I can haz data?

That things are getting smarter, smaller, and more complicated is an obvious trend and the fact that there are more businesses every day making and selling things is even more so. An interesting effect of all this is things are getting made in such a way that makes it difficult for the average person to understand how it works and becomes less involved in the process and in personal security.

This discussion made me think of this video by Vox about phones and the environment. It discusses the (terrible) footprint of manufacturing these devices, about how we don’t repair or even keep the phones for long, about how these toxic these materials affect our environment, and about how we need to make these phones more sustainable. 

These points become increasingly when we think about how everything is being made to incorporate some element of ‘smart’. Companies focus on whether they can sell a product and consumers focus on whether they ‘need’ something to stay current.

But this isn’t how we should think about things in this digitizing of our world. We need to think about if there is an actual need, if we are somehow bettered by having this technology – do we need another plastic based water bottle with a chip that speaks with your phone to remind you to drink? How many resources were used to produce and ship that product, to advertise, to sell, and for the consumer to take home to probably not use for more than a few months? What about the cost of having more products that require electricity? Twitter, who produces no physical products, was listed as one of the least green technology firms, due to their energy usage which largely depends on natural gas (43%), coal (21%) and nuclear (14%) with clean energy only accounting for 10%.

These environmental risks are important and need to be considered alongside risks to the individual such as a loss of agency and skills, dependency on experts, centralisation of power, and a loss of privacy to others, businesses, and the government. The legal challenges shouldn’t be limited to topics such as privacy and protection of copyright, but to the effects to the environment and ourselves psychologically (a discussion for another time).

Free speech is viewed by many countries as absolutely fundamental though once it takes new forms and has different effects, the line between acceptable and not becomes complicated. The idea of protests shifting from physical streets to the virtual environment seems to have first been put forth by the Electronic Disturbance Theatre in a text published in 1994. Since then, the question of whether DDoS attacks should be a legal form of protest is being increasingly debated.

In the US, DDoS attacks are illegal under the Computer Fraud and Abuse act and in the UK under the Computer Misuse Act. Most significant legal action against a DDoS attack was in 2013 when 13 men where charged for targeting organisations such as law firms, major credit card companies, and websites as part of ‘Operation Payback’. 

First large scale push for legalising DDoS attacks as a form of protests was in the US in 2013 through a petition to the White House but it failed to receive the number of votes required to be debated. In January 2017, a software engineer by the name of Juan Soberanis proposed a virtual protest to Trump’s inauguration, urging others to refresh the official White House page as often as possible. They were not successful in taking down the site (which might have been due to the media coverage of the act as being illegal and the website operators having forewarning) but should DDoS attacks be seen as illegal?

While some DDoS attacks can be done for objectively bad reasons such as the ransomware Wannacry which affected over 230,000 computers including governments and the NHS, many can do good such as Operation Darknet which targeted child sexual abuse photography websites in 2011.

This puts governments in a dilemma – on the one hand people should have the right to free speech and to protest, but on the other hand the effects of these attacks are often much worse than a physical protest as there are many other effects. If it is a business’s website which is targeted, they could spend millions fighting the attack and protecting themselves from future attacks, all while they are losing money each minute that the site is down.

‘Meme’ is defined by Urban Dictionary as, “its not a word, it’s a lifestyle”, but more relevantly as “an image, video, or set of text that becomes popular and spreads rapidly via the internet”.

Through the use of these memes above, I reference four issues on copyright on the internet:

First row, the internet has many copyright violations.

Due to the ease in creating copies and lack of effective policing, copyright violations remains a big issue on the internet. While companies like Netflix may not provide a button to copy a film, there is little that can be done to prevent users from screen capturing and distributing that copy. To make matters worse, people don’t care about the fact they are infringing copyright and some even do so with reckless disregard or even as a badge of honour, such as on sites such as 4Chan.

Second row, about copyright owners trying to enforce their rights.

Not only is the technology not helping copyright owners, but trying to stop a viral meme can be like shouting into a technological abyss. There is little in the way of people sharing through multiple web based mediums and the creator’s or copyright owner’s words can be easily disregarded. Because of this, many rely on other ways to stop infringers through fear tactics by contacting users directly, among other things.

Third row, about users posting content on YouTube.

“300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute” (https://fortunelords.com/youtube-statistics/) and while some do shamelessly post knowingly (or at least should have assumed) infringing content, many videos are legal under the US copyright Fair Use principles and the UK Fair Dealing exceptions. In spite of this, many videos are taken down when if they were taken to court would have been found to be acceptable.

Fourth row, about YouTube’s approach to copyright.

Often YouTube itself does not consider whether a video would be under a fair use exemption, leaving content creators confused as to why their video is taken down. Once a video has been taken down by YouTube, the appeals process is long and difficult process which leaves content creators that rely on the revenue from their videos stuck.

Artists complain that technology doesn’t allow them to properly exploit copyright in their works. Blockchain (which is becoming increasingly important in the financial and real estate sectors) would help to prevent copying, provide a complete source of information about the song, as well as ensure proper compensation for artists with each play. 

Do you actually know what you’re agreeing to when you accept the terms and conditions of software services like Facebook? Do you get any rights over your content or even your organs? 

(Ctrl-Walt-Delete) 

The loss of control of our personal data is definitely number one on my list too and I’m glad to see efforts to fix this like with the Brave Browser.