Cyberlaw Central

I was honored to be asked to participate on the excellent Lawyer 2 Lawyer podcast on the topic of the recent stipulation entered into between Viacom and YouTube (Google) over user data that the Judge in that case ordered to be turned over to Viacom. My fellow guest was Lauren Gelman, the Executive Director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, and the discussion was very good. Of course, the hosts, J. Craig Williams and Bob Ambrogi, did their typically great job as well. I regularly listen to show during my commute, so it was fun to be on it for a change.

Please feel free to leave comments on the podcast here.

Here is a link to the show page, where you can download the show or listen online. You can also use the links on the left side of the page to subscribe to the show in Itunes.

I’m interested in the impact of the digital world on our society.  In an interview with Tech Nation, Kevin Werbach of Wharton College and founder of the Supernova conference touches on that impact.  He also touches on some mistakes made during his tenure with the FCC, such as the Communications Decency Act.  Of course, that particular failure isn’t his fault, but he does he have an interesting perspective.

All in all, it’s an entertaining 20 minutes.  Too bad some of the issues aren’t covered in more depth, but it still is worth a listen.

Christopher Lydon’s outstanding public radio show called Open Source is available as a podcast. This morning on my commute I listened to the February 7th show about Craigslist and its implications for generating community on the Internet. Here is a link to the show which you can download and listen on any MP3 player or personal computer.

What struck me was the community generated around sites like Craigslist, there is some discussion on the show of its societal impact. One of the guests, Tom Sander, had this to say:

There are two potential benefits of a site like Craigslist. One is that it actually enables new connections to form, whether it’s a backgammon partner, or a friend with benefits, or a missed connection that becomes a connection. But I think the other value is that … if people have 20 different micro transactions, one who returns their ipod, and a nanny that they hire that seems trustworthy, and a person to meet for sushi on Tuesday night, that all those things together start to change their nature about other people in their community…

Many other Internet technologies are isolating, allowing people to get more done without having to socialize with real people. Craigslist is different - it builds a sense of community and lets people interact. At the end of the show, David Cleaves, a Mandolin player in Lowell, MA played beautifully. The show had placed an ad in the local Craigslist looking for a musician, and found one willing to come in to the studio. Now *that’s* community.

Jamais Cascio’s talk from Mesh Forum 2005 entitled “participatory panopticon” is very interesting, it regards the societal changes that come from mobile phones with digital cameras and other always on mobile networked tools. The Panopticon was Jeremy Bentham’s proposed prison where the inmates could be watched all the time. Mr. Cascio’s idea is that we will be soon living in a ‘participatory’ panopticon where the people voluntarily take the part of the warden. Instead of big brother, there are a lot of little brothers and sisters with cell phones.

As cell phones get better, imagine a world where politicians won’t know whether they are being recorded at any particular time. Look at what happened with Abu Ghraib – individuals with a digital camera and network access changed the public perception of the war in Iraq. Look at Rodney King – an individual with a video camera changed the public perception of the police. Recently, a plane crash in Miami was recorded by a man on vacation who happened to be recording at the time.

An interesting new concept is personal memory assistance. A first generation device allows you to record the last thirty seconds of what you have seen. It’s bulky and has a limited battery life. As these get better, imagine the copyright issues. Since meat memories are imperfect, nobody cares if you remember a copyrighted song imperfectly. When memories become perfect, then you could enter a situation where a license is needed to remember. Memory assistance devices would be required to be deactivated in movie theaters and other performance spaces. The backlash could come only when people feel restricted on their ability to remember. The more the people feel these devices are important to their lifestyle the less likely that they will accept restrictions on their use.

Always on networked devices that can record important events are an important tool to implement an ethos of citizen journalism. When the average person can record, upload, and share easily, as these devices become ubiquitous, then we come closer to the world envisioned by Mr. Cascio.

UPDATED TO ADD: Geek Press has a link to a great article on the use of cameras on public property.

My thanks to Evan Brown who asked me to be a guest on his InternetCases.com podcast to discuss the recent controversy over RSS Hijacking. I’ve written about hijacking here and here. Also interviewed is Rick Klau, the Vice President of Business Development for Feedburner. I was fortunate to meet Rick at Blawgthink 2005.

The podcast can be downloaded from this link: InternetCases.com December 7, 2005 Podcast

So, just what was Sony thinking? Now that the first class-action lawsuit has been filed in California, I’m sure more details on that topic will eventually emerge. Since Sony licenses the software from First 4, it may not have known all of the niceties of just how the software worked. I would not be surprised if First 4 will be required to indemnify Sony from the lawsuits over the use of its software.

So what else has happened since my last post?

My major problem with the Sony DRM I wrote about yesterday is the lack of consent on the part of the user. The terms of the Sony EULA are posted here. Nowhere does Sony advise that even if you uninstall the software using normal procedures that there are hidden bits that remain. Further, the fact that the software is sloppily written and leaves the door open for malicious rootkit developers to take advantage of its flaws is negligent at best.

For its part, Sony today advised that a removal tool is now available from its website provided that you tell Sony where you obtained the CD from. However, it denied wrongdoing while admitting that many of the security flaws pointed out by Russinovich will be fixed on future CD releases.

I listened to an interesting interview with Kurt Huang of BitPass.com over at IT Conversations, part of the Web Talk series with Rob Greenlee. BitPass is a micropayment service, allowing small payments to be deducted from an account in order to pay for online content. Rob discussed the new proposed “BitPass Unplugged” service with Kurt, and while the details were sketchy (since it’s not yet available, looks like end of 2005), it sounded like a really neat application of RSS. Obtaining a subscription-based podcast via an RSS feed will deduct the payment from the user’s BitPass account automatically without any user intervention. If realized, this service could lead the way in allowing the podcasting phenomenon to really grow, since the monetization problem is what is keeping many of the bigger players away right now.

What a neat idea. I hope the final service works out close to how Kurt described it in the podcast.

Be sure to give the recently re-featured talk by Ben Saunders over at IT Conversations a listen. Ben is the ultimate in extreme bloggers - he updated his site from the North Pole, and kept his last expedition up to date with some makeshift electronic gear that he was flat-out advised by the manufacturers would *NOT* work in the arctic.

It’s a truly compelling story of his solo skiing adventure across the arctic ice, on a race against the weather - there were some good stretches where the ice had already melted. This is also first hand evidence of the effects of global warming - sounds like in a few years nobody will be able to do what he did because there won’t be *any* ice.

An interesting conversation with Joel Spolsky has been featured this week at IT Conversations. It’s from September 2004, but still relevant.

The idea that remained with me is the fact that in order for Microsoft to have backwards compatability for users whenever it came out with a new version of Windows, Microsoft had to include code that emulated the bugs in the original release. That way, software that was written to overcome those bugs could still work. Yikes! Now that’s a job I am glad I don’t have.

I also liked Joel’s comments about Microsoft’s lag in updating its file formats for Word and Excel, especially in light of the recent announcement that MS Office will, in the next version, implement an XML-based format. That long delay means that none of the new versions of Word or Excel introduced any features that made changes in the document that could be saved into the file. I wonder how much creativity and innovation had been stifled by this idea that the file format couldn’t change. At long last, the formats will change for the better in the next version.