Street Photography, Right to be Alone and the Challenge of the Reasonable Privacy Expectation

Question: what does ? street-photography has in common with Google’s indictment in the Mosley suit?

Answer: both challenge the balance between reasonable privacy expectation and the right to be informed.

There is a widespread attitude acknowledged by some European courts – namely, Italy and France – that grants legal protection to this alleged “right to be forgotten”. This is a rather dangerous attitude because following this path leads to the deletion of the collective memory of a culture: if Catilina were alive today, he would have had merit in asking his conspiracy to be deleted by the chronicle. Agreed, not everybody is a Catilina – or a public person whatsoever – but there is a shared principle in Western legal systems that separates what is public and what ought to be private. As soon as something falls in the former, there is not – or ? there shouldn’t be – a reason to delete the information of its existence.

To provide an example of the absurdity of the enforcement of this alleged “right to be forgotten” on the freedom of (online) press I can quote a fact I’ve witnessed in person, professionaly. An online magazine has been targeted by a threatening letter from a law firm, asking to remove from its server an article talking about an acquittal – yes, acquittal – of a Mr. Somebody. The basis of the claim is not a falsity or an exaggeration – that would have been illegal, indeed – but the simple fact that this Mr. Somebody “didn’t like the news to be online.” Only the future will tell whether this case will end in settling new censorship’s standards, or if the Justice – once and if the issue will be taken in Court – will decide in favour of the freedom.

As per the relevant case law, after a couple of lower court decision that enforced this “right to be forgotten”, a Supreme Court decision ruled that there is no such thing as “right to be forgotten” when freedom of press is involved and the news is correct. The concerned person, nevertheless, has the right to ask the online newspaper to update the original news in case of some further development of the story.

With a rather unusual sense of balancement – when dealing with the Internet – the Supreme Court issued a reasonable decision that should stop any further attempt of erasing the History.

 

Net-neutrality, Trojan Horses

In Italy the Codice delle comunicazioni elettroniche legally bind ISPs to guarantee the functionality and security of the network (both from a physical and logical perspective). This means that if traffic shaping is needed to handle traffic overload this can be done with no specific provision.
Every proposal of nailing down traffic shaping options is a trojan horse because – for instance – copyright lobbies might whistleblow that P2P is creating an international emergency thus forcing ISPs to violate the net neutrality “for security sake”.

On Apple’s Adobe Flash Ban(g)

So, according to MacRumors, Apple’s explanation for the ban over Adobe’s Flash-to-Iphone compiler is deadly simple: Apple doesn’t want to loose its grip on the users. They invested monies in creating product, capturing a market and now want to raise fences to prevent other eating on theyr own dish (or, better, hunting in the same hunt-resort.

Adobe’s supporters – on their side –  ?shout fire accusing Apple of being unfair, etc. etc. etc. …

Well, I might agree with those criticism against Apple, were the accusation coming from the open source community (where Mac OsX is supposed to come from?) but honestly I can’t accept that an hyper-proprietary company such Adobe (member of Business Software Alliance, among other things) might complain against a business strategy that is entirely into the “mood” of this industry sector. This is the market, catch-it or leave-it.

This is not to say that I do like or approve Apple behaviour.

Preventing user from having multiple choices, liberty in other words, is by definition an unfair move. I think Apple should learn from Google, whose “power” stays firmly in users’ hands.

One may think that this is wrong too. Maybe, but between a leaving in a golden cage (as soon as you can afford it) or be free in the wild I would go for the latter.

Italian Antitrust to storm on Google News?

Yesterday ? the Italian headline news announced that the Italian Antitrust, following ? claims by FIEG (Federazione Italiana Editori e Giornali – Italian Federation of Publishers and Journals), opened an investigation against Google, “charged” with discriminating against those publishers who had denied the availability of their content in Google’s News platform.

As I’ve pointed out in an interview by ANSA, this claim seems to stand on very weak legs.

As first, people use Google simply because it works. As soon as a (not necessarily new) search engine will prove to be more efficient, people quickly discharge Google.

Secondly: Google is not, by far, the only search engine to provide news search. People are not affected by a “locked-in syndrome” like in the operating system field: in other words, nobody has put a gun on the users’ temples to use Google.

Thirdly: the Internet economy is based on a quid pro quo, and the search engine sector doesn’t behave any differently. Publishers have contents, Google the technologies to make these contents available. If they join forces, publishers get traffic (i.e.: advertising), Google its part of the cake. If they don’t, they loose traffic and advertising revenues. That’s the Internet, honey!

Fourthly, let’s admit – for the sake of the discussion – that Google actually does what it is charged with. So what? As soon as the law is abided, Google is a private company, and the only people who can complain about its business strategies are the shareholders. I don’t see any reason whatsoever to force Google to look for specific content.

A final note: this situation is a typical demonstration of how “innovation” is “awarded” in Italy by the content industry. Instead of trying to unleash the power of new tools, the reaction of the traditional powers is to break it. It happened with software, it happened with music and video, and now with the Internet.

The Pirate Bay war. Does something changes for ISP’s liability?

The new episode of the Pirate Bay war leads to think that something is changing in judges’ mind in re: ISP liability. In the recent Swedish preliminary order neither is the final user the final target of a legal action, nor the ISP. The focus is on the sole and only possible defendant: the one who actually shares illicit contents (apart from the merit of the specific TPB case.) The ISP who provided the housing service for TPB torrent search engine has been ordered to “disconnect” the machine from the network and not, as in the previous episodes, to hijack users’ attempts to reach The Pirate Bay.

It is important to remark that in this trial the ISP is not involved as (contributory) defendant, but only as subject whose cooperation is – de facto – necessary to obtain the compliance to a court order. Thus, we face a situation where:

  • rights of innocent end users are not endangered by the activity of the copyright majors,
  • ISP’s role is not portrayed as those of an accomplish, supporter, or contributory violator,
  • the target of the legal action is focused on the (alleged) culprit.

Again, I don’t want to enter in the legal quarrel about TPB responsibility. What I want to stress is that – should the Swedish approach be confirmed – a step toward and actual respect of legal principles set by dir. 31/00/CE is made.