Stanford Center for Internet and Society

J.B. White, my former professor, has written a powerful essay (pages 98-103) on the evils of reducing the human experience to mere economics. Here is an excerpt:

"One particularly strong feature of the culture of consumption is an immense and relentless campaign, so pervasive and so normalized as to have become invisible, to persuade the public to accept and act on its premises. I refer here to the world of consumer advertising, especially to its apotheosis in television. This kind of advertising persuades people not only to buy this or that item, but more importantly, to accept and live by the whole infantile dream of the consumer economy. It is only in a narrow sense that advertisements compete with each other; in a deeper way they reinforce each other constantly."

Professor White retires this year following a long and distinguished career at Chicago and Michigan, where he held a joint appoint at the law school and English department. The full essay will appear in a book to be published by the University of Michigan Press in early 2009.

Roy Baumeister in Psychology Today: "Economists think that if people were true to financial logic, they would act more like monkeys..."
 

The CIS team tied for third place against Berkeley's Law and Technology Group at EFF's 18th Birthday Celebration/Pub Trivia night.

David Brooks in today's New York Times: "Studies designed to link specific genes to behavior have failed to find anything larger than very small associations. It’s now clear that one gene almost never leads to one trait.

It’s official: Wired Magazine has placed worrying about privacy on Gmail in the final column marked “expired.” (What’s “wired”? Worrying about privacy on Google Health.) Yet here I am, continuing to fret over Google’s eons-old practice of scanning incoming and outgoing messages in order to display contextual ads.

In my defense, I don’t think some evil Google Adwords employee is sitting in his brightly lit hexagonical reading through my email and twisting an ironic mustache. I recognize that it’s a dispassionate (for now) computer that scans for keywords and selects contextual ads.

My concern has to do with competition: Gmail puts Google’s advertisers in a position to use the content of their competitors’ emails to compete with them.

With increased interest in global warming, green building and ecologically friendly behaviors, I initially observed that there was fairly little chatter concerning intellectual property aspects. This prompted me to examine the extent that IP issues that consume us in other technologies, like the Internet or e-commerce are also affecting progress in the ‘green’ world.

In a previous post, the Traditions of Knowledge I referred to the appropriation of traditional knowledge by means of industrial revolution intellectual property.

Conventional intellectual property laws claim to confer rights only on knowledge that is individually authored, reduced to material form and 'original'. The antithesis of that modern knowledge paradigm is traditional knowledge which is by its nature traditional, communal and frequently oral.

Wired's Threat Level is reporting that a court (the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York) has ordered Google "to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube." (I believe the author means to refer to “user IDs,” not the proper names of the users.)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues on its website that such disclosure would violate the Video Privacy Protection Act. More disturbing still is the threat to a user's right to review material – including material at the core of the First Amendment – anonymously. See, e.g., Julie Cohen, “A Right to Read Anonymously: A Closer Look at 'Copyright Management' in Cyberspace,” 28 Conn. L. Rev. 981 (1996) (available online here).

I would think it clear that Viacom and its co-plaintiff should get, if anything, just that information necessary to determine what percentage of download activity involves copyrighted works.

UPDATE: Reuters reports that Google and Viacom have reached an agreement, wherein Google will anonymize YouTube user data before turning it over.