In episode #44 of “Tech Policy Weekly,” Berin Szoka and Adam Thierer engage in a debate with Internet security expert Chris Soghoian, who is a student fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He is also a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University’s School of Informatics.
Chris is an up-and-coming star in the field of cyberlaw and technology policy as he has quickly made a name for himself in debates over privacy policy, data security, and government surveillance. He straddles the line between academic and activist, and the role he often plays in many tech policy debates is somewhat akin to what Ralph Nader has done in many other fields through the years. Except, in this case, instead of “Unsafe at Any Speed” it’s more like “Unsafe at Any Setting,” since Chris is often raising a stink about what he regards as unjust or unreasonable privacy or security settings that various online websites or service providers use.
On the show, Chris talks about two of his recent crusades to get certain online providers to change their default settings to improve user security or privacy: (1) His effort this week to get major email providers—and Google in particular—to change their default security settings on their email offerings; and (2) his earlier crusade to create permanent opt-out cookies to stop behavioral advertising by advertising networks.
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I reviewed the Veoh case for DRMWatch recently:
The user-generated video site Veoh achieved a victory in court on August 27th when California District Judge Howard Lloyd ruled that it was entitled to the protection of the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions. Veoh was accused of copyright infringement by IO Group, a maker of adult films…
Like eBay v. Tiffany, another case in which one might trumpet a tech-side win… the tech gets at least some protection from liability. But only in a context in which the tech is already taking substantial steps to help the plaintiff trademark/copyright owner with their enforcement problem, steps that would have been hard to conceive of a decade ago, and that many would have grandly declared to be too ambitious and too invasive for online services to attempt. Prediction: the case law is now much more mature, but the business side is just getting started. More and fancier filtering to come.
It’s funny and scary how many of our grand ideas about justice, rights, freedom, fairness and property come down to what we can become accustomed too. Bad, in the sense that one can easily lose the customary baselines against which freedom is measured in a generation or so. Good, in the sense that one is not limited to identify freedom with just one historic mythical Golden Age; a free society has somewhat more leeway.
I’m fond of paradoxes these days. Tedious things. Almost as annoying to other people, I am sure, as those characters (you know who you are) who make puns all the time.
In the latest C:Spin over at CEI’s website, I examine the record industry’s latest Internet copyright battle and the shortcomings it reveals about U.S. intellectual property laws:
The next potential casualty of America’s deficient copyright regime is MP3Tunes, a San Diego startup founded by Web entrepreneur Michael Robertson, which lets users store digital music files in a secure, Web-based locker they can access from anywhere. MP3Tunes lets listeners access only music they have uploaded themselves. Like a handheld MP3 player, MP3Tunes frees music lovers from dragging around massive album collections on physical discs. 
But now Robertson’s service has run into a major obstacle. EMI, a major British record label, has sued MP3Tunes for copyright infringement. EMI contends that since users are transferring their music to a third party without getting permission from the record label, MP3Tunes is violating EMI’s exclusive right to distribute its music. MP3Tunes faces tough odds given past rulings in copyright infringement cases.
EMI’s argument seems tenuous. MP3Tunes doesn’t “share” files with anybody but the original owner, and paying a third party to act as a custodian does not imply a transfer of ownership. Individuals can already store digital files online using myriad services from Flickr to Mozy. We increasingly back up our entire lives to online repositories, and the individual, not the website, remains the owner.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
