January 21, 2010

My Two Bits on Google in China

Last Saturday, the Sacramento Bee ran my op-ed on Google's leadership in China. I begin:

While most American companies are rushing into China, why are so many Americans cheering Google pulling out?

This week Google announced it had discovered attempts to hack into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. This prompted Google to declare it was ready to leave China if it could not provide honest search results to the people of China.

At the same time that Google was boldly threatening to pack its bags, General Motors was announcing that its sales of cars in China had nearly doubled last year. Yet, few people urged GM to pull up stakes even though it is doing business in a society that lacks political freedoms.

What explains this divergent reaction?

Posted by Anupam Chander on January 21, 2010 at 02:14 PM in Digitization, Globalization | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 20, 2009

"Exposed: The Erosion of Privacy in the Internet Era"

Harvard Magazine runs a nice piece discussing the "ambivalence we sometimes feel about new technologies that reveal identifiable personal information."

Latanya Sweeney's research, in particular, is pretty startling: "Fully 87 percent of the United States population is uniquely identified by date of birth, five-digit zip code, and gender, she says: “So if I know only those three things about you, I can identify you by name 87 percent of the time. Pretty cool.”"

Posted by Anupam Chander on October 20, 2009 at 01:16 PM in Digitization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 16, 2009

Disintermediation: Vertical Integration in Cult Bands

After a seven year hiatus, the British pop band Cornershop has released its new album, Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast. The album is self-published; there appears to be no record company other than the band itself. In the U.S., the CD is available through Amazon as a $36.98 import. But the band sells it directly on its own site for 10 British pounds, payable through Paypal. This includes shipping world-wide:

SHIPPING COSTS, TIMES AND METHODS All prices include package and postage worldwide. Cornershop endeavour to despatch your online order within 3-5 working days of receipt (subject to stock availability). Please allow up to 28 days for delivery when an item is out of stock. All digital downloads (MP3s) are simply & immediately downloaded by yrselves after Paypal procedure. In need of shop help? Please contact info@cornershop.com
This is certainly not the first album to be released directly by the band without a record company, but is less commonplace among popular bands (Cornershop's Brimful of Asha reached #1 in the UK in 1998. 

A sign of things to come?

Posted by Anupam Chander on September 16, 2009 at 08:49 PM in Digitization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 27, 2009

Korean IP Law Poses Hurdle to Korean Bloggers

Fearing new Korean laws aimed to thwart online copyright infringement, Google has shut off audio uploads to its local blogging site, the Korea Times reports. This has the consequence of barring the publication of both (the local version of) fair use and licensed work.  The baby and the bathwater are both jettisoned.  Indeed, this seems a natural result of many who argue for maximalist IP protection.


Google has banned subscribers to its Korean blogging platform, Textcube (www.textcube.org), from uploading songs onto their blogs, citing the country's new anti-file sharing provisions aimed at thwarting online piracy. This is the first time that the U.S. giant has disabled its bloggers from posting music files on their personal Web pages. 

As of Monday, Textcube users were blocked from uploading MP3, WMA, WAV and other types of music files on their blogs, while existing songs were blinded and are now accessible only to the logged-in owners of the blogs. 


Posted by Anupam Chander on May 27, 2009 at 09:00 AM in Digitization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Judge Sotomayor's Cyberlaw Opinions

Thomas O'Toole at the BNA has a helpful round-up of Judge Sotomayor's opinions in cyberlaw.  


While a District Court judge, she held in favor of the N.Y. Times in its dispute with Tasini and other freelance authors--a win for a corporation against individual plaintiffs.  (I preferred the Supreme Court's holding on the subject, though Judge Sotomayor's decision is certainly reasonable.)

Her opinions in domain name cases, as summarized by O'Toole, seem to be eminently reasonable interpretations of the law.

Her most important opinion in this area is Specht v. Netscape, an opinion that is now a classic in cyberlaw, reproduced in all casebooks on the subject. There she declined to enforce Netscape's terms of use for a particular plug-in when Netscape had done a very poor job of making users aware of the existence of those terms.  This opinion might be classified as pro-consumer, though it again seems an eminently reasonable application of the background legal rules.  The opinion is sophisticated and thorough.

All in all, a creditable jurisprudence in the area.

Posted by Anupam Chander on May 27, 2009 at 08:14 AM in Digitization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 19, 2009

What Brands Make Up Your Day?

A person who goes by the moniker Jane Sample has posted an account of her typical day using brands for commercial products to represent her experiences.  


Mine would begin with newspapers.

Posted by Anupam Chander on May 19, 2009 at 04:32 AM in Digitization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 27, 2008

Yale Law School Information Society Project Fellowships

Having worked with the ISP for the last few years, I encourage applicants for this program that combines interest in law and information policy. A law degree is not required, though of course lawyers are welcome into the program.

Yale Information Society Project Fellowships for 2009-2010

The Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School is seeking applicants for 2009-2010 postdoctoral fellowships.  The ISP resident fellowships are designed for recent graduates of law or Ph.D. programs who are interested in careers in teaching and public service in any of the following areas:  law and innovation; Internet and telecommunications law and policy; intellectual property law; access to knowledge; first amendment law; media studies; privacy; civil liberties online; cybercrime and cybersecurity; social software; standards and technology policy; bioethics, biotechnology, and law and genomics; and law, technology, and culture generally.

Information about applying is available at the ISP web site at: http://www.law.yale.edu/intellectuallife/6523.htm. Applications for 2009-10 ISP fellowships must be postmarked no later than Feb. 1, 2009.

Posted by Anupam Chander on November 27, 2008 at 08:23 AM in Digitization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 05, 2008

Companies Criticize ICANN Domain Name Plan

New Domain Names Put Name Brands in a Bind


To Protect Their Reputations, Some Companies May Have to Buy Up Millions of Dollars of Web Sites With Suffixes Like '.bank'


By EMILY STEEL

Worried about having to shell out millions of dollars to protect their brands, several major companies are protesting the launch of a slew of new top-level domains -- the suffixes like ".com" that appear at the end of Web-site names.

Verizon Communications, Marriott International and New York Life Insurance are among the companies arguing that the new domains could open the flood gates to Internet fraud and drastically increase their costs of doing business online. The companies also say there couldn't be a worse time than a down economy to saddle them with the added expense.

The organization that oversees the Internet, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, plans to start selling the rights to an unlimited number of top-level domains next year. These domains are likely to take their names from popular subjects, types of businesses, geographic locations or even brand names, such as .bank, .hotel, .nyc or .verizon.

Companies fear that if they don't register their trademarks at the new domains, their brand names could be hijacked, leading to mistrust of their brands, as well as Internet scams.

"Companies are in a difficult position. In one sense, they may feel compelled to register their crown jewels in all these locations because if they don't, an infringer will come along, and you will have to deal with the consequences. But at the same time, it's a huge waste of corporate resources," says Sarah Deutsch, vice president and associate general counsel at Verizon.

ICANN, a not-for-profit organization whose members include the registrars who operate the top-level domains, says it is accepting feedback as it rolls out the new domain names, but that the current domains are too crowded. The crowding makes it difficult for newcomers to buy a domain that suits their business.
... Companies are debating whether they should buy up the rights to operate their own brand-specific domains, such as .marriott or .nylife. They also are looking at registering their trademarks for more generic domains. For example, Marriott is considering acquiring the rights to Marriott.nyc, Marriott.travel or Marriott.vacations.

"There is certainly a possibility that someone could create a site that looks like a legitimate New York Life site, then request Social Security numbers to get account information. The New York Life brand would suffer if any scheme like that were successful, and consumers would suffer, too," says Ken Hittel, vice president of New York Life's corporate Internet department.

The application fee to operate a new top-level domain is $185,000. Companies that buy the rights to one would also bear the technical costs of running a registry, as well as the marketing costs of drawing consumers to the new sites.

The application process and the high cost may dissuade an impostor from forking out such an amount for a brand-specific domain like .marriott.

The bigger issue for companies probably would be more-generic domains like .bank, which could attract interest from multiple parties and spark bidding wars.

The companies that end up operating such domains are expected to offer trademark owners the chance to register their trademarks early for about $500 per domain, about 10 times as much as the price to the public.

A typical company might register 20 sites within each new top-level domain, making the total cost to participate in all 200 of them $2 million, says Josh Bourne, managing partner of FairWinds Partners, an Internet-strategy consulting firm.

There currently are 21 generic top-level domains, such as .org, .info and .biz. (This excludes the domains used to designate countries, such as .cn for China or .de for Germany.)

Companies already spend a significant sum each year to buy up domain names connected to their brand.

Industry executives say consumers are likely to stick with their current Web-surfing habits, so they expect the new domains to have little business purpose. Web surfers are more apt to continuing visiting sites with the standard .com suffix, such as NYLife.com, instead of visiting a Web site with the address customerservice.nylife, says New York LIfe's Mr. Hittel.

"It is difficult enough to get consumers to visit any domain name that doesn't end with .com," he says.

Companies say they have been through this before, pointing to earlier launches of such domains as .asia or .eu. They bought up hundreds of thousands of domains pre-emptively but say these sites either sit dormant or fail to generate traffic.


Posted by Anupam Chander on November 5, 2008 at 09:45 AM in Digitization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 11, 2008

Passwords are Broken; Two Factor Authentication Schemes Should be Standard

Link: Digital Domain - Goodbye, Passwords. You Aren’t a Good Defense. - NYTimes.com.

The principal problem (unfortunately not identified in the article) is that most people use the same password for multiple sites. A worker who has access to the computer logs at one site, can then employ that person's email and password on other more valuable sites--such as Amazon.com or a bank.

The difficulty is that we have to convince Amazon and the banks to move towards a more secure authentication protocol.

More companies should adopt two-factor authentication for their employees' remote access to email or VPN.

Posted by Anupam Chander on August 11, 2008 at 07:52 PM in Digitization | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 28, 2008

McCain MashUp Violates Copyright

Link: Stumper : McCain's Musical Woes Continue.

The McCain mash-up "Obama Love," featuring video clips from news anchors and commentators set to Franki Valli's "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You" clearly violates copyright. The video clips themselves, of course, are fair use. But the song clearly needs licensing. The extent of the use, the fact that the use does not constitute a parody (of the song itself), the market that exists for licensing this use--all suggest that the use of the song is not fair.

The McCain campaign staff is caught flat-footed yet again. This was a rookie mistake. An alternative--and sleazier--possibility is that they intentionally flouted the law, not wanting to pay large royalties to the copyright owners--and are reasonably happy with the many views they got before the cease and desist notice arrived.

Posted by Anupam Chander on July 28, 2008 at 01:30 PM in Digitization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack