I was half-expecting someone to come back with the OSS/free content argument. There is no doubt that some useful works are produced by these, but the volume of production and distribution today is utterly insignificant compared to copyright-based, commercial practice. Moreover, the amount of money to be made by professionals who might improve the quality and quantity of available works is indistinguishable from noise.
In terms of volume, I suspect that several of the larger commercial software vendors still have more installed copies of their software alone than all the OSS in the world put together. (If you're about to mod me a troll for that, please at least stop and do some quick estimates on the back of an envelope first. I'm being entirely serious.)
In range of functionality and quality, it is hard to name OSS packages where there is no alternative available via the commercial/copyright-based route at a similar or higher level. In most cases, there are multiple significantly better alternatives available. And of course there is no established OSS available at all in numerous areas where copyright-based software businesses are successfully supplying products.
Similar arguments apply in the case of works available under Creative Commons/GFDL/etc. Probably the biggest poster child for this approach is Wikipedia, which for all its success is still only comparable to a single good encyclopaedia supported by the copyright model in depth and quality. If you took all the worthwhile free content available under these licences and published it in book form, how many shelves at your local library would it take up? Not all of them, I suspect, not by a long shot.
The original copyright term was actually 14 years.
Sure, and that's probably a lot more reasonable than what we have today. But the post I replied to was arguing for one year, because one "new" year is for some reason supposed to be equivalent to ten "old" years, apparently. That post also claimed that copyright is there to get someone to market first. These are silly claims for several reasons, starting with the fact that if you created a new work you're going to be first to market by default, and followed by the fact that creating significant works and setting up useful distribution channels to commercialise them can easily take more than a year.
In any case, this is all rather a moot point, because the material being illegally ripped on-line would overwhelmingly still be within copyright even under the original rules with much shorter copyright periods. Some people around here have a bizarre fixation about Disney wanting to preserve the rights to some short film most people have never heard of from several decades ago, but in reality what really bugs the Big Media outfits is the trading of relatively recent or even preview-copy movies, music singles and games, in direct competition with regular sales.
I agree with much of what you wrote, so I'll concentrate on just the interesting parts or disagreements here.
Oh and I hope you like what those wealthy people like, because only what they like is going to get made. Sometimes you will, most of the time you probably won't.
In this discussion, the behaviour of rich Big Media organisations and rich politicians is being criticised from all over the place. At the same time, the critics seem to be proposing abolishing the primary mechanism through which average people can collaborate to support producing works. Irony, much?:-)
Most people's sense of "fairness" is "take all I can, screw the other guy."
Here, we disagree. I think most people's sense of fairness does mean compensating someone to a reasonable extent for their efforts.
IME, the big objections in copyright debates are usually about the middlemen such as the **AA organisations, who have taken advantage of copyright laws that are in their own interests, while somehow simultaneously avoiding other laws that are designed to constrain pricing in non-competitive markets. The result is that people who are not the artists are selling artistic works at artificially high prices. Consumers see no reason they should pay a middleman who they perceive to be ripping them off, and view copyright infringement via downloads and such as screwing the unfair middleman, and therefore ethical.
Of course, this is a problem with the current implementation of copyright, not with the underlying principle. In previous discussions, we (various Slashdot posters) have suggested a range of alternatives that are faithful to the basic idea of copyright, but would shift the balance way back towards benefiting the artist and the consumer rather than the middleman, leaving the latter to make a profit only if they provide a valuable service to artists and/or consumers in a competitive market. If we moved back in that direction, I don't think most people would consider it fair to rip works at the expense of the people who actually worked hard to make them, and I think the law in this area would deserve a lot more respect generally.
Functioning, profit earning markets require neither copyright nor intellectual property. The goods still have to be manufactured even if no one owns that right exclusively.
This is the basic problem with your argument. You are thinking in materialistic terms, where producing a good requires a corresponding supply of raw materials plus some amount of skill and effort on the part of the producer. The kind of intellectual property covered by copyright doesn't work that way.
By its nature, producing as many copies of a work as you like has near zero marginal cost, and almost no extra raw materials are required to produce extra copies. The value of the work comes almost entirely from the skill and effort of the producer, and any remaining costs (e.g., the sets and props for making a TV show) are one-offs. However, the skill and effort required by the producer is often very much greater for this kind of work than is needed for the mechanical production of most physical goods.
This distinction is important, because a lot of the arguments against copyright in the Internet age are based on the marginal cost of reproduction, and entirely ignore the initial costs of production. The big advantage of copyright is that it allows those initial one-off costs to be amortized over all copies produced and sold, leaving each individual consumer paying only a tiny fraction of the overall cost yet benefiting from the whole work. The various alternatives commonly suggested, such as the patronage model or socialised funding, tend to impose the entire burden on a single consumer/benefactor and then give away the work for free to everyone else. That's all well and good, but it only works if you can find patrons willing to support the cost of producing works.
This is why I challenge your claim that "Functioning, profit earning markets require neither copyright nor intellectual property". If you believe this to be so, and that the incentives for producing and sharing works of useful quality are really as good as the current copyright/IP legal framework, then you get to answer the billion dollar question: why are there not parallel industries producing films, books, software and the like that compete effectively with the established, copyright-based model and produce new works in the same sort of quantity?
FWIW, I dispute some of your other unsourced claims as well. Do you have any objective evidence that a majority of people consider downloading material legal (or, better yet, that a majority of well-informed people do)? I'm not sure where you get all the claims about copyright durations and the first-to-market argument from, either. Again, do you have any objective evidence to support these claims?
In general: if the majority does something that is illegal, then it is not the people that are wrong, it is the law that is wrong.
So tell us: what proportions of the population of your country do you think:
believe copyright to be unethical and copy knowing they are breaking a law they consider unjust?
don't object to copyright in principle but copy in the expectation that they will not get caught?
don't understand copyright and copy without knowing they are doing anything wrong?
don't object to copyright in principle and don't deliberately infringe it?
Slashdot is not exactly a representative forum on this subject, and across the population as a whole, I suspect the answers are not what you think they are.
Pay careful attention to the background music, as it will provide valuable cues on when to run.
Oh, please. Movies like that are soooooo 1990s!
In the new century we handle this sort of scenario with game techniques. You just save the current state of the world every few seconds, while sending your guy out into the field. There won't be any change in the music until it's too late for him, but then you just reload, activate all his power-ups, and go kick the red-eye'd mystery device back to where it came from.
Just be careful if the red eye is moving from side to side and you catch a glint of silver. Those guys from the sci-fi shows are trying to muscle in on our turf.
There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complains and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now.
they are scrubbing it out of good will more than anything.
Well, not really. The European advisory group was recommending a 6 month maximum, and Google were at 18. As Microsoft have learned, Europe is not shy about going after megacorps that think they are above its laws, and privacy and data protection issues are hot political topics in various EU countries right now, with a lot of media coverage of leaked data and rising public awareness of the dangers associated with such things.
This was done out of "good will" for the same reasons that industries accept "voluntary" regulation schemes that appear not to be in their own best interests: because the alternative is to have compulsory regulation and legal sanctions applied, and that costs a heck of a lot more and in some cases threatens negligent company directors personally. At 18 months, the first big leak could have seen the political powers turn strongly against Google at a time when their continued strength in several fields is already in jeopardy. At 9 months instead of 6, it's more of a misdemeanour than a felony, as it were.
FWIW, I meant the statement literally: I don't believe in the concept of "freedom of religion". I have nothing against anyone who wishes to practise any honest religion, I just feel that other established rights and freedoms already protect them where their behaviour is reasonable. Elevating religion to the same status immediately puts the rights of those claiming to follow any religion above the rights of those who say they follow no religion, and it enables anyone claiming something is part of their religion to use the "freedom of religion" protection to trump other laws. I don't consider such an imbalance to be a good thing.
This sort of insanity is exactly the reason that "freedom of religion" should not be protected at all: there should be no different level for anyone, just because they choose to label something with the ill-defined term "religion". I wrote a little about this in a previous post.
As you say, if the conduct is unlawful then they should be dealt with like anyone else. If it is not, then they should suffer no penalty for whatever they choose to believe. Religion simply shouldn't enter the picture here.
New Labour are an interesting (and scary) paradox: as you say, many of their policies are clearly traditional right-wing territory, yet they still raise taxes and hand out money like left-wing socialists. It's hard to imagine a worse combination.
You don't want some random site's malware to get to close to the online banking application running in a different tab, so you've got to take steps.
Exactly. I can't be the only Firefox user who habitually has many tabs open, but gets frustrated because one tab fired up an external application to read some sort of non-HTML document and everything freezes for a while. I've seen Firefox crashed on several occasions by widely used plug-ins, and even if that's just in one tab, such a crash will take out the entire browser, which is just daft.
I see where you're coming from, but I don't think all of your example scenarios are equivalent. There are several fundamental differences, for example, between a phone company running a service that is a private communications medium that is completely content-neutral and YouTube running a service that obviously gets a lot of hits because of illegal content that it is publicly rebroadcasting. Here we have differences of knowledge and intent, common vs. incidental use, private vs. public use, temporary vs. permanent storage...
To get back to your specific comments:
I believe that these data protection laws are intended to apply to companies who are charged with keeping private data.
You may choose to belive that, but as far as I'm aware no such condition has ever been written into the rules I cited, nor even mentioned by anyone arguing for them in government or otherwise.
This is not meant to apply to a publisher of public information. The publisher does not know if the data they are publishing is somehow violating some unknown 3rd-party's rights.
Here's the rub. Before we had anyone-can-write-it, mass-audience, near-instant communication via the Internet, the only people with the ability to share personal information widely and quickly were professional publishers, TV and radio broadcasters, and the like. It was generally regarded as due diligence that you checked the facts in your articles or broadcast reports and exercised some editorial control. If you failed to do so and shared something you shouldn't, your editor or producer could expect to take a big hit for it.
It seems to have been widely assumed, so far, that in the age of the Internet these things just don't apply any more, but that extra personal freedom comes at a price. Most people are honest, decent, happy to have the extra abilities, and responsible in how they use them, but the nasty thing about something like the Internet is that it only takes one person to really screw someone over, anyone can do it, and a significant minority of the human population is pathetic enough to do it. You can see this effect in numerous other contexts as well with the current generation of web sites: most posts on Slashdot are well-intentioned, for example, and from time to time someone writes something truly excellent, but there are also people who post serious defamation, who troll, who give misleading information, even who do just plain antisocial things like posting spoilers for a show that has been on TV in one country but not in others yet.
I think the jury is still out on whether this sort of complete openness is on balance a good thing, and if experience shows that it isn't, I don't see why companies whose business models have failed should get some sort of free pass on the rules that apply to everyone else. I've been predicting for a year or two that a coming trend in web sites will be semi-editorial sites, building on the success of the current generation of community-supplied content and interaction, but with some degree of oversight and editorial control exercised by the site operators to keep the quality up and the junk out.
Alternatively, I can believe that the community spirit combined with some sort of pre-moderation will take off for sites like Slashdot: perhaps you get a certain quota of posts or words per day, so you have to think a bit about what you want to say, and then each post gets randomly sent to other users for pre-moderation as a worthwhile contribution before it gets put on the public web site. Perhaps each post gets sent to three people, and if they all approve it goes live immediately, if they all reject it gets canned instantly, and if they are split a site editor has to check it. Perhaps society would come to accept this sort of scheme as a reasonable "good faith" effort in trying to avoid posting inappropriate information, and combined with a prompt mechanism to get things taken down that shouldn't be there (one of the few things laws l
If you go and read the documents there, they helpfully spell out the basics in a downloadable guide, together with citations of relevant European directives and related provisions in the European Convention on Human Rights that underpin some of these measures, and various specific requirements imposed by different European nations in this area.
You might like to read the section "When can personal data be processed?" on page 7 of the guide. Note in particular that the final point is the only one that conceivably applies to a service such as Google's, and they explicitly note that "this interest cannot override the interests or fundamental rights of the data subject, particularly the right to privacy". There also mechanisms described for dealing with transfers to areas that have inadequate data protection regulations (which the US clearly is, for this purpose) up to and including imposing an EU-wide ban on data transfers that are non-compliant as a last resort.
And incidentally, all the DMCA/safe habour stuff you keep mentioning is irrelevant to this discussion. The potential legal problems with Google's service aren't because of copyright infringement in this case.
Yes, it does, if Google are holding any personally identifiable data. Are you actually familiar with the kinds of privacy and data protection laws we're discussing here, at all?
I understand what you're saying, I just think it lets people off the hook even though they are in the business of doing things that are likely to be based on harmful or distressing actions a significant proportion of the time.
If you come into possession of stolen property, then in most places you are not automatically guilty of an offence if it was an innocent transaction, but you are required to return the property. Moreover, if you picked it up under dubious circumstances (e.g., high-tech equipment or designer labels for 10% the usual price), then you may have a hard job arguing that you didn't realise it was probably stolen and you are innocent of all wrong-doing. This means you can't "commission" a theft, but then wash your hands of it if you are discovered.
As I understand it, courts in most Western jurisdictions generally rule similarly on propagation of legally privileged information. If you're a magazine editor and you publish information that you would reasonably be expected to know was proprietary and had been leaked illegally, then this does not give you a "free speech" pass on sharing it further. Likewise, if a court has ordered a ban on publishing the names of, say, child defendants, then you can't publish them in a national newspaper just because you didn't get them directly from the court but you overhead someone talking about them outside.
And free speech is not an absolute when it affects other people, either. We have slander and libel laws for this very reason. We also have harassment laws that guard against prolonged courses of action generally likely to cause someone distress without a good reason.
These analogies are not perfect, but my point is that other existing laws deliberately don't create a "firewall" of blame, where someone is free to knowingly do something likely to be harmful without any regard for the consequences of their actions. Nor do laws in any jurisdiction I know provide for absolute freedom of expression with no regard for the consequences. I find it strange that we would expect invasion of privacy not to come up to the same standards.
It's not like there's even much downside to this approach. Who really needs to publish a picture of someone else who was caught doing something embarrassing using a telephoto lens, or by a van covered in cameras driving down their street, or by a phone or other similarly small camera they didn't know was present? In general, there is no great public interest in seeing someone who looks like they were plastered (but perhaps were just ill that day), or in a state of undress they didn't expect anyone else to be able to see, or going into some financial organisation, medical facility, or other sensitive place. You could remove most of the unpleasant photos posted on the Internet without consent and replace them with the tag "andnothingofvaluewaslost", and this would make a lot of people's lives a little bit happier.
Why can't we have a presumption of privacy, such that posting photographs likely to be harmful or distressing to someone in the photograph without their consent is against the rules, and anyone who wants to do it has to show a compelling public interest (e.g., that the photograph shows an elected official who is claiming they support a certain position in public but privately going against it)? That way, there is no excuse for anyone, anywhere along the chain, to share things like photos that are likely to cause harm or distress.
We used to call this "minding your own business", "respecting someone's privacy" or simply "common courtesy". It is regrettable that in the Internet-enabled, "I deserve to see everything", "information wants to be free" era we seem to have forgotten how to treat fellow human beings in our self-righteous belief that just because we can do something, that means we should do it. I do not think this makes the world a better place.
Unfair terms in these pre-written contracts are often thrown out by courts precisely because of the unequal bargaining power of the parties. It's not forced as such, but there is certainly recognition that they haven't been agreed between two equal and fully informed parties.
That's great, but what happens when someone else starts posting sensitive information about you on the Internet? Do you think anyone running a service that collects and potentially republishes such information should just get a free pass? "We didn't know it was highly likely that our business model relied on people giving us information other people might not want us to have, Your Honour!"
It's unpleasant enough when someone posts a photo of you that you'd rather forget, but what if the photo was itself an invasion of your privacy and taken without consent? What if it's not a photo, but leaked documents accidentally revealed by one of the numerous screw-ups by government departments, financial services and other similarly powerful groups recently? Is that just too bad, we know someone else should have been more careful, but since they won't we'll just republish that data about you since it's public now and you'll just have to deal with the fraud/loss of reputation/identity theft later?
It's easy to construct trivial examples of problems that, for most people, won't be anything more than embarrassing for a while. But privacy, or lack of it, in an Internet world has much wider implications for basic quality of life and the risk of serious harm. There's no point just turning a blind eye to those possibilities as if they won't happen, because then when they do, it will be far too late to do anything about it and it will probably be an entire generation before the damage is undone.
Data protection laws are for stuff that matters, like your financial or medical record.
So, leaving aside the question of where we should draw the line, how do you propose that we should protect things that do matter if there is "no such thing as privacy on the internet"?
Most of the civilised world has basic privacy protections. If the US doesn't, then in the age of the Internet, the US needs to be penalised by everyone else until it does. This is no different to the way the US itself leans on other nations to protect its own interests. Related things are already happening, with increasing numbers of European businesses explicitly forbidding service providers from storing data in or routing data via the US because of legal and regulatory concerns.
Either this sort of harmonisation with basic rights protected by worldwide law happens, or sooner or later the Internet probably becomes fragmented into more localised parts with more consistent legal environments. That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, IMHO: just like any other international agreements, if you want to play with the others, you have to play nice.
No, but it is Google potentially breaking the law by holding personal information about someone without their knowledge or consent. It's hard to see how you would reconcile this sort of database building with privacy and data protection rules, even the relatively weak ones we have at the moment.
Thank you. I didn't appreciate the difference before, and it wasn't obvious to me from the cited pages that this only applied to one and not the other. Does this mean no personal information is ever being sent to Google, then?
Slashdot Mirror
I was half-expecting someone to come back with the OSS/free content argument. There is no doubt that some useful works are produced by these, but the volume of production and distribution today is utterly insignificant compared to copyright-based, commercial practice. Moreover, the amount of money to be made by professionals who might improve the quality and quantity of available works is indistinguishable from noise.
In terms of volume, I suspect that several of the larger commercial software vendors still have more installed copies of their software alone than all the OSS in the world put together. (If you're about to mod me a troll for that, please at least stop and do some quick estimates on the back of an envelope first. I'm being entirely serious.)
In range of functionality and quality, it is hard to name OSS packages where there is no alternative available via the commercial/copyright-based route at a similar or higher level. In most cases, there are multiple significantly better alternatives available. And of course there is no established OSS available at all in numerous areas where copyright-based software businesses are successfully supplying products.
Similar arguments apply in the case of works available under Creative Commons/GFDL/etc. Probably the biggest poster child for this approach is Wikipedia, which for all its success is still only comparable to a single good encyclopaedia supported by the copyright model in depth and quality. If you took all the worthwhile free content available under these licences and published it in book form, how many shelves at your local library would it take up? Not all of them, I suspect, not by a long shot.
The original copyright term was actually 14 years.
Sure, and that's probably a lot more reasonable than what we have today. But the post I replied to was arguing for one year, because one "new" year is for some reason supposed to be equivalent to ten "old" years, apparently. That post also claimed that copyright is there to get someone to market first. These are silly claims for several reasons, starting with the fact that if you created a new work you're going to be first to market by default, and followed by the fact that creating significant works and setting up useful distribution channels to commercialise them can easily take more than a year.
In any case, this is all rather a moot point, because the material being illegally ripped on-line would overwhelmingly still be within copyright even under the original rules with much shorter copyright periods. Some people around here have a bizarre fixation about Disney wanting to preserve the rights to some short film most people have never heard of from several decades ago, but in reality what really bugs the Big Media outfits is the trading of relatively recent or even preview-copy movies, music singles and games, in direct competition with regular sales.
I agree with much of what you wrote, so I'll concentrate on just the interesting parts or disagreements here.
Oh and I hope you like what those wealthy people like, because only what they like is going to get made. Sometimes you will, most of the time you probably won't.
In this discussion, the behaviour of rich Big Media organisations and rich politicians is being criticised from all over the place. At the same time, the critics seem to be proposing abolishing the primary mechanism through which average people can collaborate to support producing works. Irony, much? :-)
Most people's sense of "fairness" is "take all I can, screw the other guy."
Here, we disagree. I think most people's sense of fairness does mean compensating someone to a reasonable extent for their efforts.
IME, the big objections in copyright debates are usually about the middlemen such as the **AA organisations, who have taken advantage of copyright laws that are in their own interests, while somehow simultaneously avoiding other laws that are designed to constrain pricing in non-competitive markets. The result is that people who are not the artists are selling artistic works at artificially high prices. Consumers see no reason they should pay a middleman who they perceive to be ripping them off, and view copyright infringement via downloads and such as screwing the unfair middleman, and therefore ethical.
Of course, this is a problem with the current implementation of copyright, not with the underlying principle. In previous discussions, we (various Slashdot posters) have suggested a range of alternatives that are faithful to the basic idea of copyright, but would shift the balance way back towards benefiting the artist and the consumer rather than the middleman, leaving the latter to make a profit only if they provide a valuable service to artists and/or consumers in a competitive market. If we moved back in that direction, I don't think most people would consider it fair to rip works at the expense of the people who actually worked hard to make them, and I think the law in this area would deserve a lot more respect generally.
Functioning, profit earning markets require neither copyright nor intellectual property. The goods still have to be manufactured even if no one owns that right exclusively.
This is the basic problem with your argument. You are thinking in materialistic terms, where producing a good requires a corresponding supply of raw materials plus some amount of skill and effort on the part of the producer. The kind of intellectual property covered by copyright doesn't work that way.
By its nature, producing as many copies of a work as you like has near zero marginal cost, and almost no extra raw materials are required to produce extra copies. The value of the work comes almost entirely from the skill and effort of the producer, and any remaining costs (e.g., the sets and props for making a TV show) are one-offs. However, the skill and effort required by the producer is often very much greater for this kind of work than is needed for the mechanical production of most physical goods.
This distinction is important, because a lot of the arguments against copyright in the Internet age are based on the marginal cost of reproduction, and entirely ignore the initial costs of production. The big advantage of copyright is that it allows those initial one-off costs to be amortized over all copies produced and sold, leaving each individual consumer paying only a tiny fraction of the overall cost yet benefiting from the whole work. The various alternatives commonly suggested, such as the patronage model or socialised funding, tend to impose the entire burden on a single consumer/benefactor and then give away the work for free to everyone else. That's all well and good, but it only works if you can find patrons willing to support the cost of producing works.
This is why I challenge your claim that "Functioning, profit earning markets require neither copyright nor intellectual property". If you believe this to be so, and that the incentives for producing and sharing works of useful quality are really as good as the current copyright/IP legal framework, then you get to answer the billion dollar question: why are there not parallel industries producing films, books, software and the like that compete effectively with the established, copyright-based model and produce new works in the same sort of quantity?
FWIW, I dispute some of your other unsourced claims as well. Do you have any objective evidence that a majority of people consider downloading material legal (or, better yet, that a majority of well-informed people do)? I'm not sure where you get all the claims about copyright durations and the first-to-market argument from, either. Again, do you have any objective evidence to support these claims?
In general: if the majority does something that is illegal, then it is not the people that are wrong, it is the law that is wrong.
So tell us: what proportions of the population of your country do you think:
Slashdot is not exactly a representative forum on this subject, and across the population as a whole, I suspect the answers are not what you think they are.
Pay careful attention to the background music, as it will provide valuable cues on when to run.
Oh, please. Movies like that are soooooo 1990s!
In the new century we handle this sort of scenario with game techniques. You just save the current state of the world every few seconds, while sending your guy out into the field. There won't be any change in the music until it's too late for him, but then you just reload, activate all his power-ups, and go kick the red-eye'd mystery device back to where it came from.
Just be careful if the red eye is moving from side to side and you catch a glint of silver. Those guys from the sci-fi shows are trying to muscle in on our turf.
I hear the Franco-Swiss border is nice this time of year... Maybe that would be a good place?
There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complains and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now.
Only if the LHC is propelling cats.
Ha ha, funnee. U not even no how many times kitteh heerz dat one.
U be caful tho, maybe i haz last laf!
they are scrubbing it out of good will more than anything.
Well, not really. The European advisory group was recommending a 6 month maximum, and Google were at 18. As Microsoft have learned, Europe is not shy about going after megacorps that think they are above its laws, and privacy and data protection issues are hot political topics in various EU countries right now, with a lot of media coverage of leaked data and rising public awareness of the dangers associated with such things.
This was done out of "good will" for the same reasons that industries accept "voluntary" regulation schemes that appear not to be in their own best interests: because the alternative is to have compulsory regulation and legal sanctions applied, and that costs a heck of a lot more and in some cases threatens negligent company directors personally. At 18 months, the first big leak could have seen the political powers turn strongly against Google at a time when their continued strength in several fields is already in jeopardy. At 9 months instead of 6, it's more of a misdemeanour than a felony, as it were.
Yes, I was treating Google as a collective noun, and yes, I'm British.
(I submitted the article. Amusingly, I appear to have anonymised myself while doing so...)
FWIW, I meant the statement literally: I don't believe in the concept of "freedom of religion". I have nothing against anyone who wishes to practise any honest religion, I just feel that other established rights and freedoms already protect them where their behaviour is reasonable. Elevating religion to the same status immediately puts the rights of those claiming to follow any religion above the rights of those who say they follow no religion, and it enables anyone claiming something is part of their religion to use the "freedom of religion" protection to trump other laws. I don't consider such an imbalance to be a good thing.
This sort of insanity is exactly the reason that "freedom of religion" should not be protected at all: there should be no different level for anyone, just because they choose to label something with the ill-defined term "religion". I wrote a little about this in a previous post.
As you say, if the conduct is unlawful then they should be dealt with like anyone else. If it is not, then they should suffer no penalty for whatever they choose to believe. Religion simply shouldn't enter the picture here.
New Labour are an interesting (and scary) paradox: as you say, many of their policies are clearly traditional right-wing territory, yet they still raise taxes and hand out money like left-wing socialists. It's hard to imagine a worse combination.
You don't want some random site's malware to get to close to the online banking application running in a different tab, so you've got to take steps.
Exactly. I can't be the only Firefox user who habitually has many tabs open, but gets frustrated because one tab fired up an external application to read some sort of non-HTML document and everything freezes for a while. I've seen Firefox crashed on several occasions by widely used plug-ins, and even if that's just in one tab, such a crash will take out the entire browser, which is just daft.
I see where you're coming from, but I don't think all of your example scenarios are equivalent. There are several fundamental differences, for example, between a phone company running a service that is a private communications medium that is completely content-neutral and YouTube running a service that obviously gets a lot of hits because of illegal content that it is publicly rebroadcasting. Here we have differences of knowledge and intent, common vs. incidental use, private vs. public use, temporary vs. permanent storage...
To get back to your specific comments:
I believe that these data protection laws are intended to apply to companies who are charged with keeping private data.
You may choose to belive that, but as far as I'm aware no such condition has ever been written into the rules I cited, nor even mentioned by anyone arguing for them in government or otherwise.
This is not meant to apply to a publisher of public information. The publisher does not know if the data they are publishing is somehow violating some unknown 3rd-party's rights.
Here's the rub. Before we had anyone-can-write-it, mass-audience, near-instant communication via the Internet, the only people with the ability to share personal information widely and quickly were professional publishers, TV and radio broadcasters, and the like. It was generally regarded as due diligence that you checked the facts in your articles or broadcast reports and exercised some editorial control. If you failed to do so and shared something you shouldn't, your editor or producer could expect to take a big hit for it.
It seems to have been widely assumed, so far, that in the age of the Internet these things just don't apply any more, but that extra personal freedom comes at a price. Most people are honest, decent, happy to have the extra abilities, and responsible in how they use them, but the nasty thing about something like the Internet is that it only takes one person to really screw someone over, anyone can do it, and a significant minority of the human population is pathetic enough to do it. You can see this effect in numerous other contexts as well with the current generation of web sites: most posts on Slashdot are well-intentioned, for example, and from time to time someone writes something truly excellent, but there are also people who post serious defamation, who troll, who give misleading information, even who do just plain antisocial things like posting spoilers for a show that has been on TV in one country but not in others yet.
I think the jury is still out on whether this sort of complete openness is on balance a good thing, and if experience shows that it isn't, I don't see why companies whose business models have failed should get some sort of free pass on the rules that apply to everyone else. I've been predicting for a year or two that a coming trend in web sites will be semi-editorial sites, building on the success of the current generation of community-supplied content and interaction, but with some degree of oversight and editorial control exercised by the site operators to keep the quality up and the junk out.
Alternatively, I can believe that the community spirit combined with some sort of pre-moderation will take off for sites like Slashdot: perhaps you get a certain quota of posts or words per day, so you have to think a bit about what you want to say, and then each post gets randomly sent to other users for pre-moderation as a worthwhile contribution before it gets put on the public web site. Perhaps each post gets sent to three people, and if they all approve it goes live immediately, if they all reject it gets canned instantly, and if they are split a site editor has to check it. Perhaps society would come to accept this sort of scheme as a reasonable "good faith" effort in trying to avoid posting inappropriate information, and combined with a prompt mechanism to get things taken down that shouldn't be there (one of the few things laws l
If someone sends information to Google, Google is not legally responsible for it.
I'm going to stop you right there, because in some jurisdictions that just isn't true. See, for example, the European Commission web site on data protection.
If you go and read the documents there, they helpfully spell out the basics in a downloadable guide, together with citations of relevant European directives and related provisions in the European Convention on Human Rights that underpin some of these measures, and various specific requirements imposed by different European nations in this area.
You might like to read the section "When can personal data be processed?" on page 7 of the guide. Note in particular that the final point is the only one that conceivably applies to a service such as Google's, and they explicitly note that "this interest cannot override the interests or fundamental rights of the data subject, particularly the right to privacy". There also mechanisms described for dealing with transfers to areas that have inadequate data protection regulations (which the US clearly is, for this purpose) up to and including imposing an EU-wide ban on data transfers that are non-compliant as a last resort.
And incidentally, all the DMCA/safe habour stuff you keep mentioning is irrelevant to this discussion. The potential legal problems with Google's service aren't because of copyright infringement in this case.
Yes, it does, if Google are holding any personally identifiable data. Are you actually familiar with the kinds of privacy and data protection laws we're discussing here, at all?
That's fine as long as the photographs are of you personally. What if the photographs are of someone else?
I understand what you're saying, I just think it lets people off the hook even though they are in the business of doing things that are likely to be based on harmful or distressing actions a significant proportion of the time.
If you come into possession of stolen property, then in most places you are not automatically guilty of an offence if it was an innocent transaction, but you are required to return the property. Moreover, if you picked it up under dubious circumstances (e.g., high-tech equipment or designer labels for 10% the usual price), then you may have a hard job arguing that you didn't realise it was probably stolen and you are innocent of all wrong-doing. This means you can't "commission" a theft, but then wash your hands of it if you are discovered.
As I understand it, courts in most Western jurisdictions generally rule similarly on propagation of legally privileged information. If you're a magazine editor and you publish information that you would reasonably be expected to know was proprietary and had been leaked illegally, then this does not give you a "free speech" pass on sharing it further. Likewise, if a court has ordered a ban on publishing the names of, say, child defendants, then you can't publish them in a national newspaper just because you didn't get them directly from the court but you overhead someone talking about them outside.
And free speech is not an absolute when it affects other people, either. We have slander and libel laws for this very reason. We also have harassment laws that guard against prolonged courses of action generally likely to cause someone distress without a good reason.
These analogies are not perfect, but my point is that other existing laws deliberately don't create a "firewall" of blame, where someone is free to knowingly do something likely to be harmful without any regard for the consequences of their actions. Nor do laws in any jurisdiction I know provide for absolute freedom of expression with no regard for the consequences. I find it strange that we would expect invasion of privacy not to come up to the same standards.
It's not like there's even much downside to this approach. Who really needs to publish a picture of someone else who was caught doing something embarrassing using a telephoto lens, or by a van covered in cameras driving down their street, or by a phone or other similarly small camera they didn't know was present? In general, there is no great public interest in seeing someone who looks like they were plastered (but perhaps were just ill that day), or in a state of undress they didn't expect anyone else to be able to see, or going into some financial organisation, medical facility, or other sensitive place. You could remove most of the unpleasant photos posted on the Internet without consent and replace them with the tag "andnothingofvaluewaslost", and this would make a lot of people's lives a little bit happier.
Why can't we have a presumption of privacy, such that posting photographs likely to be harmful or distressing to someone in the photograph without their consent is against the rules, and anyone who wants to do it has to show a compelling public interest (e.g., that the photograph shows an elected official who is claiming they support a certain position in public but privately going against it)? That way, there is no excuse for anyone, anywhere along the chain, to share things like photos that are likely to cause harm or distress.
We used to call this "minding your own business", "respecting someone's privacy" or simply "common courtesy". It is regrettable that in the Internet-enabled, "I deserve to see everything", "information wants to be free" era we seem to have forgotten how to treat fellow human beings in our self-righteous belief that just because we can do something, that means we should do it. I do not think this makes the world a better place.
You don't HAVE to click OK, you can click cancel. And you don't HAVE to use their products. That is the negotiation.
Well, no, actually.
Unfair terms in these pre-written contracts are often thrown out by courts precisely because of the unequal bargaining power of the parties. It's not forced as such, but there is certainly recognition that they haven't been agreed between two equal and fully informed parties.
That's great, but what happens when someone else starts posting sensitive information about you on the Internet? Do you think anyone running a service that collects and potentially republishes such information should just get a free pass? "We didn't know it was highly likely that our business model relied on people giving us information other people might not want us to have, Your Honour!"
It's unpleasant enough when someone posts a photo of you that you'd rather forget, but what if the photo was itself an invasion of your privacy and taken without consent? What if it's not a photo, but leaked documents accidentally revealed by one of the numerous screw-ups by government departments, financial services and other similarly powerful groups recently? Is that just too bad, we know someone else should have been more careful, but since they won't we'll just republish that data about you since it's public now and you'll just have to deal with the fraud/loss of reputation/identity theft later?
It's easy to construct trivial examples of problems that, for most people, won't be anything more than embarrassing for a while. But privacy, or lack of it, in an Internet world has much wider implications for basic quality of life and the risk of serious harm. There's no point just turning a blind eye to those possibilities as if they won't happen, because then when they do, it will be far too late to do anything about it and it will probably be an entire generation before the damage is undone.
Data protection laws are for stuff that matters, like your financial or medical record.
So, leaving aside the question of where we should draw the line, how do you propose that we should protect things that do matter if there is "no such thing as privacy on the internet"?
Strawman, much?
Most of the civilised world has basic privacy protections. If the US doesn't, then in the age of the Internet, the US needs to be penalised by everyone else until it does. This is no different to the way the US itself leans on other nations to protect its own interests. Related things are already happening, with increasing numbers of European businesses explicitly forbidding service providers from storing data in or routing data via the US because of legal and regulatory concerns.
Either this sort of harmonisation with basic rights protected by worldwide law happens, or sooner or later the Internet probably becomes fragmented into more localised parts with more consistent legal environments. That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, IMHO: just like any other international agreements, if you want to play with the others, you have to play nice.
No, but it is Google potentially breaking the law by holding personal information about someone without their knowledge or consent. It's hard to see how you would reconcile this sort of database building with privacy and data protection rules, even the relatively weak ones we have at the moment.
Thank you. I didn't appreciate the difference before, and it wasn't obvious to me from the cited pages that this only applied to one and not the other. Does this mean no personal information is ever being sent to Google, then?