What iRights Isn't Personal Commentary9/20/2000; 3:02:27 PM In the original incarnation of the last article about Apple licensing Amazon's one-click patent (which was never publicly posted), I started to get into my posting policy for this site, which has developed over the last 8 months I've been running this site. I decided to pull it out seperately.I see iRights' primary purpose as covering issues, not news. While a lot of news makes it onto the site, I always try to make sure it relates to the issues. Hence, things like the Napster trial, which is news, gets covered in detail as the case was groundbreaking, and the arguments were getting analysed by a judge presiding over an actual case for the first time. This is importent in the settling of the issues that the trial covers. If Napster-Clone 3 gets sued two years from now for the same reason, Napster-Clone 3 would be lucky to get so much as a mention from this site. (If there's still a point to this site 2 years from now!)I have found that I try to pick news stories that meet the following criteria, from most importent to least (to me):

• News stories that cover a new topic. These are fairly rare, and often end up as entirely new catagories.
• News that puts a new spin on an issue, or clarifies an issue, or resolves an issue.
• News that is reasonably interesting... essays of interest fit in here.

Most all the news I post should fit into one of those catagories, most really in the third catagory. (Since I'm fitting my behavior after the fact and have no intention of being bound by these rules, there's a lot of flex room here. ) Thus, I didn't cover the Amazon One-Click patent until the essay in Salon pointed out the only relevent new observation about the agreement, which is that the licensing added percieved validity to the patent. Other then that tidbit, there's nothing new about the patent problem contained in the article.As another "for instance" (there are a few others), I don't cover stories about employee privacy. I tend to agree with the law; the computers belong to the corporation and if they want to mandate what you can and can't do with them, and monitor your every keystroke, then so be it. It's invasive, insidious, perhaps even evil, but legal. And the way to meet this problem is the same way employees have been fighting management since the industrial revolution: with unions. It's an importent issue, yes, but it's not really a "computer" or "internet" issue. (It's really no different then having a camera pointed at you at all times. If the unions won't stand up to it, then it will be done and it will be legal.)So, this site is not a news service; it only looks like a news service because all of the issues are so new (both truly new issues, and issues that existed before the founding of this site in Jan. 2000), and so a lot of news makes it in here. I don't aggregate everything I can find. There's absolutely no way I could cover all of the topics I'm covering if I had to post every news story of interest. In more peaceful times, this site might cover just the various essays that people might be writing.(Digest sites are useful, I don't mean to slight them at all, I'm just saying I'm not aiming for that niche. There are many great digest sites out there... one that covers a lot of things in detail that I summarize is the Privacy Digest, which collects a lot of stories about privacy, both computer and otherwise. I don't know if the author posts everything he finds from day to day, but he finds a lot more then I post here, and the way the two sites cover two niches in detail is great! Privacy Digest and iRights are excellent companions; I don't see us as competing sites, but as complementing sites. Another excellent digest-type site that only rarely touches the topics on this site is Over Lawyered.com, which covers lawsuits and trial lawyers. If you know of other good ones, I'd be very interested in knowing.Of course, this is a range, not an absolute news/issues dichotomy. Both of the digests I mention run commentary too, they just have a much stronger tendancy to post news then iRights, regardless of whether they have commentary or not.)I just wanted to clarify why there are some things 'missing' from this site that you might think belong here. Hopefully it'll make more sense after my essay gets done anyhow. (Yep, another massive missive is in the works, and I'm really, really excited about how it's turning out. Optimistically speaking, I really do think I've pulled nearly all of these topics together in a rational way, and how to handle them reasonably consistently. There are some other bonuses too, more about that later.)Thanks for reading!

Apple's "1-click" deal leaves a sour taste Patents9/20/2000; 2:32:23 PM 'By accepting the "1-click" patent as valid, Apple has for all practical purposes closed the debate about the patent's very legitimacy.'I have been waiting for an article, like this one from Salon, that covers what I didn't have time to cover: Apple's license legitimatizes the patent in the eyes of a lot of people, and will stifle debate.I wish they had stood up to Amazon, but it's just never worth it for one company to stand up alone, I suppose.

Expert: Go Easy on Privacy Regulations Privacy from Companies9/20/2000; 11:38:10 AM 'Say what you will about Richard Epstein, but don't call him a privacy zealot. 'The erudite University of Chicago law professor said Tuesday that instead of staking out extreme positions on both sides of the topic, advocates instead should consider the likely outcome of government regulations....'This is very true, and a Wired article from later today turns out to provide the perfect example to that. In An Ordeal: Copin' with COPPA, we see

...Therrien has come to believe that the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act is a flawed piece of legislation, and has decided it's easier to help his kids forge their ages to set up email accounts than it is to submit his credit card number, as at least one free email service (Hotmail) is demanding. "Maybe I'm admitting to a crime there, but I had a philosophical problem with giving them that kind of information," he said. "I don't want to give up credit card numbers where all I'm trying to do is set up an email account for my kids."

I'm sure COPPA gave our Congress-people lots of warm fuzzy feelings, but COPPA isn't working out all that well, because I don't think Congress ever stopped to think about side-effects. Designing privacy protection systems has all the legal complication that passing any law entails, and all the technical complications of system design, multiplied together. Few people understand both sides of the problem... perhaps nobody.Going back to the "expert" in the Wired article, I don't agree with him 100% but I do understand and agree with his call for thinking before we leap. There is one thing he said that I'd particularly like to take issue with, though:'Cox said that the benefits of exchanging personal information -- such as lower costs and greater customization -- exceeded the privacy costs.'Says who? Perhaps he's only talking about giving information away to a certain site for customization purposes, and it probably is true that the benefits of doing that outweight the costs... but it's not what we privacy advocates have a problem with! In those cases, you can simply refuse to divulge your information and nothing catastrophic occurs.The bad thing is the culture of selling, buying, aggregating, and selling again. If you want to order something online, you have to tell them where to ship it. In order to allow Userland to host this site, I had to tell them my e-mail address. Certain "breaches" of privacy are necessary, but that doesn't mean that the info necessarily must be sold, or else lower the value of our economy. When info is sold, company-to-company, there's often (nearly always) no real benefit to the consumer, regardless of what the focused advertising(/annoyance) proponents say. This info sharing is not necessary for our economy to survive. The critical point, though, is that we believe the decision of whether information is shared, whether customer-to-company or company-to-company, belongs to us, the consumer, not 'experts', and certainly not the companies! That is the 'extreme position' we privacy advocates take. I guess it's your call on just how 'extreme' that is.ps: This all begs the question of how valuable your privacy is. Some people seem to place it near zero, others quite high. Look at it as a supply-demand cost issue: Right now, the supply of privacy is high (or perceived to be high) so many people are having a hard time assigning significant value to it. What would this same expert say if the supply was low?

Security firm tests FBI limits with e-mail surveillance tool Surveillance and Privacy from Government9/20/2000; 11:08:00 AM 'A security company has designed an open and free alternative to the FBI's Carnivore e-mail surveillance tool that it hopes will provide a more palatable choice to wary Internet service providers and privacy advocates....'While the FBI refuses to comment on specific products, spokeswoman Chris Watney confirmed that the information is all the bureau is interested in. How they get it, as long as it's legal and complete, doesn't matter, she said.'This will probably push that issue to see how true that is.'Graham hopes that making the technology less of a mystery will cause everyone to focus more on the privacy and legality questions about Carnivore, which Congress has been attempting to deal with through legislation. '"We founded this company in order to protect peoples' privacy," Graham said. "By showing the source code for Altivore, we're narrowing the debate to the true issues."'And that can't hurt. I'm glad they've done this, and I hope it works as they hope.

Linking In Germany... good guys win first roung
Country Watch: Germany
9/20/2000; 9:21:43 AM Jan-Willem Swane points to Spicy Noodle's excellent coverage of the linking issue in Germany, including the best English description of the issue I've seen.

Spicy Noodles also links to Tim Berners-Lee's comments on what linking means. (TBL is the inventor of the web, in case you're wondering.) Commentary on Web Architecture - Links and Law and Links and Law: Myths are critical reading for all involved in the Web.

The Right to Link in Germany Country Watch: Germany9/19/2000; 4:13:26 PM I'm fuzzy on the details, but Jan-William has brought to my attention that there is a legal scuffle in Germany regarding linking. 'Symicron accuses Müntz, author of the html-helpsite SELFHTML, of an illegal link to the American software FTP-explorer. The reason: Symicron has the German trademark for the word Explorer.'Protests are ensuing. I don't read German so the news article doesn't do me much good.Update: Thanks, Andrea, for the link to a good page in English describing the problem at Freedom for Links.

The Active Customer Technology & Sociology9/19/2000; 11:56:33 AM 'What's the moral of this story? It's not that our auto club is staffed by incompetent employees (the rep was perfectly nice), or even that the Internet is the fastest way to get road maps (although that's obviously true). The moral is that in an imperfect world of customer service, most customers prefer to cut to the chase and help themselves. They know what they want, and they want to get it as efficiently as possible.'This truth reflects a dramatic change in the role of the customer in our economic system over the past generation. The change has occurred across three dimensions: power, specificity and activity. Each of these changes is important; their cumulative effect is enormous.'One can but hope similar changes will occur in the realm of politics someday. Now that would be a change worth having.

Regulating Privacy: At What Cost? Privacy from Companies9/19/2000; 11:41:52 AM 'Privacy advocates who successfully transformed such previously arcane matters as credit bureau databases and DoubleClick cookies into mainstream concerns are close to winning a truly epic battle. 'After years of agitating by liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, both Democrats and Republicans are suddenly expressing their support for sweeping new regulations of U.S. businesses.'Yet schemes like a federal privacy commission -- suggested this year by a bipartisan duo in Congress -- don't exactly cheer free-market organizations, which have been largely silent in this debate so far.'Wow... who will have the unenviable job of standing up in front of Congress and in front of a national audience, declare with a straight face that Americans should not have privacy? There's only one ploy that might work... But the children! Won't somebody pleazze think of the children!The biggest counterargument is from those who believe that the government can't be trusted to protect privacy, as they are one of the largest violators themselves. That's true, but who else can do it? The market has failed. Why would it even bother trying? The natural state of things is that there is benefit in invading the consumer's privacy, and while attempts to monetize personal data (like Zimtu) excites me, I have to admit it probably won't work, as it's fighting to restructure an entire entrenched economy. "Consumer demand", the magic that is supposed to right this wrong, will simply result in better hiding of the collection process, because it's just too darned valuable to give up.This is like breaking up a monopoly; only the government has the power to do it, so for better or for worse, if we want to improve things, we must allow it to try.

Carpe Diem
Personal Notes
9/19/2000; 11:30:37 AM I didn't want to jump the gun, but with the second post I'll do it. Hello to Carpe Diem!

:CueCat Fun And Games Misc.9/18/2000; 9:47:04 PM An interesting article at Slashdot about the :CueCat that Joel was recently mercilessly mocking. It seems the company is playing IP games after being pissed about their plan to give stuff away free and sneak a trojan horse in their drivers that report ever bar code scanned back to Digital Convergance, the creaters of the :CueCat, where they can make money selling detailed profiles. What has attracted my attention enough to warrent a post on this site is their apparent attempt to hold people to licenses by using hardware, after people created drivers for Linux which meant that you didn't need their software to use the hardware.Plus... all private data the site was collecting from the users of the Windows software was available in plain text on the webserver (according to message 147). And postal regulatoins apparently say that those who received the item unsolicted completely own it, says message 33. Installing their software may bind you to a EULA, but it seems their attempt to control how people use them are inevitably doomed to failure. Oops.It's an interesting story, that's for sure. There's a lot of annoyed people who are complaining loudly about what amounts to being notified that you are bound to a contract for using an unsolicited gift.