From a free speech perspective, this sounds similar to Wikileaks. Bradley Manning clearly broke the law by leaking information. But should Wikileaks be held accountable for basically forwarding or distributing that info?
Some dice here: SkyNews screwed up by leaking her name. Might make sense to go after them -- but it bothers me that you can get trouble for a "retweet".
In this case, the original leak came from SkyNews, not Twitter users. Yet police are arresting people who basically re-tweeted or otherwise passed on the information. If the police want to go after SkyNews, fine -- they screwed up. But it scares me that the simple act of pressing the "retweet" button could subject a person to criminal liability.
Maybe standardization could help here. Most people don't read the full-text of a CC license, but they might check out the "short" version or recognize the icons floating around.
But all in all, a hard problem. People's privacy expectations on websites are informed by a mix of the UI design and their experiences with other websites. And the idea of being used over a misleading UI would terrify any designer.
Suppose a book is (legally) made in China. According to the 9th Circuit, the copyright holder can prevent you from importing the books into the U.S. and reselling them.
BUT suppose the copyright holder itself imports in those books and sells them. Now you can resell the books.
Unfortunately, it's not that easy. The implication of the Second Circuit case is NOT that if something is made overseas, then U.S. copyright law ceases to apply. Rather, it's that if it's made overseas, it is no longer "lawfully made." That is, everything made abroad is essentially unlawful (under U.S. law) and the minute it touches U.S. shores, it can be blocked by the copyright holder.
I don't know exactly how Quinn's process works, but I can describe how it works in general at most large firms.
The firm maintains a database of its lawyers and which cases they've worked on. Every time they work on a new case or matter, that gets added to the database. This list is usually very robust, since firms have to keep track of who their clients are in order to bill them.
The problems arise when lawyers are moving between firms. Usually the lawyer just takes the list of prior matters from the old firm and gives it to the new firm. But to my knowledge, there's no standardized way of formatting that list, so someone at the new firm has to manually re-enter all the data or otherwise massage it to get it into the new database. This is probably where the most mistakes are made.
That said, firms have a strong interest in identifying conflicts. First, conflicts are expensive. If a conflict is discovered late in the game, the firm is disqualified and all the work they've done gets tossed out. That's incredibly disheartening and huge pain in the ass to clean up. And you can't bill for it.
Second, conflicts are hard to hide. If a firm is adverse to a client they had a former relationship with, there's a good chance that the client will remember! Moreover, the fact that a firm represents a client isn't always a secret. It's often recorded in press releases, case opinions, and other publicly available information that gets indexed by major databases.
Anyhow, a firm will usually check with their internal database before taking on a case to see if there are any conflicts. Conflicts don't automatically disqualify the firm though. If only a subset of the firm's lawyers have a conflict, the firm can "wall off" those lawyers. Large firms are pretty good about maintaining these walls. They'll restrict a conflicted lawyer from both physical and electronic access to confidential information. And everything you do at a firm is tracked and recorded. Ostensibly it's for billing purposes, but it also means it's hard for a conflicted lawyer to involve herself without leaving an incriminating paper trail.
That's the high-level view. I don't know exactly what Quinn does, but they're a large enough firm that I imagine they have a similar process in place.
The process is usually pretty good but sometimes mistakes happen. Case in point: I interviewed at Quinn a year and a half ago and asked a second-year associate what the worst experience of her job there had been. She told me that she and several other lawyers spent three months working non-stop on a case before discovering a partner had a conflict. It was a small conflict from a decade ago, but Quinn still had to withdraw.
It's a good argument for compulsory licensing of patents -- much like how India forces pharmaceutical companies to grant licenses of live-saving drugs to their competitors for a reasonable price.
Of course, what's "reasonable" is a difficult discussion -- but short of just nixing the patent altogether, it's better than the alternative.
Thought: Could you build a plausible deniability mode on top of Facebook? That is, give your employer (or interrogator) a "fake" FB password. When this password is used, it pulls up a limited version of your FB account.
I'm not sure how (or if) you would do this with an FB app (as opposed to changes to FB itself). But it seems plausible.
Err ... don't law enforcement and counter-terrorism agents "habitually" visit those sites? You know, to gather intelligence and predict what the next target will be? A literal application of Sarkozy's proposal would basically criminalize intelligence gathering.
This is actually a great reason for allowing an independent invention defense. In theory, patents provide an incentive to disclose your invention. And once something has been disclosed, why reinvent the wheel when you can just build off someone else's disclosure (in exchange for a licensing fee of course)?
But in practice, patent disclosures are a joke. And with software, practically no one is actually looking up the disclosures. It's faster to figure out a patented piece of code on your own than it is to make sense out of the intentionally ambiguous software patents out there.
An independent invention defense would solve this. It provides an incentive for inventors to make their disclosures actually useful, and protects software developers when the disclosures are useless.
So I'd be just as opposed to SOPA-style blocking of badware sites as I would be to SOPA-style blocking of anything else, but this seems like an area where large players such as Google could really make a difference.
When you go to a known phishing website in Chrome or IE or any other major browser, you get alarm bells galore warning you not to visit that site. I'd appreciate it if my mom's browser would warn her about deceptive checkboxes.
At least until she learned to ignore the warnings ...
On the post: UK Police Planning To Arrest Twitter Users For Mentioning The Name Of A Rape Victim
Wikileaks
Some dice here: SkyNews screwed up by leaking her name. Might make sense to go after them -- but it bothers me that you can get trouble for a "retweet".
On the post: UK Police Planning To Arrest Twitter Users For Mentioning The Name Of A Rape Victim
Re: "The cat is out of the bag" = BS
On the post: To Read All Of The Privacy Policies You Encounter, You'd Need To Take A Month Off From Work Each Year
Creative Commons for Licensing?
But all in all, a hard problem. People's privacy expectations on websites are informed by a mix of the UI design and their experiences with other websites. And the idea of being used over a misleading UI would terrify any designer.
On the post: Bonus Sunday Post: Help Dan Bull Get His New Freely Distributed Song On The Charts
How do the charts work?
On the post: Supreme Court To Review If It's Legal To Resell A Book You Bought Abroad
Re: Re: Re: The bigger picture
On the post: Supreme Court To Review If It's Legal To Resell A Book You Bought Abroad
Re: Re:
BUT suppose the copyright holder itself imports in those books and sells them. Now you can resell the books.
On the post: Supreme Court To Review If It's Legal To Resell A Book You Bought Abroad
Re:
On the post: Supreme Court To Review If It's Legal To Resell A Book You Bought Abroad
Re: The bigger picture
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Re: Re: Re: Nobody Needs To Know
So their's unfortunately, but we can blame Congress / The Supreme Court for that.
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Re: Nobody Needs To Know
Agreed that metering is the better way to go though -- meters degrade gracefully, so going a little over a cap won't kill you.
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
This isn't unique to MBs
We have varying solutions to the above, albeit with mixed degrees of success. It's a hard problem.
On the post: US Gov't Says Megaupload Shouldn't Be Allowed To Use Top Law Firm It Hired For Its Defense
Re:
The firm maintains a database of its lawyers and which cases they've worked on. Every time they work on a new case or matter, that gets added to the database. This list is usually very robust, since firms have to keep track of who their clients are in order to bill them.
The problems arise when lawyers are moving between firms. Usually the lawyer just takes the list of prior matters from the old firm and gives it to the new firm. But to my knowledge, there's no standardized way of formatting that list, so someone at the new firm has to manually re-enter all the data or otherwise massage it to get it into the new database. This is probably where the most mistakes are made.
That said, firms have a strong interest in identifying conflicts. First, conflicts are expensive. If a conflict is discovered late in the game, the firm is disqualified and all the work they've done gets tossed out. That's incredibly disheartening and huge pain in the ass to clean up. And you can't bill for it.
Second, conflicts are hard to hide. If a firm is adverse to a client they had a former relationship with, there's a good chance that the client will remember! Moreover, the fact that a firm represents a client isn't always a secret. It's often recorded in press releases, case opinions, and other publicly available information that gets indexed by major databases.
Anyhow, a firm will usually check with their internal database before taking on a case to see if there are any conflicts. Conflicts don't automatically disqualify the firm though. If only a subset of the firm's lawyers have a conflict, the firm can "wall off" those lawyers. Large firms are pretty good about maintaining these walls. They'll restrict a conflicted lawyer from both physical and electronic access to confidential information. And everything you do at a firm is tracked and recorded. Ostensibly it's for billing purposes, but it also means it's hard for a conflicted lawyer to involve herself without leaving an incriminating paper trail.
That's the high-level view. I don't know exactly what Quinn does, but they're a large enough firm that I imagine they have a similar process in place.
On the post: US Gov't Says Megaupload Shouldn't Be Allowed To Use Top Law Firm It Hired For Its Defense
Re: Re:
So ... mistakes happen.
On the post: Patents Threaten To Silence A Little Girl, Literally
Of course, what's "reasonable" is a difficult discussion -- but short of just nixing the patent altogether, it's better than the alternative.
On the post: Should We Outlaw Employers From Asking For Social Networking Logins?
Plausible Deniability
I'm not sure how (or if) you would do this with an FB app (as opposed to changes to FB itself). But it seems plausible.
On the post: Should We Outlaw Employers From Asking For Social Networking Logins?
Bad Security
On the post: Sarkozy Seeks To Criminalize 'Habitually Visiting' Websites About Violence
Police visit those sites too
On the post: Why It's Mathematically Impossible To Avoid Infringing On Software Patents
Independent Invention Defense
But in practice, patent disclosures are a joke. And with software, practically no one is actually looking up the disclosures. It's faster to figure out a patented piece of code on your own than it is to make sense out of the intentionally ambiguous software patents out there.
An independent invention defense would solve this. It provides an incentive for inventors to make their disclosures actually useful, and protects software developers when the disclosures are useless.
On the post: A Cracked Look At The Impact Of Spam
Solutions
When you go to a known phishing website in Chrome or IE or any other major browser, you get alarm bells galore warning you not to visit that site. I'd appreciate it if my mom's browser would warn her about deceptive checkboxes.
At least until she learned to ignore the warnings ...
On the post: Louis Vuitton's International Tour Of Trademark Bullying Runs Smack Dab Into UPenn Law School Who Explains Trademark Law In Return
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