Cyberlaw

Moonlighting author

Was watching the film Then She Found Me (details at IMDB) last week. The movie was ok but I would probably have turned it off but as I was working at the same time it flowed in the background and did not demand much from me. The reason I was even watching the movie was that it had some good actors. Anyway in the middle of the film the main character has a doctors appointment and the actor playing the doctor is… Salman Rushdie!!

Since he is one of my favorite writers it made me pay attention for a while – mainly I was kind of shocked. The man who wrote Midnights Children, Grimus, Shalimar and Satanic Verses was playing a minor character in a ordinary little film. Rushdie played himself in Bridget Jones’s Diary (IMDB details) but that made more sense. And now this! How odd and yet how fun. This ordinary little film all of a sudden achieved a new depth. But I wonder if many people would recognize him? I can’t say that I would recognize many of my favorite authors.

Posted on by mklang

Demanding 1,6 million

According to the local free newspaper the record companies suing the  people behind The Pirate Bay are demanding 1 621 045 euro in damages – thats a lot of money.

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Swedish moves against P2P

In an effort to come to terms with online copyright violation the Swedish government has decided to allow courts the power to force Internet providers to reveal the physical identity of those IP addresses involved in illegal file sharing. Previously this was thought to be a move that would go to far and diminish the integrity of Internet users.

This move is an attempt to decrease the need for police involvement since the only previous recourse for the copyright holder was to report the matter to the police. Now the move will towards civil action.

On the other hand the government has decided against the suggestion of the Renfors investigation (Renforsutredningen) which means that they will not allow Internet providers to terminate the accounts of users involved in illegal file sharing. I have written about the stupidity of these types of suggestions earlier (here) so I am glad that this proposal was not followed.

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Stallman lecture in Göteborg

Richard Stallman will be in Göteborg giving a public talk entitled: The Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux Operating System about the goals and philosophy of the Free Software Movement, and the status and history of the GNU operating system, which in combination with the kernel Linux is now used by tens of millions of users world-wide. The lecture will be arranged by the Free Software Foundation Europe, IT University of Göteborg, Chalmers University of Technology and Student union.

Dr. Stallman is the founder of the GNU project and president of the Free Software Foundation. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Glasgow, Free University of Brussels and Universidad Nacional de Salta. In 1990, he was the receiver of a Macarthur foundation fellowship and has been elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The lecture will take place at Runan, Chalmers (Johanneberg) on Feb 27th 18.00 – only 450 seats so it my be wise to show up on time. Last time he was here over 1000 people showed up.

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Law and the pirate bay

On the 29th of January the Frederiksberg county court (in Denmark), at the request of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), ordered (court decision available here) the ISP Tele2 to block access to The Pirate Bay. In 2006 a Copenhagen court ordered Tele2 to shut its customers’ access to AllOfMP3.com, a Russia-based online music site.

According to The Pirate Bay the only other countries to block The Pirate Bay are China and Turkey (Piratbyrån). The Danish Pirate group have already published articles on how to bypass the measures set up by Tele2 and have prepared a letter of complaint for the customers of Tele2 to copy&paste into emails (Also on jesperbay.org).

In Sweden the courts are beginning to move on the Case against The Pirate Bay (BBC News). Similarly in China, three major music industry companies petition courts to order Baidu to remove all links on its music delivery service to copyright-infringing tracks. (PC world, ArsTechnica).

We all know that these organizations are being attacked the question is what is it that they are doing that is so wrong?

First of all it is important to state that these sites, possibly with the exception of AllOfMP3, do not have copyrighted material on their servers without permission. In other words the organizations cannot be sued for direct copyright infringement.

They are being sued for helping others find that material. Some argue that that the role of The Pirate Bay is similar to that of linking (Copyriot). In other words the Pirate Bay is no different to Google or Yahoo. The debate on linking, and in particular on deep-linking & framing, was never really ended. It seems to have fizzled out in the last millennium, with non-cases such as Shetland Times vs Shetland News (in 1996 see for example BBC).

Eventually the whole concept of depth was lost on the Internet – in more ways than one it may seem.

But is The Pirate Bay only linking? The Pirate Bay is a large collection of torrent files. These files (and their protocol) are an ingenious way of utilizing the web to ensure redundancy of information and the a distribution of traffic to remove bottlenecks.

The information contained in these files help to the person wishing to download. With no technical knowledge the user can download copyrighted material seamlessly from several sources at the same time while downloading the user also shares the parts of the material he/she already has downloaded. The actions of the user are a clear case of copyright violation if the original material is copyrighted and is shared without the consent of the copyright holder.

The Pirate Bay stores the torrent files and hands them out to all who want them. They have no way of knowing whether the torrent files contain information about legal or illegal material. Whether it is there with or without the consent of the copyright holder. So are they contributing to copyright infringement?

Contributory infringement analogous to the getaway driver in a bank robbery. Even though he/she did not go into the bank he/she is part of the robbery. There are two parts in contributory infringement: The infringer knew or had reason to know of the infringing activity and active participation in the infringement (for example inducing it, causing it or contributing to it).

It is difficult for The Pirate Bay to claim that they have not had reason to know that their site is playing an important role in the copyright infringement of others and supplying the torrents in a easy to use way could definitely be seen as contributing to the infringement.

Of course the same arguments can be made against many search engines but The Pirate Bay cannot use the argument that it is used mainly for legal purposes as Google would argue. The argument that The Pirate Bay may be discriminated against in the fact that it is being singled out for prosecution may be true but it is hardly a defense that will successfully permit any contributory infringing behavior.

We should expect to see the case against the Pirate Bay move from upwards and onwards until it reaches the highest court. Most probably by the time the case is resolved reality and business models for online content will have changed…

We look forward to many interesting arguments along the way.

Posted on by mklang

Defending Security by Obscurity

Almost as soon as Google launched its “Social Graph API” the discussions began. As with other innovations in the field of social networking the Google social graph will be a potential new threat to privacy – and like everything else produced by Google it will be well-packaged and presented in a non-threatening manner.

So what is the social graph and why is it important?

Basically the social graph is a way to take existing data and to use it in new ways. By analyzing the information available the social graph will present relationships between data and people online. One of the examples used in the instructional video (found here) is this:

social graph by Google

the user Brad joins twitter and searches for friends. The social graph knows that b3 belongs to Brad (maybe his blog), from the Blog the social graph knows that Bradfitz is also Brad. Bradfitz is friends with Jane274 who is also known as Jane on twitter. Since they are friends on livejournal Brad can ask Jane to be friends on twitter.

The criticism against this model is that Jane274 may accept Bradfitz on livejournal but Jane may be trying to avoid Brad on twitter – even if they are the same people. Maybe Jane is trying to avoid Brad alltogether but has failed on livejournal? Who knows? Whatever the reason Jane may be using different names to create watertight compartments of her online life. This model of security is not particularly strong but it works reasonably well and is known as security by obscurity.

Tim O’Reilly argues that the weakness or false sense of security created by security by obscurity is dangerous and therefore social graphs should be implemented. He realises people will get hurt when the obscurity is lost but considers this to be a necessary cost of evolution

It’s a lot like the evolutionary value of pain. Search creates feedback loops that allow us to learn from and modify our behavior. A false sense of security helps bad actors more than tools that make information more visible…But even here, analogies to living things are relevant. We get sick. We develop antibodies and then we recover. Or we die.

Basically it’s evolve or die to Tim.

This is OK if you are pretty sure to be among those who survive the radical treatment. But what about those who are hurt by the treatment – what about those who die? Danah Boyd at apophenia writes:

…I’m not jumping up and down at the idea of being in the camp who dies because the healthy think that infecting society with viruses to see who survives is a good idea. I’m also not so stoked to prepare for a situation where a huge chunk of society are chronically ill because of these experiments. What really bothers me is that the geeks get to make the decisions without any perspective from those who will be marginalized in the process.

The problem is that the people who will get hurt in large scale social experiments such as these are never those who are responsible in carrying them out. The costs will be carried by those who are not techie enough to defend themselves. The experts will continue to go about their lives because they will always have the ability (time, money, knowledge) to defend themselves.

Those in the position of privilege should remember that with great strength comes great responsibility. In other words those who have the ability to create systems such as these should really think about the social implications of the tools they are creating. Not as seen from their positions of privilege but from the perspective of the users who may be hurt.

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Charges against the Pirate Bay

Almost two years after the raid on the Pirate Bay the prosecutor is now pressing charges against four of the people behind the operation. They are charged with aiding copyright violation and preparing to aid copyright violation. The four are being sued for over 1 million Swedish crowns reports IDG.se (in Swedish).

piratebay.jpg

the Pirate Bay logo today

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Law in a noise society

An interesting thesis will be defended at the IT university soon. Fellow Swede and IT lawyer Niklas Lundblad will be defending his thesis Law in a Noise Society (abstract) on the 20th February at 2 pm.

Congratulations Nicklas!

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Yesterday in Brussels

What a long day. Woke up at 4.30 and flew to Brussels to participate in the European Union Public License (EUPL) workshop. The license is an attempt by the EU to create a copyleft license available in all EU languages. Not only is the license to be translated into all EU languages but it is even to have legal effect in all jurisdictions.

The first draft of the EUPL was created in 2005 and was accepted in three official languages (French, German & English) in 2007. During 2007 the license has been translated into all the languages of the member states of the EU and the translation and adaptation process was carried out.

My role was to work as one of the Swedish experts and the work was to both fact check the language and terminology and to adapt to Swedish law. These 19 translations were approved by the European Commission on 9 January 2008.
A secondary, but more interesting role, was to wake questions and to discuss during the workshop. The presentations and discussions were interesting and occasionally lively.

This liveliness was in relation to copyright/licensing lawyers so it was hardly a rowdy gathering.

The meeting was held in the EU district but after the meeting I managed to do a bit of flash sightseeing in the center. The city is real nice even if I didn’t find the little peeing statue.

Posted on by mklang