EU legal advisor: disclosing identities of suspected copyright pirates "compatible" with EU privacy laws; Boing Boing, September 29, 2023

ROB BESCHIZZA, Boing Boing; EU legal advisor: disclosing identities of suspected copyright pirates "compatible" with EU privacy laws

"Releasing pirates' identities is "Compatible With EU Privacy Laws," says a top legal advisor to the European Union's highest court following the discovery that the French government retains more than a decade of data collected about millions of people suspected of infringing copyrights."

When Scientists Develop Products From Personal Medical Data, Who Gets To Profit?; NPR, May 31, 2018

Richard Harris, NPR; When Scientists Develop Products From Personal Medical Data, Who Gets To Profit?

"If you go to the hospital for medical treatment and scientists there decide to use your medical information to create a commercial product, are you owed anything as part of the bargain?

That's one of the questions that is emerging as researchers and product developers eagerly delve into digital data such as CT scans and electronic medical records, making artificial-intelligence products that are helping doctors to manage information and even to help them diagnose disease.

This issue cropped up in 2016, when Google DeepMind decided to test an app that measures kidney health by gathering 1.6 million records from patients at the Royal Free Hospital in London. The British authorities found this broke patient privacy laws in the United Kingdom. (Update on June 1 at 9:30 a.m. ET: DeepMind says it was able to deploy its app despite the violation.)

But the rules are different in the United States."

Data mining: why the EU’s proposed copyright measures get it wrong; The Conversation, May 24, 2018

Martin Kretschmer

Professor of Intellectual Property Law, University of Glasgow and Thomas Margoni

Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property and Internet Law, University of Glasgow,

The Conversation;  
Data mining: why the EU’s proposed copyright measures get it wrong

"Data that is mined with the help of machine learning techniques has been a rapid area of technological advancement – with good and bad consequences for everyone. And EU copyright law is currently caught in the crossfire.

Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s recent data scandal, which involved the profiling of users from their online behaviour facilitated by social networks, brought important issues to the surface about web privacy, only after it was reported that millions of people had their data harvested and improperly shared with a political consultancy.

But the same data mining technique also offers great societal benefit in fields such as traffic prediction, natural language processing and the identification of potential cures for diseases.

Many people think that regulating the use of data is a matter of data protection or privacy laws. However, where the raw material subjected to analysis is not “personal data” but material protected under copyright law, such as texts or certain structured databases, another set of legal norms come into play. This has far reaching and little understood consequences."

Privacy Laws and Listener Data in the Music Industry; Inside Counsel, March 2, 2017

Adrian J. Perry and Sari Sharoni, Inside Counsel; 

Privacy Laws and Listener Data in the Music Industry

"Whether and how state privacy laws across the United States apply to the collection and sharing of listener preference data could have a profound effect on not only the ability of music streaming services to deliver their content to listeners, but on the future of music and the music industry generally.

A recent U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decision, in which the court dismissed a proposed class action suit against Pandora for disclosure of listener music preferences in violation of Michigan's Preservation of Personal Privacy Act (PPPA), shed light on the uncertainty looming over the music industry from the prospect of state privacy law placing constraints on the alienability of this valuable data.

The Michigan PPPA, in relevant part, prohibits a business engaged in selling, renting, or lending sound recordings from knowingly disclosing to anyone information that personally identifies a particular customer as having purchased, leased, rented, or borrowed those sound recordings from that business. The question before the Ninth Circuit was whether this statute could be construed to prohibit Pandora, a music streaming service with both paid and ad-supported unpaid options, from disclosing listener preference data."