Touching on the central dualism of the information age: What information is available to you versus what information are you making available (or is available about you) to others?

In sometimes heated discussions around Facebook, Twitter, P2P, Social Networks, Meshups the Internet community has recently touched from different angles on the same underlying generic question:

What information is available to you versus what information are you making available (or is available about you) to others?

Lots of concepts that in the past have been considered only by theoretical philosophers/scientists as “information” are now experienced from everyone on a daily basis as exactly that: information that is immediately available (examples: music=mp3 files, with itunes being now the 2nd largest music retailer in the US ; movies=avi files; social networks: facebook).

The evolution of technology is responsible for bringing up questions like this:

Is it already illegal to click on a link found by Google search (currently the legal situation in the UK for this is unclear, details here)?
How much should information should I make publicly available about myself (interesting example: http://www.realtea.net/too_much_info )?

But because new technologies/services like Facebook, Twitter, P2P, Social Networks, Meshups are stimulating intensive discussions of Privacy, Copyright and Ownership of Data these services are also providing the opportunity for the society to make decisions (through parliament/congress or courts) about the rules that organizations and individuals will follow in the future. There is a relationship between the rules (that constraint what information you can legally access and distribute) and the economy, as Friedman’s remark regarding Copyright is showing:

Freedom of speech is the opposite of copyright, which means that you can’t get copyright right. And, intellectual property is different from physical property: in both cases, you have a monopoly but the monopoly on intellectual property is wholly different because duplicating the property comes generally at a very low or zero marginal cost. You are enforcing a monopoly pricing, as it were, that limits output to lower than the optimum social level. You cannot be in favor of infinite copyright.
http://www.cato.org/special/friedman/friedman/friedman4.html

In the context of globalization and global competition it remains to be seen what impact any country/region specific rules for information access and distribution will have.
For now just click below to read about some of the most recent decisions (at the beginning of 2008) and what arguments out of the ongoing discussions we found so far worth listing.

Privacy and access to private data:

Germany’s highest court has restricted (27.02.2008) the right of the security services to spy on the computers of suspected criminals and terrorists. Under the technique, software sent in an email enables the authorities to spy on a suspect’s computer hard drive. The Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe said cyber spying violated individuals’ right to privacy and could be used only in exceptional cases.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7266543.stm

Using well-chosen Google search queries, Goolag Scan discovers links to vulnerable web applications, back doors, or documents inadvertently put on the internet that contain sensitive information. The legality of such a tool appears to vary across Europe. In the UK, the situation is unclear at present. Using the links returned by Goolag Scan to gain access to a third party’s content might be an offence or not, depending on several factors. If the owner of the material had intended that the content should be private, it would be necessary to obtain authorisation to access it in order to stay within the law, regardless of how it could be accessed. There is no requirement in CMA that protection must be circumvented for access to be unlawful, so contributory negligence on the part of the content owner in failing to protect content intended to be private would probably be irrelevant.
http://www.heise-online.co.uk/security/Cult-of-the-Dead-Cow-turns-Google-into-a-vulnerability-scanner–/news/110087

Jeremiah Owyang asked on Twitter the other day:
“By you sending me an email (and me responding) we’re in a social contract. Can I use the content of an email without your knowledge?”
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/11/29/how-i-use-twitter-and-you/

Copyright:

Remixing is a key part of today’s culture, as people use commercial music and video as the raw materials for their own creations. Not surprisingly, Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC, and Tim Wu, the professor at Columbia Law school see these issues rather differently.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/830/

In Atlantic v. Brennan, a Connecticut case, the Court has denied the RIAA’s application for default judgment, rejecting the RIAA’s “making available” theory. The February 13, 2008, decision of District Judge Janet Bond Arterton holds, among other things, that the complaint is insufficient, both because
““without actual distribution of copies…. there is no violation [of] the distribution right.”
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2008/02/default-judgment-denied-in-atlantic-v.html

Ford: Car owners are pirates if they distribute pictures of their own cars

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/13/ford-car-owners-are.html

Do You Actually Understand What Copyright Is For? … The first, comes (again) from copyright expert William Patry, who points to a seven minute video of ordinary people explaining why they think copyright exists. The video itself is by Karl Fogel, who also runs a site called Question Copyright. What the video pretty clearly demonstrates is that most people have no clue why copyright exists, and many assume (as we see in the comments around here) that it’s there to “protect” the content creator or to prevent plagiarism.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071230/233138.shtml

Ownership of personal data:

There’s been a lot of discussion in the Cyberverse recently regarding Robert Scoble and Facebook. Robert lost his Facebook account (he got it back after appealing) when he violated Facebook’s Terms of Use by using a program to “scrape” (download) Facebook data — specifically, his “friends” list. Facebook’s Terms of Use “broadly prohibits the running of automated scripts on the site.”
http://vlb.typepad.com/commentary/2008/01/who-owns-the-da.html

If you are trying to contact me on Facebook, please don’t. My account has been “disabled” for breaking Facebook’s Terms of Use. I was running a script that got them to keep me from accessing my account.
http://scobleizer.com/2008/01/03/ive-been-kicked-off-of-facebook/

Taking my data and sharing it with a third party without my permission isn’t cool. Just because I shared information with you doesn’t give you the right to share it with others.

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CommentView.aspx?guid=5abd64f7-df45-42a7-bb2b-0584f8c13761

It’s hard to argue against data portability. After all, who could oppose giving people control over the data they load, publish and store on Web sites?
This is particularly timely now that average users have started feeling the “network fatigue” that comes from maintaining multiple social-networking profiles, e-mail accounts, blogs, address book applications, social-news-sites memberships and the like.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/141541/data_portability_reasonable_goal_or_impossible_dream.html

Online Reputation:

Now that first impressions are often made in cyberspace, not face-to-face, people are not only strategizing about how to virtually convey who they are, but also grappling with how to craft an e-version of themselves that appeals to multiple audiences — co-workers, fraternity brothers, Mom and Dad.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/fashion/03impression.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&no_interstitial

Obviously there is already a service ready to take care of your online reputation:
http://www.reputationdefender.com/

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Februar 29th, 2008 at 8:44 pm and is filed under Interesting Links. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.