Law and Information

Swiss newspapers report that a Brazilian DJ performing in Italy has to pay a 1.4 million euros fine because he carried 500 pirated CDs and 3000 MP3 files with him. That’s repordedly the toughest sanction ever imposed in Europe for copyright infringement of this kind. I’ve noted elsewhere that Italy is particularly serious about the fight against piracy.

Check it out, Ben Walker‘s latest podcast on Iranian cult blogger Hossein Derakhshan.

Read Derek Slater‘s initial comments on a recent Cato Report on P2P and DRM — good stuff, as always (thanks, Derek).

Usually, the information value of yesterday’s newspaper decreases rapidly. Not in this case, I think: You There, at the Computer: Pay Attention. Funny — and so true. (Just out of curiosity: Would you run the semantic email software on your machine?)

Read today’s NYTimes story on the media and PR-battle over P2P: As Piracy Battle Nears Supreme Court, the Messages Grow Manic. The article quotes, among others, our colleague/cyberscholar Susan Crawford.

I’ve missed this paper — but better late than never: December 2004 report by Olivier Bomsel and Anne-Gaelle Geffroy, Economic Analysis of Digital Rights Management systems (DRMs). (via Sacha). Update: this is the new link.

I had the pleasure and honor to serve, together with Martin Eppler and Markus Helfert, as a Guest Editor of a 2004 Special Issue of the International Journal Studies in Communication Science on Information Quality. This special issue has recently been released and brings together researchers in the domain of business and organizational studies, as well as information technology and legal scholars to share findings regarding information quality and information quality management. Here’s an overview of contributions and contributors:

Herbert Burkert, professor of information law and president of the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) as well as an international fellow at Yale Law School and a visiting scholar at New York Law School, offers in his contribution “Law and Information Quality” some skeptical observations on law aimed at regulating information quality. In essence, he argues that information quality is a subject best to be avoided by law, although the pressure on law to regulate increases in the context of issues that law has to decide upon. In this fascinating article, Burkert provides a theoretical framework of law’s relations to information quality and explores information quality in the context of law’s own products.

Larry English (U.S.A.), one of the pioneers and thought leaders in the IT-driven information quality field, examines the role of information quality-related regulation from a management point of view and analyzes its impact on management practices. His normative approach rooted in information technology also consists of outlining ways of improving information and data quality pragmatically.

Tom Redman (U.S.A.), another early leader in the information quality community, discusses various barriers that companies must overcome if they want to manage information quality systematically. Redman not only focuses on key barriers and outlines their logic, he also shows ways of how to overcome them.

Retha de la Harpe and Dewald Roode (South Africa), investigate data quality through a theoretical lens by applying the relatively novel theory of actor-networks to data quality. Their discussion is grounded in the context of medical practice and demonstrates that actor-networks are a powerful conceptual framework that emphasizes technical and social issues. Their theoretical framework can be used to explore data quality in a way that complements the traditional management oriented approach to this topic.

Pankaj Kamthan (Canada) examines the quality of visual information that is generated with the help of UML – the universal markup language, which can be seen as the new, graphic lingua franca of software developers. The contribution extends the application of information quality frameworks to graphic information. This is surely a future application field for information quality that offers great potential.

Fabrizio De Amicis, a business consultant and researcher working in the financial services sector, and Carlo Batini from the Universit� di Milano Bicocca (Italy) propose a detailed methodology for data quality assessment that combines both subjective, qualitative and objective, quantitative data quality assessment. Both types of results are compared and provide a detailed data quality analysis which helps to identify actions for data quality improvements. The methodology is applied to financial data from a real case study that demonstrates the richness of this approach.

Cinzia Cappiello, Chiara Francalanci and Barbara Pernici from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) present a semi-automatic and rule-based methodology to perform quality assessment and improvement. The results demonstrate how data quality monitoring rules are defined with an initial data and process analysis and how they can trigger both information process-oriented and data-oriented improvement actions. The monitoring and assessment component is organized around a data quality management architecture – the quality factory – providing a complete set of tools for data quality management.

Certain articles can be downloaded for free. Please check this site. If you’re interested in an article that hasn’t been made available, please send me an email.

Funny story: Schoolboy spots errors in Encyclopaedia Britannica. And now compare with Wikipedia: It got at least the “European bison” story right…

The German National Library reached an agreement with the German Federation of the Phonographic Industry and the German Booksellers and Publishers Association on the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPM) such as access and copy controls on CDs, CD-ROMs, and e-books. See also here and here.

According to the press release (English version via this site), the German National Library got a “license to copy” techno-protected digital content for “own archiving, for scientific purposes of users, for collections for schools or educational purposes, for instruction and research as well as of works that are out of print.” To avoid misuses, the library “will check user’s interest” for a copy of the technologically protected content. Further, the copies, which are subject to a fee, “will as far as possible be personalized by a digital watermark.” (Press release.)

Let’s recall the legal background of this agreement as recently described in this paper:

Article 6(4) of the EU Copyright Directive (EUCD) addresses the situation where beneficiaries of certain copyright exceptions provided for in article 5 EUCD are hindered from making use of those exceptions due to the technological lock-down of the work. It is under article 6(4) where the balance between the interests of rightholders and holders of related rights using technological protection measures on the one hand and the public on the other can be struck. The exceptions set out in article 6(4) are divided into two categories: the ‘public policy exceptions’ and the ‘private copying exception’. The public policy exceptions listed in article 6(4) – i.e. exceptions in relation to photocopying, copy and archive purposes of educational facilities, broadcaster’s own ephemeral recordings, non-commercial broadcasts, teaching and research, use by disabled individuals, and public safety – are mandatory. However, recital 51 EUCD makes clear that member states should take appropriate measures only in absence of “voluntary measures taken by rightholders, including the conclusion and implementation of agreements between rightholders and other parties”. However, according to article 6(4) subpara. 4, this exception do not apply to “on-demand”-services, i.e. works “made available to the public on agreed contractual terms in such a way that members of the public may access them from a place and at a time individually chosen by them.”

Against this backdrop, the German Copyright Act, transposing the EUCD into national law, stipulates that the rightholders are obligated to make available the necessary means which enable certain categories of permissible uses. Some of the exceptions and limitations, respectively, also apply to digital media, but others not (click here for an overview.) Furthermore, the Copyright Act does not define how this obligation must be accomplished. However, � 95b(2) provides a remedy against someone who violates the make-available obligation. According to this provision, someone who fails to make available the necessary means can be sued by the beneficiary.

In accordance with the EUCD’s approach, the German legislator hoped that agreements between rightholders and consumers/users associations will be reached. (See here). It seems that the agreement between the German National Library and the above-mentioned associations is an important step forward.