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The Internet Bill of Rights. A Dangerous And Useless Idea

Italy (or at least, a little but noisy group of old-school netizens, politicians and academics) is in pole-position at the race for the Internet Bill of Rights, a sort of “constitution” to grant “internet rights” to the people.

The Internet Bill of Rights is useless because doesn’t add a set of rights that we don’t own just yet, and is dangerous because, on the contrary, would add more confusion to a rather chaotic situation.

In the Western World we have plenty of rights such as: data-protection, personal privacy, free-speech, freedom of commerce, freedom for press, copyleft and copyright. But what we actually lack – in Italy for sure – is a FAIR ENFORCEMENT of these rights: the fundamental rights that are taken for granted on paper, when challenged in court or in the parliament are twisted and torched to meet the need of the moment.

Think of the ridiculous extension made by local courts first and then by the Corte di cassazione (the Italian Supreme Court) of the “seizure” legal concept up to including the Internet traffic filter, or the way the Italian Data Protection Authority is working as a censorship machine, taking over the freedom of press, the Communication Authority, that self-gave the power to shut down Internet resources accused of copyright infringement, without any judicial review or, yet, the Antitrust authority that has been given the power (that was supposed to be reserved for a judge) to tell as illegal a contractual provision between a professional and a consumer…

This is typically Italian: pretend to fix a problem by passing a law, and immediately forget to check whether and how is enforced. And when the “need” arises, the old joke comes into play: law is enforced against enemies, interpreted towards friends.

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The Economics of Personal Data And The (Reckless?) Use Of Unreliable Statistics

A paper by a scholar of the university of Trento (IT), co-authored by people from the Kessler Foundation,Telefonica Network, Telecom Italia and Google finds that we are ready to sell our personal data for about two Euros.

Although the conclusions are – in principle – fair enough and match the “gut-feeling” of whoever works in the field of the personal-data handling, I wonder how it would be possible to draw statistics evidence by the criteria adopted.

I’m not a statisticians, but the only part of the paper dedicated to the sample’s composition reads:

All volunteers were recruited within the target group of young families with children, using a snowball sampling approach where existing study subjects recruit future subjects from among their acquaintances … A total of 60 volunteers from the living lab chose to participate in our mobile personal data monetization study. Par- ticipants’ age ranged from 28 to 44 years old (μ = 38, σ = 3.4). They held a variety of occupations and education levels, ranging from high school diplomas to PhD degrees.
All were savvy Android users who had used the smartphones provided by the living lab since November 2012. Regard- ing their socio-economic status, the average personal net in- come amounted to e21169 per year (σ = 5955); while the average family net income amounted to e 36915 per year (σ = 10961). All participants lived in Italy and the vast majority were of Italian nationality.

While, again, I have a limited knowledge of the statistic, there are a few oddities in the method applied by the researchers that undermine the value of the findings:

  1. The sample is made by only 60 people, belonging to young (wealthy enough) young families with children. This isn’t actually a fair depiction of the Italian socio-economics. Furthermore, there are neither enough information about the socio-economic status nor the ? geographic location of the participants to actually understand the sample quality.
  2. Even Wikpedia knows that the “snowballing” sample selection method is known to be prone to biases. No evidence are given in this paper of who the biases are handled.
  3. Though broadly used, Android isn’t the only platform. A well balanced sample should have taken into account Blackberry, IOS and Windows Mobile (or whatever the name.)
  4. The “measurements” of individual traits data relies upon psychological categories and methods. Psychology is not a science and putting a bunch of equations into an highly subjective discipline doesn’t turn it to hard science (I know, I know, positivism is dead, natural sciences aren’t so “absolute” etc. But try to send a rocket to the moon by assessing the “mood” of a ballistic trajectory and tell me the results.)

Before concluding that this paper offers no scientific evidence of its findings I would like to have these (and maybe other, expert-made) questions be answered. But I’m afraid that the final judgements wouldn’t change.

A final remark: the lack of scientific method shown in this paper is dangerous because, as often happens, poorly informed journalists jump on the news and “sell” it without any warning to the readers, thus luring them – and the Data Protection Authority, I fear – into thinking that what is a limited, partial and non-relevant work actually drives to factual conclusions.

 

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Parkinson’s Law Italian Edition Quoted By Gian Antonio Stella

Gian Antonio Stella, a well known ? journalist whose articles are published by the most important Italian daily newspaper, Il Corriere della sera, just published a new book: Bolli, sempre bolli, fortissimamente bolli, about the bureaucracy cancer in Italy.

At the beginning of the book (Kindle location 1853, to ? be precise) he extensively quotes ? La Legge di Parkinson, the Italian translation I did of the British classic “Parkinson’s Law“.

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Google Not To Become A US Defense Contractor

Well, the news isn’t actually “new” but there is one interesting and underlooked Google statement about the acquisition of the (military) robotics firm Boston Dynamics: while the current agreements are honored, Google has no plan to become a defense contractor.

This way Google is depriving the US military system of a top-notch technology, keeping in its own and solely hands what is supposed to be a (although future) critical asset for the US security and safety.

Should this trend be confirmed, we might face in the near future the massive accumulation of advanced technologies in the hands of just one company that might become the “one-stop” for defense – and more broadly – public needs.

 

 

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The Italian Copyright Levy To Legalize Digital Piracy?

The Italian Minister of culture, Franceschini (Democratic Party) issued the decree – effective by July 17, 2014 – that makes the copyright levy skyrocket up to 30 Euros per multimedia storage device. This levy (technically called “fair reward”) is supposed to compensate in advance the authors for the copy made by a user of a copyrighted content. Even those contents – so long, entertainment industry – shared through the Internet. But the authors who don’t belong to SIAE (the Italian Royalty Collecting Agency) will never get paid for the (ab)use of their works.

So, how is it possible that online sharing isn’t illegal? Here is the catch: nothing in the Italian Copyright Law says that the copy must come from an ORIGINAL or legally owned content. The consequence is that if I download or share something through the Internet I’m not infringing somebody else’s copyright because of the preemptive payment made through the levy.

More than legally correct, this conclusion comes from common sense: the “fair” compensation exists way before the Internet and was designed in the VCR-era to allow copyrighters to get some money from the privately made TV broadcast recording. Of course somebody who recorded a movie didn’t have a “right” over this content that allowed him to put it on a video-cassette and this is where the levy jumps in. The equation is simple: pay your fee in advance and get the right to keep your favourite show at home.

As odd as it may sounds, this equation works for the Internet too but the entertainment industry refuses to even talk about the issue, claiming that the levy is designed for legally-owned content only. While – again – there isn’t such provision clearly stated in the law, this statement is counterintuitive since is a fact that as soon as a content is stored on a levy-burdened media, the author compensation’s has already been paid.

Instead of complaining, the entertainment industry should be happy of this unjust levy because it gets money from a huge quantity of Terabytes used for backups, business continuity and private storage that don’t contain copyrighted works and that – nevertheless – are still burdened by the “fair” compensation.

The only that have the right to complain are all the unknown authors whose works (music, words, pictures) are routinely abused (not only) on the Internet and that will never get their share of “fair” reward. Yes, because all the monies we pay fall into the SIAE ? that shares the cuts among its members.

Is this “fair” reward actually so?