Internet users more powerful than the law?

An interesting news item on out-law.com about a company at the forefront of the user-generated content movement that has chosen to risk legal action that may spell termination for the company, in place of disappointing its users. Digg, a website that ranks news stories according to its readers votes, has received cease and desist letters from entertainment companies after a number of its leading stories this week contained details of a secret code which unlocks the anti-piracy systems of DVDs.

Digg.com originally deleted the stories but after a massive user backlash allowed the stories to be posted In a U-turn that could open them to legal action.

Encryption codes like the one revealed on Digg are covered by the U.S.'s 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a controversial piece of legislation (read the U.S. Copyright office summary here).

Fred von Lohman, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in his blog that sites which carry the code or links to it are unlikely to be able to use a traditional defence of 'safe harbor'.

"While no court has ruled on the issue, AACS (the trade group for Advanced Access Content System Licensing) will almost certainly argue that the DMCA safe harbors do not protect online service providers who host or link to the key."

Read the out-law.com news item here

See more about this story in:

The New York Times

The LA Times

The Guardian

Forbes

Financial Times

Image by Darwin Bell on Flickr CC-BY-NC

User Generated Content - The Copyright Conundrum

This event looks interesting. Thanks to Sean Flynn for flagging it up. I'm afraid I can't make it but hopefully somone else can. Although it's taking place in the States there is a live webcast.

Sean's message was as follows:

Please join us for

User Generated Content: The Copyright Conundrum
April 10th | 4:00 pm — 6:00 pm
Reception to Follow
Washington College of Law | Room 603

4801 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington D.C.

Registration: www.wcl.american.edu/secle/cle_form.cfm

The Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at the American University Washington College of Law and the Center for Social Media at the American University School of Communications, in collaboration with the DC Chapter of the Copyright Society of the USA, present a lively discussion on the implications of copyright law for makers of participatory media and the platforms on which it is displayed. The discussion will emphasize strategies to avoid or minimize risk of copyright liability. Panelists will include:

Sarah B. Deutsch
Vice President & Assoc. General Counsel
Verizon

Alec French
Senior Counsel, Gov’t Relations
NBC Universal, Inc.

Fred von Lohmann
Sr. Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation

Steve Tapia
Sr. Attorney, Law & Corp. Affairs
Microsoft

Mike Remington
Partner
Drinker Biddle & Reath, LLP

This event is open to the public. Your registration is appreciated to help our planning of the public reception following the panel. Registration, however, is not required to attend.

Registration

www.wcl.american.edu/secle/cle_form.cfm

Webcast

www.wcl.american.edu/pijip/webcast.cfm

Blogs as new sources of research data - what about privacy?

Last week I went to an interesting workshop at the e-Science institute in Edinburgh called ‘New Kinds of Social Data: from Blogs to Administrative data'.

The meeting was targeted at researchers in academia and government and those concerned with long time archiving and access of social data. My primary interest was in the privacy and data protection implications of using these new data resources. A talk I found particularly interesting was given by Karen McCullagh, entitled ‘Blogs archives and privacy’.

Karen is currently working on her PhD. You can find out more about her research project here. The survey on 'Bloggers Privacy Expectations and Attitudes ' is no longer live but Karen hopes to make the results of this survey available at this link shortly.

All of the presentations from the workshop are available online.