for swiping portions of compositions by semi-obscure German electronic artist Ulrich Schnauss for the Chinese Democracy track "Riad N' the Bedouins." Pitchfork has some links to listen to the tracks. Sounds to me like it's pretty clearly swiped, but I'll say this: I own and really like Schnauss' 2003 disc A Strangely Isolated Place, but I wouldn't have picked out the sample if it hadn't been pointed out. Which isn't to say he shouldn't get paid, of course.

This may be an atypical example, partly because the sample is so blatant and so long and partly because it seems possible that GnR simply had no idea it was music (stylistically, GnR and Schnauss are about as far apart as you can get). It's also just about copying a snippet of the original performance, rather than combining that sample with other material, or modifying the sample.

Here are links (working Feb 2012) to the two compositions:
At issue is the opening ~20 seconds. It's not the best example of sampling, because it's a rather atypical sound for GnR, and it's also rather long. Note that GnR used this opening only on their CD release; I did not find it in any of their live-performance examples on YouTube. GnR has insisted that they did nothing wrong.

A musician who does nothing but sample (or perhaps "remix" is a more accurate term) is Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk; see myspace.com/girltalk/music. There are many other examples at whosampled.com.

In 1991,in Grand Upright Music v Warner, a district court ruled that clearly recognizable sampling constituted infringement. Judge Duffy wrote

It is clear that the defendants knew that they were violating the plaintiff's rights as well as the rights of others. Their only aim was to sell thousands upon thousands of records. This callous disregard for the law and for the rights of others requires not only the preliminary injunction sought by the plaintiff but also sterner measures.

Ironically, it is also clear that the sampling here was not going to affect sales.

In the case Bridgeport Music v Dimension Films, the 6th Circuit Court ruled in 2005 that use without permission of a 2-second chord from a song by the Funkadelics constituted infringement. More specifically, they ruled that the de minimus defense (ie that the sample was "too small to matter") did not apply. The court famously wrote

Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way.
   
However, the court left open the possibility of a Fair Use defense. (They left this open because the defendants did not raise the Fair Use defense at the trial level, and new defenses cannot be introduced later.)

Both courts seemed to side with the "copying is presumptively bad" school of legal thought, rather than the "society has an interest" school of thought.

The industry line here is that any use of copyrighted material requires permission; this gives the rights-holder the opportunity to set a fee limited only by the law of supply and demand.

Fair Use is the one exception to the copyright law's strict assignment of rights to the creator. Note that sampling clearly has no effect on the market for the original. On the other hand, there might be (and in fact is) a "secondary" market for sampling rights that is affected. The copyright law itself only refers (§107(4)) to "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work", without making it entirely clear whether the market for the entire work is meant (though the phrase "the copyrighted work" certainly seems to suggest the entire work).

Whether or not the Fair Use sampling argument will ever prevail in court, there is definitely a serious social issue here that cannot be written off as theft. Music is generally built on the musical influences of others. Before sampling this would be limited to a melody, or an accompaniment line, or a particular guitar style; all that sampling does is allows for musicians to sample without re-performing. Is this taking advantage of the original artist? Certainly not in a financial sense. But a performer is certainly entitled to feel that they do not want their work serving as the larger component of a remix that is done in a very different style (it is hard to see how this would apply to ~2-second samples).

Samples can always be licensed, but sometimes licensing rates are exhorbitant. Rights for a few small samples can easily amount to 100% of royalties, which makes further sampling financially impossible.

The site whosampled.com includes in its masthead the phrase "exploring and discussing the DNA of music", suggesting that sampling is how music evolves nowadays. Others feel that musical evolution is not hindered by the simple rule that samples must either be licensed or be re-performed.

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 Ninth 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).

[What do you think of the links issue?]

Wikipedia documents the District Court ruling in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_10_v._Google_Inc.
   
Judge Howard Matz's Fair Use analysis (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

In 2007 the Ninth Circuit then reversed, issuing a preliminary ruling that all of Google's use is likely enough fair use that P10 loses their injunction.
Their preliminary decision is 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: the Ninth Circuit held that the use was transformative. Very much so.
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.
     
Ninth Circuit 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. Recall that 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,...."

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. 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


They are watching you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JNFr_j6kdI.

Is this a real threat? (See especially the section between 0:45 and 1:25)

I'm offering this as an example of a possible threat, but which definitely has elements of "paranoia" as well. (I imagine somewhere on YouTube there's a video of someone explaining the dangers of the government eavesdropping on your conversations by beaming lasers on your windows.)

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 the slow voluntary exchange of personal information.

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.

Personalization

We understand that all sorts of online purchasing information is collected about us in order for the stores to sell to us again. Whenever I go to Amazon.com, I am greeted with book suggestions based on past purchases. But at what point does this information cross the line to become "personalized pitches"?

What if the seller has determined that we are in the category "price-sensitive shopper", and they then call/mail/email us with pitches that offer us the "best price" or "best value"? (See the box on Baase, p 78, for a related example. Here, the British Tesco chain determined which shoppers were "price-conscious", and also what they were most likely to buy. These products (maybe the top 20 in sales volume?) were then priced below Wal*Mart's prices.)

Political parties do this kind of personalization all the time: they tailor their pre-election canvassing to bring up what they believe are the hot-button issues for you personally.


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:

Caller ID

When it first came out in the early 1990's, Caller ID was widely seen as a privacy intrusion. That is, it took away your "right" to call someone anonymously. Actually, that is a plausible right if you're calling a commercial enterprise; if you don't want them calling you back, you should be able to refuse to give them your number.

Within a decade, Caller ID was widely seen as a privacy boost: you could control who could interrupt you. This is privacy in sense #2 above; the original issue was privacy in sense #1.

Caller ID never caught on with stores; it did catch on with ordinary people.

Is there any right to phone someone anonymously? What if you're trying to give the police a tip? What if you're a parole officer?


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 has made us our own worst privacy leakers.

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


Some specific things we may want to keep private, from a few years ago:
In keeping these sorts of things private, are we hiding something?

More significantly, what has the rise of Facebook done to this list? How much do we care about this "general background" information as opposed to the kind of information that leaks out of Facebook: who we partied with last night, what we drank, who we partied with five years ago, where we were last night given that we said we would be volunteering at the soup kitchen?

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 was google's first attempt at a social-networking site, back in ~2009[?]. When it was first introduced, your top gmail/gchat contacts were made public as "friends", even though the existence of your correspondence may have been very private. 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 Dharun Ravi to be out of the room for the evening. Clementi then invited a male friend and they kissed. Ravi, meanwhile, turned on his webcam remotely from a friend's room, watched the encounter, and streamed it live over the internet.

Ravi told friends he would stream the video again on September 21, but Clemente turned off Ravi's computer. That night Clemente filed an official invasion-of-privacy complaint with Rutgers, and requested a single room. The next day Clemente leapt to his death from the George Washington bridge. His exact motives remain unclear; his family did know he was gay.

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 had been kissing 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. Here is a note about the New Jersey law.

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".

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.

Ravi was convicted on March 16, 2012 for the invasion of privacy and for "bias intimidation"; the latter is commonly known as the "hate crimes" statute. He was then sentenced to 30 days in jail, plus fines and probation. Ravi was not charged with provoking the suicide itself.


Google search data

Consider the following site (which is an advertisement for duckduckgo.com):
    http://donttrack.us/

Some points:

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?

Pennsylvania school laptops

notes in class 5