Complementing legislation, the actions in this Communication aim to:
support enforcement through a new EU Observatory on counterfeiting and piracy which will bring together national representatives, private sector experts and consumers to work to collect data on and analyse the scope and scale of the problem, share information, promote best practices and strategies, raise awareness and propose solutions to key problems;
foster administrative cooperation across Europe by developing coordination to ensure that more effective exchanges of information and mutual assistance can take place. As a result, Member States are called to designate National Coordinators. An electronic network for information sharing will also need to be available .
build coalitions between stakeholders to overcome conflicts and disputes, by developing collaborative voluntary arrangements that focus on concrete problems, such as the sale of counterfeit goods over the internet, and are capable to adapt quickly to changing markets and technology. Such agreements can also be more easily extended beyond the EU and become the foundation for best practice at global level.
The Communication results from the Commission's IPR Strategy for Europe adopted last year and builds upon the recent Council Resolution on a comprehensive European anti-counterfeiting and anti-piracy plan."
Naturally, content industry unimpressed:-)
(via Michael Geist)
EDIT: Meanwhile however one asks of course, but what of the Telecoms Package and when is the conciliation process taking place, after the failure of the second reading procedure?
Helpfully , the new EDRI-gram tells us :
"Preparations are being made in the EU institutions for the expected third
reading of the Telecom Package. The timescale for the remainder of the
legislative process will be determined by the official communication of the
Council Common Positions to the Parliament. In theory, this can happen as
late as mid-October, meaning that the final agreement could happen as late
as the end of November or early December.
..The Member States can be expected to push for as much of the Common
Position as possible to be retained and to push again for the
"compromise" that was agreed with the Parliament negotiators on
Amendment 138 in the first reading (but not adopted). "
Watch this space!
Are Scottish solicitors Inksters the first firm to have a dedicated YouTube channel?
The Glasgow-based firm Inksters hope to ‘keep ahead of the legal technology curve with the launch of a YouTube channel’. The channel contains an initial five films which are also available at inksters.com. These include films on The Home Report, one about windfarming on croft land and another on the House of Lords case: Moncrieff v Jamieson (featuring SSCL Chair Iain G Mitchell QC). Brian Inkster said ‘putting these films on YouTube will bring them to a wider audience. It is a natural extension of the Web 2.0 policy we have been pursuing at Inksters. We were the first Scottish law firm to Twitter earlier this year and we are perhaps now the first Scottish law firm with a dedicated YouTube channel’.
The YouTube videos are at www.youtube.com/inksterssolicitors
Not only that but I *think* I've scooped venerable Scots Law News here! Drag your eyes away from Ally Megrahi (that well known footballer), team.. (Opps EDIT: no! See here.)
I've also very belatedly updated my blog roll a little to include a few excellent newer blogs including Datonomy, on personal data with a stellar UK practitioner line up, and Simon Deane-Johns's useful round up of consumer law,Pragmatist, including some very pithy comments on the seemingly endles revision of EC online consumer law.
From Datonomy, I learn that the UK ICO rather quietly commissioned research in August to price a business case for businesses to invest in privacy; effectively aiming to find out how much businesses might save by proactively investing in privacy rather than waiting for the security breach headlines to hit the fan. How interesting, and how topical, but it certainly seems to move us a long way from privacy-as-a-human-right to commodified privacy-as-property doesn't it?
Oddly enough Pangloss will be speaking on this very topic at the upcoming special-value one-time-only credit crunch SCL Policy Forum in September (fee payable with 6 months 0% credit - no not really) , so if anyone else wants to comment or has interesting worked examples (please show figures:-) of the (alleged) value of privacy to either consumers or businesses, please do comment!
So for me upcoming on the intergalactic talk schedule (just call me Cyber Wogan), it's Estonia for cyberwar, Amsterdam for death (2.0 variety), and London for poverty and privacy. The Three Horsemen of the IT Law Apocalypse. What does that leave? Rains of frogs I suppose..
Via 38 degrees and ORG:
"Pressure is building today on Lord Mandelson to stop rushing through his plans to cut the internet connection of anyone that downloads copyrighted material. Today, a coalition of musicians, songwriters and producers spoke out calling his plans, "Expensive, illogical and extraordinarily negative". [1]
Since we launched our petition last week, hundreds of us have signed up to ask Mandelson to stop rushing through new rules. Now, if we all work together and ask our friends to sign, we can quickly make the petition grow even bigger. Please can you forward this email and ask your friends to sign by clicking this link?
http://38degrees.org.uk/message2mandy
The artists which include Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Elton John and Damon Albarn said in their statement today that "We vehemently oppose the proposals being made and suggest that the stick is now in danger of being way out of proportion to the carrot." Meanwhile, internet service providers and consumer groups, including BT and Which?, today warned that these plans will create a Kangaroo court which would "place serious limits on freedom of expression" in the UK. [2]
Only in June this year the government had ruled out draconian measures like these but it appears Mandelson decided to change government policy just days after a dinner with an industry executive in Corfu.
If enough of us take action, Mandelson will have to back down. Recently, he had to give up on his plan to privatise the post office after a popular outcry. Please help by asking your friends to sign the petition by clicking this link:
http://38degrees.org.uk/message2mandy
Thanks for getting involved,
Hannah, David, Nina, Johnny, Warren, and the 38 Degrees Team
[1] See for example here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/03/youtube-prs-deal-file-sharing
[2] See for example here http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article6819093.ece "
Pangloss: Do I need to comment further?
"Television is a problematic market for advertising to certain demographics, and it's no secret that magazines are in trouble. Online destinations are just starting to come into their own. So where does that leave opportunities for advertising? Video games. A new study, attractively titled "Eye-tracking Analysis as a Means to Visualise the Effects of In-Game Advertising" by 11 Prozent Communication and the University of Offenberg shows that marketing to gamers can be very effective... if you follow the rules.
The first challenge is to make sure the ads fit into the game world. "Advertisements that do not fit into the context or do not provide more realism to the setting of the game or even obstruct the game’s flow, might ruin the whole effort and generate irreparable damage," the study stated. Sports games and racing games are easy in this regard; we're used to being deluged by ads at both types events in real life... why should gaming be any different?"
Pangloss has been intrigued ever since she discovered in 2007 that Google hadfiled a patent for extending their targeted advertising model into advertising presented in games, using information collected in games , via both networked consoles and/or online games. Google have since said they have not followed up that patent but if in-game advertising is the next big thing someone, somewhere, will surely design a Phorm for online games?? After all people play these things for DAYS. Who could resist such a fertile source of personalising data??
Which really does make you wince because think of the information that would be collected - "hmm , this guy regularly tortures, kills and buys virtual genitalia. Oh and he's a junior civil servant with 3 kids (we got that from Doubleclick) but in the game he's a green alien called Grrrarg who despises all females . . Quick, advertise an extreme porn cable channel to him!" Hmm....
Issue: The sharing of personal information with third-party developers creating Facebook applications such as games and quizzes raises serious privacy risks. With more than one million developers around the globe, the Commissioner is concerned about a lack of adequate safeguards to effectively restrict those developers from accessing users’ personal information, along with information about their online “friends.”
Response: Facebook has agreed to retrofit its application platform in a way that will prevent any application from accessing information until it obtains express consent for each category of personal information it wishes to access. Under this new permissions model, users adding an application will be advised that the application wants access to specific categories of information. The user will be able to control which categories of information an application is permitted to access. There will also be a link to a statement by the developer to explain how it will use the data.
This change will require significant technological changes. Developers using the platform will also need to adapt their applications and Facebook expects the entire process to take one year to implement.
Issue: Facebook provides confusing information about the distinction between account deactivation – whereby personal information is held in digital storage – and deletion – whereby personal information is actually erased from Facebook servers. As well, Facebook should implement a retention policy under which the personal information of users who have deactivated their accounts will be deleted from the site’s servers after a reasonable length of time.
Response: Facebook has agreed to make it clear to users that they have the option of either deactivating their account or deleting their account. This distinction will be explained in Facebook’s privacy policy and users will receive a notice about the delete option during the deactivation process.
While we asked for a retention policy, we looked at the issue again and considered what Facebook was proposing. We determined the company’s approach – providing clarity about the options, offering a clear choice, and alleviating the confusion – is acceptable because it will allow users to make informed decisions about how their personal information is to be handled.
....Issue: People should have a better way to provide meaningful consent to have their account “memorialized” after their death. As such, Facebook should be clear in its privacy policy that it will keep a user’s profile online after death so that friends can post comments and pay tribute.
Response: Facebook agreed to change the wording in its privacy policy to explain what will happen in the event of a user’s death."
Pangloss is mildly amused that only two years after she, Ian Brown and Chris Marsden presented a paper highlighting the privacy and security issues around the use of third party apps on Facebook, changes are finally being made.
The interesting issue will be if these changes are only made for Facebook in Canada or applied worldwide; similar legal pressure has not, it seems, being exerted in other jurisdictions such as the UK and the US - but there has certainly been concern over the repeated use of third party apps as an easy way to collect personal data for fraudulent or criminal purposes, or to spread malware. One might speculate that if FB are investing in developing new more privacy-compliant code it might as well install it system-wide given the PR advantages and the fact that FB's growth appears to have peaked (the rate of growth has been declining since about January 08). Chris Soghoian on Twitter seems to indicate the changes will be worldwide. If so, the Canadians have certainly done us all a favour.
Pangloss is also intrigued by the Canadian concern over Facebook's treatment of profiles on death. While the matter is certainly a pressing one (with 200 million users, not all young, FB profiles are, sadly, often a major concern to relatives after death) in fact FB has been pretty much in the vanguard in the area of transmision of digital assets, in at least providing a clear and accessible way for relatives to ask for profiles to be "memorialised" after death.
Other sites where digital "assets" remain after death (eg eBay, Flickr, et al) are in general much less clear about what rights they offer relativesafter death, have hard to penetrate procedures on the matter, or actively refuse to allow relatives control after death (see the famous Yahoo! case where relatives of a US marine were initially refused access to his emails after death because the privacy policy forbade passing on information to any third party. At least in the US, the privacy policy remains unchanged to date.)
However in my recent talk on this subject, I also suggested that it would be easy for FB in its various preference suggestions to allow users themselves to indicate what they would like done with their profiles after death. Not all want their profiles left open for comments after death ; some would like them closed down; others might like a friend or relatives to make the decision what to do. One size does not fit all and a solution should also consider and balance the interests of both the profile owner and the relatives. However if FB take a lead here under Canadian persuasion, they may well benefit all by becoming a good practice example in a rather under-considered part of the web 2.0 field.
"DG Information Society has quietly released its position on the Telecoms Package Second Reading, just as everyone is heading off for the summer holidays. No doubt Commissioner Viviane Reding was hoping no-one would see it. Why? It calls for a “compromise” text which the Council of Ministers was trying to push onto the European Parliament, which could have the effect of giving permission to governments to block access to Internet services and applications.
The so-called “compromise” is the replacement of Amendment 138 ( which seeks to protect users rights on the Internet) with an alternative which was drafted by the Council (sometimes known as the ‘fake 138′). The replacement, when considered in context with other Amendments in the Package, will seal in to the Telecoms Framework a right for governments to implement ‘measures regarding end-users’ access to or use of services and applications through electronic communications networks’.
The so-called “compromise” is positioned in Article 1 of the Framework directive, addressed to Member States. It should be read in conjunction with Amendment 1.2a of the Universal Services and Users Rights directive, which will permit broadband providers to block impose “conditions limiting access to and/or use of services and applications”. In light of T-Mobile blocking Skype, BT throttling peer-to-peer services, and Karoo, a small UK ISP cutting off users, it should now be abundantly clear what this text means. . "
Source: IpTegrity
(without prejudice - Pangloss has not seen the original text yet)
"The most interesting story we found though was how sites consistently hid any mention of privacy, until we visited the privacy policies where they provided paid privacy seals and strong reassurances about how important privacy is. We developed a novel economic explanation for this: sites appear to craft two different messages for two different populations. Most users care about privacy but don’t think about it in day-to-day life. Sites take care to avoid mentioning privacy to them, because even mentioning privacy positively will cause them to be more cautious about sharing data. This phenomenon is known as “privacy salience” and it makes sites tread very carefully around privacy, because users must be comfortable sharing data for the site to be fun. Instead of mentioning privacy, new users are shown a huge sample of other users posting fun pictures, which encourages them to share as well. For privacy fundamentalists who go looking for privacy by reading the privacy policy, though, it is important to drum up privacy re-assurance."
"A federal judge on Thursday overturned guilty verdicts against Lori Drew, issuing a directed acquittal on three misdemeanor charges.Drew, 50, was accused of participating in a cyberbullying scheme against 13-year-old Megan Meier who later committed suicide. The case against Drew hinged on the government’s novel argument that violating MySpace’s terms of service was the legal equivalent of computer hacking. But U.S. District Judge George Wu found the premise troubling.
“It basically leaves it up to a website owner to determine what is a crime,” said Wu on Thursday, echoing what critics of the case have been saying for months. “And therefore it criminalizes what would be a breach of contract.”"
Here's a brief and last reminder about GikII 2009, (as some of
you well know) the coolest IT law conference on the block, this year
transmigrated from UK to Amsterdam, by kind generosity of the IViR!
Submission of abstracts deadline is 1 July, tho this can probably slip a few days:-) We are expecting to be over subscribed (honest) so act fast! Acceptance of abstracts wil be announced by August 1. Submissions to vanhoboken@ivir.nl .
As ever, the order of the day is blue skies papers, law/tech/pop
culture/interdisciplinary, numbers capped at 40, preference for space to those
giving papers, especially ones about the Singularity :) no conference fee for speakers or attendees, ppts that could past muster in the next Banksy show, passing mentions of law, and all the LOLcats you can eat:-)
"regulators say tighter rules are needed to protect personal data given to these third-party developers. In particular, they believe developers should be subject to tough European Union privacy and data protection rules, even when the companies concerned are located far from Europe.At the same time, they argue that many corporate marketers who have turned to new forms of social media as a way to reach consumers should also be subjected to stiffer regulations."
Against that backdrop, it is hardly surprising that the report is not wildly imaginative. It deals with structure and delivery of content, rather than the content itself. It worries about provision of local news, but (with the exception of a potentially interesting proposal on a role for new local news consortiums) decides that the main answer lies with regional TV news. To be sure, Mr Bradshaw is taking a risk in imposing a £6 annual poll tax on all fixed-line phone users to pay for extending the broadband pipe network - but it is the wrong kind of risk. Some will question the fairness of Aunt Agnes in Liverpool paying higher phone bills to enable her teenage nephew in the Scottish Highlands to download games. But there is a bigger problem with this proposal: the public is subsidising private companies to gain greater market access - with no public returns. When the government pumped money into the banks, it took a big chunk of equity for the taxpayer; here it is pumping money into the broadband network and taking nothing in return. There will be no equity stakes (which would at least have been fair), nor is it easy to regulate what goes down those broadband pipes. This amounts to an unconditional transfer of resources from the very poorest to the big technology firms.
For a monthly fee, Virgin's broadband customers will be able to download or stream as many MP3 files as they want.As part of the deal, Virgin has pledged to aggressively police usage to stop the MP3 tracks turning up on file-sharing networks."
The problem is that Virgin's all you can eat deal only covers Universal artists. Virgin say it is in talks to add other music firms' back catalogues to the service. But are there any prospects of all the major labels coming in, as in the Canadian scheme, to make legal P2P as attractive as the illegal version? Pigs might fly, seems the general gist of the informed response.
"The main points outlined in the report include:• a three-year plan to boost digital participation
• universal access to broadband by 2012
• fund to invest in next generation broadband
• digital radio upgrade by 2015
• liberalisation of 3G spectrum
• legal and regulatory attack on digital piracy
• support for public service content partnerships
• changed role for Channel 4
• consultation on how to fund local, national and regional news
One of the biggest surprises in the report was the promise to introduce a levy on fixed telephone lines in order to pay for broadband rollout.
It will amount to a 50p a month tax for every household in the country with a fixed phone line."
On filesharing specifically: (para 46)
"...thirdly we aim to provide for a graduated response by rights-holders and ISPs
so that they can use the civil law to the full to deter the hard core of users who
wilfully continue unlawful activity. The Government intends to provide
initially for Ofcom to have a duty to secure a significant reduction in
unlawful file sharing by imposing two specific obligations: notification of unlawful activity and, for repeat-infringers, a court-based process of
identity release and civil action.The Government is also providing for intermediate technical measures by ISPs, such as bandwidth reduction or protocol blocking, if the two main obligations have been reasonably tried but, against expectations, shown not to have worked within a reasonable but also reasonably brisk period."
Reportedly, the aim will be for these tactics to reduce illegal file sharing by 70%. Quite a target given rough guesses that 90% plus of downloading is currentkly unauthorised.
Same old, same old. So we can, it seems, organise a levy to pay for rural broadband - which every person in the country will have to pay, whether they use it or not and are urban or rural - but are unwilling to contemplate a system like the Canadian voluntary levy, where those who don't want to fileshare simply get to opt out, and those who do, get to pay a sensible amount instead of being slowed down till they can no longer use the Net for useful stuff like jobs, education and social interaction. Sigh. Double sigh. No more: I've said it all before.
One faint piece of good news is that as the Guardian notes:
"The final report does not contain any suggestion of a statutory "rights agency" that would try to reduce copyright infringement online, as was suggested in the interim report released earlier this year – to widespread criticism. Instead, the final report says "we hope that an industry body ... will come into being to draft these codes [of practice for identifying offenders] for Ofcom to approve and we would encourage all rights holders and ISPs to play a role in this."
"In truth, though, I think the odd timing shows us something else: that the real target of Facebook usernames aren't users at all, but the companies, brands and high-profile celebrities who can be convinced to pay for services somewhere down the line.
And they've already had their usernames granted to them, regardless of the timing of the launch. Anyone else is just going along for the ride."
Multiple registrations on multiple networks (FaceBook, Twitter, Bebo, whatever) will also be a problem. The brand-owners are already aghast at the prospect of the extension of the URL domain name space to cover internationalised domain names (Kanji, Korean alphabet, etc) because they see this not as an opportunity to brand more effectively to their customer bases , but as creating hundreds of new domain names they'll have to buy up and police to avoid cybersquatting. What should be a blessing has become a curse. Interestingly, PG has been directed to a lovely tool to check whether your name is available on multiple SNSs - reportedly it has been much used in the Facebook username goldrush!!
Pangloss is deeply unsure if some new version of TMs and domain name law should be adapted or invented for the social namespace. For one, there is simply not, or at least not always, the same problem as there is with domain names used as URLs: that there can be only one. There is already more than one Lilian Edwards on Facebook (and I am lucky to have an unusual first name) but there can only be one lilian.facebook.com (and it is not me) or even liianedwards.co.uk.
Is it really helping any to give me yet more opportunities to fight it out with the other Liians ) at least one of whom has her own business, selling elephant drawings!!) ? Isn't the real solution here better granular search facilities on FB and other sites, not giving out and policing unique vanity URLs? There is already substantial evidence the public now overwhelmingly finds sites via Google not via typing in random URLs anyway.
But - as Lisa pointed out - is the issue not actually more of public confusion, than of brand maintenance? If I find a site called Dell on Twitter, will I assume it is the real Dell selling me reputable computers, not some rip-off merchant? Perhaps, but here as noted Twitter is already bringing in its own solutions (and asking businesses to pay for a verified site at some future point doesn't seem too wrong to me either, if it leads to $3m extra sales.).
In the Twitter celebrityspace there is also a rather cute emergent norm, that when a name has been snaffled, the celebrity renames as " -himself" - so eg Neil Gaiman is @neilhimself.
As well as these "norm" solutions, if the problem is public confusion, can't that be better met by enforcing existing public laws on false advertising, fraudulent commercial practices, etc, than by inviting vast swathes of private trade mark litigation, which might in turn need the reinvention of the ICANN UDRP procedure, international treaty negotiation, etc etc, all over again? This seems to me like a place where we should not in knee jerk fashion turn to an IP solution. We don't need more property for companies to fight over here, and given the costs of policing the brand, they possibly don't want it either; all we need are workable solutions for consumers.
Lisa pointed out correctly that most false advertising rules only apply to commercial actors - but this doesn't have to be so. In fact in the UK, it is an offense in advertising law to deceptively hold yourself out as a private person when you are in fact a business ( for more on this and the problem of the emergent hybrid consumer or "prosumer" see Christine Riefa's chapter on e-contracts in the upcoming - guess what - 3rd edn of Edwards and Waelde eds Law and the Internet.)
Let's stop and think a bit before we jump again to create yet more new IP rights, ok?
Pangloss is now at a hotel with a pool and a beach :-)) so she's going to try to take a break from all this intellectual fever!! Bye for now :)
Iranians around the world are making extraordinary use of Twitter and Twitter APIs to send updates and coordinate the uprising that now disputes Ahmadinejad's election. (Some background from Andrew Sullivan here) Last night Tweets from Iran seemed to go silent for several hours, apparently after Iranian government intervention, but protesters just used TwitterFall.com and other workarounds to keep the information stream going. (As one developer supporter put it, "Open APIs equal freedom.") The mainstream media has been tragically slow to cover what seems to be a major social upheaval fueled by Twitter. "
