Privacy Concerns Lead To Deletion Of All Data Collected By Norway's Contact Tracing App

from the not-enough-infections-is-a-nice-problem-to-have dept

In the early days of the coronavirus outbreak -- a few months ago, in other words -- there was a flurry of activity around contact tracing apps. Desperate to be seen to be doing something -- anything -- governments around the world rushed to announced their own digital solutions to tracing people who have been in the proximity of infected individuals. There are now over 40 in various stages of development. After the initial excitement, it's striking how quiet things have gone on the contact tracing front, as projects struggle to turn politicians' promises into useful programs. Some of the apps are beginning to emerge now, and we're likely to hear more about them over the next few weeks and months. For example, there's been an interesting development in Norway, one of the first to release its smartphone app, Smittestopp ("infection stop"), back in April. As the Guardian reports:

On Friday, the [Norwegian] data agency Datatilsynet issued a warning that it would stop the Norwegian Institute of Public Health from handling data collected via Smittestopp.

Datatilsynet said the restricted spread of coronavirus in Norway, as well as the app's limited effectiveness due to the small number of people using it, meant the invasion of privacy resulting from its use was disproportionate.

There are two important points there. One is about the balance between tackling COVID-19, and protecting privacy. In this case, the Norwegian data protection authority (NDPA) believes that the benefit is so small that the harm to privacy is unjustified. The other is that when the infection rate is low, as is the case in Norway, which has reported fewer than 250 deaths from coronavirus so far, people may not see much point in using it. Professor Camilla Stoltenberg, Director-General at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, is unhappy with Datatilsynet's move:

We do not agree with the NDPA's evaluation, but now we will delete all data and put work on hold following the notification. This will weaken an important part of our preparedness for increased transmission because we are losing time in developing and testing the app. Meanwhile, we have a reduced ability to combat ongoing transmission. The pandemic is not over. There is no immunity in the population, no vaccine, and no effective treatment. Without the Smittestopp app, we will be less equipped to prevent new local or national outbreaks

It's worth noting that Stoltenberg admits that "the work involved in getting the app to work optimally has taken longer than planned, partly because there are few people who are infected". As the number of COVID-19 cases continues to fall in some countries, those developing contact tracing apps there may encounter similar problems.

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Filed Under: contact tracing, covid-19, data, deletion, norway, privacy

Norway Supreme Court Signs Off On Apple's Harassment Of An Independent Repair Shop

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

Apple has never looked too kindly upon users actually repairing their own devices. The company's ham-fisted efforts to shut down, sue, or otherwise imperil third-party repair shops are legendary. As are the company's efforts to force recycling shops to shred Apple products (so they can't be refurbished and re-used). As is Apple's often comical attacks on essential right to repair legislation, which only sprung up after companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sony, John Deere, and others created a grass-roots "right to repair" counter movement via their attempts to monopolize repair.

Since 2017 or so, Apple has been harassing the owner of an independent repair shop in Norway named Henrik Huseby. After Norway customs officials seized a shipment of 63 iPhone 6 and 6S refurbished, replacement screens on their way to Huseby's repair shop, Apple threatened to sue the store owner unless they agreed to stop using aftermarket screens and pay a hefty settlement. Huseby decided to fight the case, and despite being out-manned five Apple lawyers to one, managed to win in 2018. At least initially.

Apple then took its complaint to Norway's Court of Appeals, claiming that the refurbished parts used by Huseby "unlawfully appropriated Apple's trademark." The appeals court ruled in Apple's favor, and this week, the Norway Supreme Court upheld that decision (pdf). Needless to say, the US and overseas right to repair movement isn't particularly impressed by the court sanctioned bullying of a small business owner:

Apple has continually tried to claim that Huseby was importing "counterfeit" iPhone screens. Huseby, in turn, states he's simply using refurbished screens, and at no point has tried to even advertise them as "genuine" replacement parts from Apple. Again, while Apple engages in a lot of rhetoric to the contrary, the motivation here is to abuse copyright to monopolize and drive up the cost of repair:

"Apple uses copyright law as a “weapon” by putting multiple logos and QR-codes on each component part of its screens, knowing that the Chinese grey market will not specifically cater to repairers in other countries that zealously enforce copyright. This creates a kind of “roulette” for repairers who want to import affordable, refurbished parts from China. Apple can then ask customs authorities in these countries to seize refurbished parts shipments.

Meanwhile, Apple refuses to sell genuine spare parts to independent repairers in Europe. So they have a choice: buy either inferior generic parts or refurbished or after-market parts, like the kind Huseby bought.

While the company has made some caveat-laden concessions, the company continues to fiercely lobby against right to repair laws in 18 states around the United States, all of which require hardware vendors like Apple sell replacement parts and repair tools to the general public and independent repair companies. And ironically, the harder Apple and other companies fight against this trend, the more support they drive support toward these right to repair bills.

Filed Under: aftermarket, diy, henrik huseby, norway, ownership, refurbishment, right to repair, trademark
Companies: apple

Apple Objects To Norway Political Party's Logo Claiming Potential Customer Confusion Over Trademark

from the politics-equals-commerce? dept

Apple has a long and storied history of playing make believe that only it can, in any way, use the image of an apple in any sort of branding. Despite trademark laws around the world generally being built on the notion that branding must be used in commerce, must be in a related industry, and must cause or have the potential to cause confusion in the public, Apple's lawyers have generally demurred on the subtle aspects of these laws. This has led to disputes with small German cafes, with Chinese food manufacturers, and with pharmacies. It can be said without question that such disputes initiated by Apple are specious at best, but it can at least be said in Apple's defense that each of those cases involve a foe that was a private, commercial business.

Such is not the case when it comes to Apple's recent trademark opposition of the logo of a political party in Norway.

Bryn Aarflot, a Norway-based patent and intellectual property prosecution firm representing Apple in the matter, formally objected to Fremskrittspartiet's trademark registration in a letter dated Feb. 26. Apple claims the political party's mark could be confused with five of its own registered trademarks. Further, the logo resembles or incorporates elements of well-known, established branding and is thus in violation of Norway's Trade Marks Act.

Registered with the Norwegian Industrial Property Office last November, Fremskrittspartiet's trademark overlays stylized "FR" iconography on a large red apple, complete with black stem and green leaf. The design is reminiscent of Apple's trademark, a two-dimensional rendering of an archetypal apple silhouette.

Is it really, though? Doing a Google image search, below is about as relevant a logo as I could find for Apple Inc.

And below is the image registered by Fremskrittspartiet.

Are those logos really so similar? Even if another Apple logo that is slightly more similar exists, are they really likely to be so similar so as to cause confusion that isn't born of the fact that Apple's logo is... an apple? And if we then layer on top of that the fact that this logo is being used by a political party and not a private enterprise, then what is the validity for this opposition at all? Did the party register the mark for the kinds of goods you'd expect a political party to produce, such as buttons and t-shirts and the like? Yup. Is anyone in Norway going to think any of that indicates that Apple had endorsed this political party, or was somehow now in the political party arena? Come on.

So this now all is pending a response from Fremskrittspartiet. If that response is anything other than, "Are you freaking kidding me?", I will be sorely disappointed.

Filed Under: fremskrittspartiet, likelihood of confusion, logo, norway, trademark
Companies: apple

Norwegian Court Orders Website Of Public Domain Court Decisions Shut Down With No Due Process

from the this-is-messed-up dept

What's up Europe? We've been talking a lot about insanity around the new copyright directive, but the EU already has some pretty messed up copyright/related rights laws on the books that are creating absurd situations. The following is one of them. One area where US and EU laws differ is on the concept of the "database right." The US does not grant a separate copyright on a collection of facts. The EU does. Studies have shown how this is horrible idea, and if you compare certain database-driven industries in the US and the EU, you discover how much damage database rights do to innovation, competition and the public. But, alas, they still exist. And they continue to be used in positively insane ways.

Enter Hakon Wium Lie. You might know him as basically the father of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Or the former CTO of the Opera browser. Or maybe even as the founder of the Pirate Party in Norway. Either way, he's been around a while in this space, and knows what he's talking about. Via Boing Boing we learn that: (1) Wium Lie has been sued for a completely absurd reason of (2) helping a site publish public domain court rulings that (3) are not even protected by a database right and (4) the judge ruled in favor of the plaintiff (5) in 24 hours (6) before Lie could respond and (7) ordered him to pay the legal fees of the other side.

I've numbered these because I had to break out each absurd part separately just to start to try to comprehend just how ridiculous the whole thing is. And now, let's go through how each part is absurd in turn:

1. Wium Lie is being sued as an accomplice to the site rettspraksis.no by an operation called Lovdata. Wium Lie tells the entire history in his post, but way back in the early days of the web, while he was helping to create CSS, Wium Lie also helped put Norway's (public domain) laws online. At the time, that same company, Lovdata, was charging people $1-per-minute to access the laws. Really. Eventually, Lovdata dropped the fees and is the official free publishers of the laws in Norway. Of course, statutory law is just one part of "the law." Case law is also quite important and (thankfully) court orders (that make up the bulk of case law) are also in the public domain in Norway. However, Lovdata charges an absurd $1,500 per year to access those decisions. And, it claims a database right* on the collection it makes available online.

2. And yet, Wium Lie is still being sued. Why? When he saw that the website rettspraksis.no was trying to collect and publish these decisions, he borrowed Lovdata CD-ROMs from the National Library in Oslo. He borrowed the 2002 version of the CD-ROM. This date is important, because the EU's database rights last for... 15 years. 2002 databases (and, yes, Wium Lie points out that it's odd to call a stack of documents a database...) are no longer protected by the database rights.

3. So, yeah, the data is clearly in the public domain, and Wium Lie didn't violate anyone's copyright or database rights. Wium Lie notes that Lovdata didn't even try to contact him or rettspraksis.no before suing, but just told the court that they must be scraping the expensive online database:

I'm very surprised that Lovdata didn't contact us to ask us where we had copied the court decisions from. In the lawsuit, they speculate that we have siphoned their servers by using automated «crawlers». And, since their surveillance systems for detecting siphoning were not triggered, our crawlers must have been running for a very long time, in breach of the database directive. The correct answer is that we copied the court decisions from the old discs I found in the National Library. We would have told them this immediately if they had simply asked.

4. This is the most perplexing to me in all of this. I can't read the Norwegian verdict (which, for Lovdata's lawyers, I did not get from scraping your site!), and don't know enough about Norwegian law, but this seems positively bizarre to me. It seems to go against fundamental concepts of basic due process, but how could a judge come out with a verdict like this?

5. ?!?>#$@!%#!%!@!%!#%!!

6. Again: is this how due process works in Norway? In the US, of course, there are things like preliminary injunctions that might be granted pretty quickly, but even then -- especially when it comes to gagging speech, there is supposed to be at least some element of due process. Here there appears to have been something close to none. Furthermore, in the US, this kind of thing would only be allowed if one side could show irreversible harm from leaving the site up. It is difficult to see how anyone could legitimately argue irreversible harm for publishing the country's own (public domain) court rulings.

I find it shocking that the judge ordered the take down of our website, rettspraksis.no, within 24 hours of the lawsuit being filed and WITHOUT HEARING ARGUMENTS FROM US. (Sorry for switching to CAPS, but this is really important.) We were ready and available to bring forth our arguments but were never given the chance. Furthermore, upon learning of the lawsuit, we, as a precaution, had voluntarily removed our site. If the judge had bothered to check he would have seen that what he was ordering was already done. There should be a much higher threshold for judges to close websites that just the request of some organization.

7. And, even if this was the equivalent of an injunction, to also tell Wium Lie and rettspraksis.no that they need to pay Lovdata's legal fees is just perplexing.

the two of us, the volunteers, were slapped with a $12,000 fee to cover the fees of Lovdata's own lawyer, Jon Wessel-Aas. So, the judge actually ordered that we had to pay the lawyer from the opposite side, WITHOUT HAVING BEEN GIVEN A CHANCE TO ARGUE OUR CASE.

This whole situation is infuriating. Being sued is a horrible experience in the first place. But the details here pile absurd upon preposterous upon infuriating. The whole database rights concept is already a troublesome thing, but this application of it is positively monstrous. Wium Lie now has some good lawyers working for him, and hopefully this whole travesty will get overturned, but what a clusterfuck.

* A separate tangent that I'll just note here rather than cluttering up all of the above. I was a bit confused to read references to the EU's database directive/database rights, because Norway is not part of the EU. However, since it is a part of the European Economic Area (yes -- this can all get confusing), it has apparently agreed to enact legislation that complies with certain EU Directives, including the Copyright and Database Directives.

Filed Under: caselaw, copyright, court rulings, css, database, database rights, due process, hakon wium lie, norway, public domain
Companies: lovdata, rettspraksis.no

Apple Sued An Independent Norwegian Repair Shop In Bid To Monopolize Repair -- And Lost

from the high-horse dept

A few years ago, annoyance at John Deere's obnoxious tractor DRM birthed a grassroots tech movement. John Deere's decision to implement a lockdown on "unauthorized repairs" turned countless ordinary citizens into technology policy activists, after DRM and the company's EULA prohibited the lion-share of repair or modification of tractors customers thought they owned. These restrictions only worked to drive up costs for owners, who faced either paying significantly more money for "authorized" repair, or toying around with pirated firmware just to ensure the products they owned actually worked.

The John Deere fiasco resulted in the push for a new "right to repair" law in Nebraska. This push then quickly spread to multiple other states, driven in part by consumer repair monopolization efforts by other companies including Apple, Sony and Microsoft. Lobbyists for these companies quickly got to work trying to claim that by allowing consumers to repair products they own (or take them to third-party repair shops), they were endangering public safety. Apple went so far as to argue that if Nebraska passed such a law, it would become a dangerous "mecca for hackers" and other rabble rousers.

Apple's efforts in particular to monopolize repair run deep. The company has worked alongside the Department of Homeland Security and ICE to seize counterfeit parts in the United States and raid shops of independent iPhone repair professionals. FOIA efforts to obtain details on just how deeply rooted Apple is in ICE's "Operation Chain Reaction" have been rejected. The efforts to "combat counterfeit goods" often obscures what this is really about for Apple: protecting a lucrative repair monopoly and thwarting anybody that might dare repair Apple devices for less money.

And Apple's efforts on this front are a decidedly global affair. More recently, Apple has been harassing an independent repair shop owner in Norway named Henrik Huseby. After Norway customs officials seized a shipment of 63 iPhone 6 and 6S replacement screens on their way to Huseby's repair shop, Apple threatened to sue the store owner unless they agreed to stop using aftermarket screens and pay a hefty settlement:

"In order to avoid being sued, Apple asked Huseby for “copies of invoices, product lists, order forms, payment information, prints from the internet and other relevant material regarding the purchase [of screens], including copies of any correspondence with the supplier … we reserve the right to request further documentation at a later date."

The letter, sent by Frank Jorgensen, an attorney at the Njord law firm on behalf of Apple, included a settlement agreement that also notified him the screens would be destroyed. The settlement agreement said that Huseby agrees “not to manufacture, import, sell, market, or otherwise deal with any products that infringe Apple’s trademarks,” and asked required him to pay 27,700 Norwegian Krone ($3,566) to make the problem go away without a trial."

How sweet. Huseby decided to fight the case, and despite being out-manned five Apple lawyers to one, managed to win. And despite Apple's ongoing claims that it's simply engaged in a moral crusade against counterfeiters, Huseby's lawyer is quick to reiterate what Apple's methods are really all about:

"In this case, Apple indirectly proves what they really want,” Per Harald Gjerstad, Huseby’s lawyer, told me in an email. “They want monopoly on repairs so they can keep high prices. And they therefore do not want to sell spare parts to anyone other than ‘to themselves.’"

Apple's real motivation is the protection of their lucrative repair monopoly enjoyed thanks to their "Authorized Service Provider" program, which requires that repair companies become authorized by paying Apple a fee, only buy "authorized" repair parts from Apple at a fixed rate, and limits what repairs a third-party vendor can actually perform. Meanwhile, Apple continues to lobby against right to repair laws in 18 states around the United States, all of which require hardware vendors sell replacement parts and repair tools to the general public and independent repair companies.

Ironically, the harder Apple and other companies fight against this trend, the more support they drive toward these right to repair bills.

Filed Under: counterfeits, homeland security, ice, norway, right to repair, trademark
Companies: apple

Norwegian Police Seize Domain Name For Linking To Sites Offering Popcorn Time

from the turtles-all-the-way-down dept

Over the last couple of years, the increasing popularity of the open source streaming software Popcorn Time has turned into one of the film industry's biggest nightmares. Not just because it's free, but also because it provides an extremely easy-to-use service. The fact that it is open source -- and therefore essentially impossible to eradicate -- just makes things worse. As part of the film industry's attack on Popcorn Time, a UK judge was persuaded a year ago to order a group of web sites to be blocked purely on the grounds that they were distributing the Popcorn Time software. That was the first step down a slippery slope, and it seems that the second step has now been taken in Norway. A post on TorrentFreak reports that the Popcorn-Time.no domain name has been seized by the police there:

In a public statement the Norwegian police and prosecution unit notes that the domain is believed to be complicit in criminal copyright infringement by linking to third party content.

"The Norwegian domain popcorn-time.no helps electronic publication by linking to other domains where the required software can be downloaded. In addition, the Norwegian popcorn-time.no domain posted information, user manuals and news updates," the police states.

Yes, providing information, and linking to a site that allows the Popcorn Time software to be downloaded, is now enough to get a site closed down, in Norway at least. It can only be a matter of time before a domain is seized somewhere because it dares to commit the terrible crime of linking to a site that points to other online locations where Popcorn Time is available. After that, it's turtles all the way down.

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Filed Under: copyright, links, norway, popcorn time

Recording Industry Has 'Virtually Eliminated Illegal File-Sharing' In Norway -- By Offering Better Products

from the they-said dept

Techdirt has written a number of times about growing evidence that good, reasonably-priced streaming services are reducing dramatically the number of illegal downloads in the regions where they are available. One of the countries where that was observed some years ago is Norway. Now, a new report in Music Business Worldwide indicates that things are looking even better for the recorded music business there:

A countrywide survey in December 2014 showed that just 4% of Norwegians under 30 years still used illegal file-sharing platforms to get hold of music.

Even better for the worldwide industry, less than 1% of people under 30 years said that file-sharing was their main source of obtaining music.

The head of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) in Norway, Marte Thorsby, explains why she thinks that has happened:

"We are now offering services that are both better and more user-friendly than illegal platforms… In [the past] five years, we have virtually eliminated illegal file-sharing in the music industry."

There we have it from the recording industry itself: offer "better and more user-friendly" products and illegal file-sharing just goes away on its own -- no intrusive surveillance, punitive three-strikes or clumsy site blocking required. How much clearer does it have to be?

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Filed Under: copyright, infringement, innovation, norway
Companies: ifpi

Norway To Digitize All Norwegian Books, Allowing Domestic IP Addresses To Read All Of Them, Irrespective Of Copyright Status

from the futuristic-thinking dept

Here's a pretty amazing story from Norway:

The National Library of Norway is planning to digitize all the books by the mid 2020s. Yes. All. The. Books. In Norwegian, at least. Hundreds of thousands of them. Every book in the library's holdings.

Now, in any normal country -- where "normal" means one in which copyright has reached the heights of monopolistic insanity -- if those books were still under copyright, the digitized versions (assuming publishers even allowed them to be made in the first place) would probably only be available in a specially constructed room deep in the basement of the National Library on a (small) screen, and with guards stationed either side of it to ensure that no unauthorized copies were made. Here, by contrast, is what's happening with the National Library of Norway's digital collection:

If you happen to be in Norway, as measured by your IP address, you will be able to access all 20th-century works, even those still under copyright. Non-copyrighted works from all time periods will be available for download.

As Alexis C. Madrigal points out in his entertaining article for The Atlantic, there's a rather interesting consequence of the different approaches to book digitization taken by Norway and the US, say:

Imagine digital archaeologists coming across the remains of early 21st century civilization in an old data center on the warming tundra. They look around, find some scraps of Buzzfeed and The Atlantic, maybe some Encyclopaedia Britannicas, and then, gleaming in the data: a complete set of Norwegian literature.

Suddenly, the Norwegians become to 27th-century humans what the Greeks were to the Renaissance. Everyone names the children of the space colonies Per and Henrik, Amalie and Sigrid. The capital of our new home planet will be christened Oslo.

This is what excessive copyright does to countries that impose it. It not only prevents today's artists from building on the work of their recent forebears -- something that occurred routinely until intellectual monopolies were introduced in recent centuries -- but it even jeopardizes the preservation and transmission of entire cultures because of publishers' refusal to allow copyright to move with the times by permitting large-scale digitization and distribution of the kind envisaged in Norway.

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Filed Under: archives, books, digitization, knowledge, libraries, norway, open access, sharing

Norway's Spy Boss Gives 'Least Untruthful' Answer About Sharing Phone Call Info With NSA, Before Correcting Himself

from the faster-turnaround-this-time,-though dept

More information has surfaced on the NSA's worldwide phone metadata collections. A leaked document provided to Norwegian paper Dagbladet shows that metadata on over 33 million Norwegian calls was collected in a single month.

As we've seen elsewhere, the first response has been outrage.

"Friends should not monitor each other," Norway's prime minister Erna Solberg told Norwegian broadcaster NRK on Tuesday. "It is legitimate to engage in intelligence, but it should be targeted and suspect based."

"It is unacceptable for allies to engage in intelligence against each other's political leadership," added justice minister Anders Anundsen...

According to Dagbladet, Norwegian phone companies NetCom and Telenor both deny giving the NSA access to their systems.

Torstein Olsen, head of Norway's telecoms regulator, said that it was illegal for anyone apart from telecommunications companies to collect such data.

"If Dagbladet's information is correct that 33 million mobile phone calls in Norway were registered by someone other than the telecommunication companies, that would be a crime under Norwegian law," he said.

This is in line with the responses offered by other US allies who have been made aware of the NSA's efforts via Snowden's leaks. The ODNI hasn't even bothered offering a denial, perhaps suggesting it would rather deal with its domestic issues than fight the intelligence brushfires around the world. This lack of response may also be due to the fact that the NSA didn't collect this metadata directly.

What is interesting about this is the Norwegian intelligence response. The head of the NIS (Norwegian intelligence) made two seemingly contradictory statements in under 24 hours.

The head of NIS, Norway's intelligence service, Lieutenant General Kjell Grandhagen, told Dagbladet that his agency had not collaborated with US to collect the data, and had been unaware that it was being collected.

That's according to The Local. Reuters' coverage of the response to this new leak quotes the intelligence head as saying this when addressing a press conference.

"This is data collection by Norwegian intelligence to support Norwegian military operations in conflict areas abroad, or connected to the fight against terrorism, also abroad," Lieutenant General Kjell Grandhagen, head of the Norwegian Intelligence Service, told a news conference.

"This was not data collection from Norway against Norway, but Norwegian data collection that is shared with the Americans."

Grandhagen's "deniability" seems to hinge on being asked the right question in the right way. The first answer, given shortly after the leak, may have simply been the "least untruthful." In some ways, the answer is true. The NIS does not collaborate with the NSA to collect the data. It collects the data itself and then shares it with the NSA. Grandhagen can honestly say he was unaware the NSA was collecting this data, because the NSA wasn't. The NIS was. Playing to the edges of the wording.

The second answer seems to have been composed with a little more thought and is targeted more at dispelling domestic spying rumors than pretending it never happened.

So, like other countries (France, Italy), these metadata collections are supposedly collections of calls into or out of the country, rather than solely domestic end-to-end calls. Supposedly. We've seen that the NSA's collections in the US gather plenty of metadata on solely domestic communications. Just as spokespersons are quick to assure offended countries that "everyone spies on other countries," those thinking more skeptically will be quick to respond with "and everyone says they're not spying on their own citizens, but they are."

33 million calls from one country in one month -- no matter who's doing the collecting and who's on the "share" list -- is a massive amount of data. If the NSA is being supplied with the metadata on hundreds of millions of phone calls from around the world every month, in addition to the hundreds of millions it collects domestically every 90 days, there's no way it can credibly claim to have a handle on all this data.

Filed Under: metadata, norway, nsa, phone calls, surveillance