On the Role of Copyright Protection in the Information Society

In January 2012, Poland witnessed massive protests, both in the streets and on the Internet, opposing ratification of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which triggered a wave of strong anti-ACTA movements across Europe. In Poland, these protests had further far-reaching consequences, as they not only changed the initial position of the government on the controversial treaty but also actually started a public debate on the role of copyright law in the information society. Moreover, as a result of these events the Polish Ministry for Administration and Digitisation launched a round table, gathering various stakeholders to negotiate a potential compromise with regard to copyright law that would satisfy conflicting interests of various actors. This contribution will focus on a description of this massive resentment towards ACTA and a discussion of its potential reasons. Furthermore, the mechanisms that led to the extraordinary influence of the anti-ACTA movement on the governmental decisions in Poland will be analysed through the application of models and theories stemming from the social sciences. The importance of procedural justice in the copyright legislation process, especially its influence on the image of copyright law and obedience of its norms, will also be emphasised.

Evaluation of the Role of Access Providers Discussion of Dutch Pirate Bay Case Law and Introducing Principles on Directness, Effectiveness, Costs, Relevance, and Time

Internet service providers (ISPs) play a pivotal role in contemporary society because they provide access to the Internet. The primary task of ISPs – to blindly transfer information across the network – has recently come under pressure, as has their status as neutral third parties. Both the public and the private sector have started to require ISPs to interfere with the content placed and transferred on the Internet as well as access to it for a variety of purposes, including the fight against cybercrime, digital piracy, child pornography, etc. This expanding list necessitates a critical assessment of the role of ISPs. This paper analyses the role of the access provider. Particular attention is paid to Dutch case law, in which access providers were forced to block The Pirate Bay. After analysing the position of ISPs, we will define principles that can guide the decisions of ISPs whether to take action after a request to block access based on directness, effectiveness, costs, relevance and time.

EU Data Protection Law and Targeted Advertising: Consent and the Cookie Monster - Tracking the crumbs of online user behaviour

This article provides a holistic legal analysis of the use of cookies in Online Behavioural Advertising. The current EU legislative framework is outlined in detail, and the legal obligations are examined. Consent and the debates surrounding its implementation form a large portion of the analysis. The article outlines the current difficulties associated with the reliance on this requirement as a condition for the placing and accessing of cookies. Alternatives to this approach are explored, and the implementation of solutions based on the application of the Privacy by Design and Privacy by Default concepts are presented. This discussion involves an analysis of the use of code and, therefore, product architecture to ensure adequate protections.

Information as Property

Information is widely regarded as one of the key concepts of modern society. The production, distribution and use of information are some of the key aspects of modern economies. Driven by technological progress information has become a good in its own right. This established an information economy and challenged the law to provide an apt framework suitable to promote the production of information, enable its distribution and efficient allocation, and deal with the risks inherent in information technology. Property rights are a major component of such a framework. However, information as an object of property rights is not limited to intellectual property but may also occur as personality aspects or even tangible property. Accordingly, information as property can be found in the area of intellectual property, personality protection and other property rights. This essay attempts to categorize three different types of information that can be understood as a good in the economic sense and an object in the legal sense: semantic information, syntactic information and structural information. It shows how legal ownership of such information is established by different subjective rights. In addition the widespread debate regarding the justification of intellectual property rights is demonstrated from the wider perspective of informational property in general. Finally, in light of current debates, this essay explores whether “data producers” shall have a new kind of property right in data.

Taking the Law into Your Own Hands: Establishing an In-house Book Repair Program

Law collections pose some unique problems in terms of their physical care due to filing and updating practices, use patterns and special binding structures such as loose-leafs and pocket parts. This workshop is designed to address specific preservation needs of law collections through lecture, demonstration and hands-on opportunities. Participants will learn the fundamentals of book repair, treatment options and decision-making, and preservation best practices. Emphasis will be placed on moving knowledge into practice through guidelines for establishing institution-appropriate in house book repair programs, by training the trainers in basic book repair techniques and providing all participants with a start-up tool kit.

Privacy Panel: Usable and Quantifiable Mobile Privacy

The ever increasing popularity of apps stems from their ability to provide highly customized services to the user. The flip side is that in order to provide such services, apps need access to very sensitive private information about the user. This leads to malicious apps that collect personal user information in the background and exploit it in various ways. Studies have shown that current app vetting processes which are mainly restricted to install time verification mechanisms are incapable of detecting and preventing such attacks. We argue that the missing fundamental aspect here is a comprehensive and usable mobile privacy solution, one that not only protects the user's location information, but also other equally sensitive user data such as the user's contacts and documents. A solution that is usable by the average user who does not understand or care about the low level technical details. To bridge this gap, we propose privacy metrics that quantify low-level app accesses in terms of privacy impact and transforms them to high-level user understandable ratings. We also provide the design and architecture of our Privacy Panel app that represents the computed ratings in a graphical user-friendly format and allows the user to define policies based on them. Finally, experimental results are given to validate the scalability of the proposed solution.

Self-disclosure and privacy calculus on social networking sites: the role of culture

Social Networking Sites (SNSs) have become extremely popular around the world. They rely on user-generated content to offer engaging experience to its members. Cultural differences may influence the motivation of users to create and share content on SNS. This study adopts the privacy calculus perspective to examine the role of culture in individual self-disclosure decisions. The authors use structural equation modeling and multi-group analysis to investigate this dynamics. The findings reveal the importance of cultural dimensions of individualism and uncertainty avoidance in the cognitive processes of SNS users.

Privacy concerns and identity in online social networks

Driven by privacy-related fears, users of Online Social Networks may start to reduce their network activities. This trend can have a negative impact on network sustainability and its business value. Nevertheless, very little is understood about the privacy-related concerns of users and the impact of those concerns on identity performance. To close this gap, we take a systematic view of user privacy concerns on such platforms. Based on insights from focus groups and an empirical study with 210 subjects, we find that (i) Organizational Threats and (ii) Social Threats stemming from the user environment constitute two underlying dimensions of the construct “Privacy Concerns in Online Social Networks”. Using a Structural Equation Model, we examine the impact of the identified dimensions of concern on the Amount, Honesty, and Conscious Control of individual self-disclosure on these sites. We find that users tend to reduce the Amount of information disclosed as a response to their concerns regarding Organizational Threats. Additionally, users become more conscious about the information they reveal as a result of Social Threats. Network providers may want to develop specific mechanisms to alleviate identified user concerns and thereby ensure network sustainability.

Online disclosure and privacy concerns: a study of Moroccan and American facebook users

In using online social networks to connect and interact with people has become extremely popular all around the world. Thelargest Social Networking Site (SNS), Facebook, offers its services in over 70 languages and increasingly relies oninternational users to grow its membership. Aiming to understand the role of culture in SNS participation, this study adopts a‘privacy calculus’ perspective to examine the differences in participation patterns between American and MoroccanFacebook users. Survey results show that Moroccans users disclose less on Facebook than US users, yet perceive moredamage should their privacy on Facebook be violated. American users, on the other hand, have lower privacy concerns, trustfellow SNS members and legal system more, and disclose more in their profile. From a practical standpoint, the resultsindicate that SNS providers cannot rely on the same methods to encourage user participation and disclosure in differentcountries.

One size fits all? Managing trust and privacy on social networking sites in Russia and Germany

When it comes to platform sustainability, mitigating user privacy concerns and enhancing trust represent two major tasks providers of Social Networking Sites (SNSs) are facing today. State-of-the-art research advocates reliance on the justice-based measures as possible means to address these challenges. However, as providers are increasingly expanding into foreign markets, the effectiveness of these measures in a cross-cultural setting is questioned. In an attempt to address this set of issues, in this study we build on the existing model to examine the impact of culture on the robustness of four justice-based means in mitigating privacy concerns and ensuring trust. Survey responses from German and Russian SNS members are used to evaluate the two structural equation models, which are then compared. We find that perceptions regarding Procedural and Informational Justice are universally important and hence should be addressed as part of the basic strategy by the SNS provider. When expanding to collectivistic countries like Russia, measures enhancing perceptions of Distributive and Interpersonal Justice can be additionally applied. Beyond practical implications, our study makes a significant contribution to the theoretical discourse on the role of culture in determining individual perceptions and behavior.

Leveraging Trust and Privacy Concerns in Online Social Networks: an Empirical Study

Unprecedented success of Online Social Networks, such as Facebook, has been recently overshadowed by the privacy risks they imply. Weary of privacy concerns and unable to construct their identity in the desired way, users may restrict or even terminate their platform activities. Even though this means a considerable business risk for these platforms, so far there have been no studies on how to enable social network providers to address these problems. This study fills this gap by adopting a fairness perspective to analyze related measures at the disposal of the provider. In a Structural Equation Model with 237 subjects we find that ensuring interactional and procedural justice are two important strategies to support user participation on the platform.

Investigating the value of privacy on online social networks: conjoint analysis

Popularity of Online Social Networks has been recently overshadowed by the privacy problems they pose. Users are getting increasingly vigilant concerning information they disclose and are strongly opposing the use of their information for commercial purposes. Nevertheless, as long as the network is offered to users for free, providers have little choice but to generate revenue through personalized advertising to remain financially viable. Our study empirically investigates the ways out of this deadlock. Using conjoint analysis we find that privacy is indeed important for users. We identify three groups of users with different utility patterns: Unconcerned Socializers, Control-conscious Socializers and Privacy-concerned. Our results provide relevant insights into how network providers can capitalize on different user preferences by specifically addressing the needs of distinct groups in the form of various premium accounts. Overall, our study is the first attempt to assess the value of privacy in monetary terms in this context.

Perceived usefulness of RFID-enabled information services – a systematic approach

Even though RFID technology is currently gaining importance mainly in logistics, usage areas, such as shopping or after-sales enhancements beyond the supply chain are envisioned. Yet, while RFID hits the street it is questioned if it may undermine one’s privacy while providing few customer benefits. Meeting this criticism this paper investigates RFID-enabled information services and the drivers of their usefulness for consumers. The article claims that the more risk one associates with a product the more benefit from RFID-enabled information services is perceived. We show empirically that the nature of product risk provides a useful framework to decide on the types of RFID information services a marketer should offer to create RFID usefulness perceptions and increase technology acceptance.

Book Review: Regulating Code : Good Governance and Better Regulation in the Information Age

Digital technologies have profoundly changed not only the ways we create, distribute, access, use and re-use information but also many of the governance structures we had in place. Overall, "older" institutions at all governance levels have grappled and often failed to master the multi-faceted and multi-directional issues of the Internet. Regulatory entrepreneurs have yet to discover and fully mobilize the potential of digital technologies as an influential factor impacting upon the regulability of the environment and as a potential regulatory tool in themselves. At the same time, we have seen a deterioration of some public spaces and lower prioritization of public objectives, when strong private commercial interests are at play, such as most tellingly in the field of copyright. Less tangibly, private ordering has taken hold and captured through contracts spaces, previously regulated by public law. Code embedded in technology often replaces law. Non-state action has in general proliferated and put serious pressure upon conventional state-centered, command-and-control models. Under the conditions of this "messy" governance, the provision of key public goods, such as freedom of information, has been made difficult or is indeed jeopardized.The grand question is how can we navigate this complex multi-actor, multi-issue space and secure the attainment of fundamental public interest objectives. This is also the question that Ian Brown and Chris Marsden seek to answer with their book, Regulating Code, as recently published under the "Information Revolution and Global Politics" series of MIT Press. This book review critically assesses the bold effort by Brown and Marsden.