Give Up Your Data to Cure Disease; New York Times, 2/6/16

David B. Agus, New York Times; Give Up Your Data to Cure Disease:

"HOW far would you go to protect your health records? Your privacy matters, of course, but consider this: Mass data can inform medicine like nothing else and save countless lives, including, perhaps, your own.

Over the past several years, using some $30 billion in federal stimulus money, doctors and hospitals have been installing electronic health record systems. More than 80 percent of office-based doctors, including me, use some form of E.H.R. These systems are supposed to make things better by giving people easier access to their medical information and avoiding the duplication of tests and potentially fatal errors.

Yet neither doctors nor patients are happy. Doctors complain about the time it takes to update digital records, while patients worry about confidentiality. Last month the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons went so far as to warn that E.H.R.s could “crash” the medical system.

We need to get over it. These digital databases offer an incredible opportunity to examine trends that will fundamentally change how doctors treat patients. They will help develop cures, discover new uses for drugs and better track the spread of scary new illnesses like the Zika virus."

‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Online Could Spread; New York Times, 8/5/15

Farhad Manjoo, New York Times; ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Online Could Spread:

"Proponents of the law also reacted skeptically to the claim that the right to be forgotten would be used by other countries to force content restrictions beyond those involving privacy.

“That’s nonsense,” said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy group. He argued there were ways to limit access to private information that would not conflict with free speech, and he noted that Google already had a process for global removal of some identifiable private information, like bank account numbers, social security numbers and sexually explicit images uploaded without the subject’s consent (known as “revenge porn.”).

“A global implementation of the fundamental right to privacy on the Internet would be a spectacular achievement,” said Mr. Rotenberg. “For users, it would be a fantastic development.”

Mr. Zittrain, of Harvard, pointed out that Google also removes content globally to abide by copyright law. When Google receives a takedown notice for linking to infringing content, it removes those links from all of its sites across the world. Couldn’t it do the same for private information?

The trouble with comparing copyright law to privacy, though, is that the United States and Europe broadly agree on what constitutes copyrighted content, but private information is far more nebulous."

Canadian court ruling in Teksavvy file sharing case a blow to copyright trolls: Geist; Toronto Star, 2/21/14

Michael Geist, Toronto Star; Canadian court ruling in Teksavvy file sharing case a blow to copyright trolls: Geist: "The outbreak of copyright trolling cases in the United States and Britain in recent years has sparked considerable anger from courts, Internet providers, and subscribers. These cases, which typically involve sending thousands of legal letters alleging copyright infringement and demanding thousands of dollars to settle, rely on ill-informed and frightened subscribers, who would rather pay the settlement than fight in court.

Canada was largely spared these cases until 2012, when Voltage Pictures, a U.S. film company, filed a lawsuit demanding that TekSavvy, a leading independent Internet provider, disclose the names and addresses of thousands of its subscribers who it claimed infringement its copyright. TekSavvy did not formally oppose the request, but it did ensure that its subscribers were informed about the lawsuit and it supported an intervention from the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, a technology law clinic, that brought the privacy and copyright trolling concerns to the court’s attention (I sit on the CIPPIC advisory board).

The federal court issued its much-anticipated decision on Thursday, granting Voltage’s request for the subscriber names, but adding numerous safeguards designed to discourage copyright trolling lawsuits in Canada...

The big remaining question is whether copyright trolls will now view Canada as hostile territory."

Doctors and dentists tell patients, "all your review are belong to us"; ArsTechnica.com, 5/24/11

Timothy B. Lee, ArsTechnica.com; Doctors and dentists tell patients, "all your review are belong to us" :

"The agreement that Dr. Cirka's staff asked me to sign on that February morning began by claiming to offer stronger privacy protections than those guaranteed by HIPAA, the 1996 law that governs patient privacy in the United States. In exchange for this extra dollop of privacy, it asked me to "exclusively assign all Intellectual Property rights, including copyrights" to "any written, pictorial, and/or electronic commentary" I might make about Dr. Cirka's services, including on "web pages, blogs, and/or mass correspondence," to Dr. Cirka. It also stipulated that if Dr. Cirka were to sue me due to a breach of the agreement, the prevailing party in the litigation will pay the loser's legal fees."

James Grimmelmann Dec. 2nd Talk at Drexel University

James Grimmelmann Dec. 2nd Talk at Drexel University, "The Google Books Settlement: Books, Computers, and the Law":

Date: 12/2/2009
Start Time: 2:00 PM
Location: Rush Building, Room 014

Joint lecture: "The Google Books Settlement: Books, Computers, and the Law” by James Grimmelmann

The iSchool at Drexel, College of Information Science and Technology, and the Earle Mack School of Law will co-sponsor the lecture "The Google Books Settlement: Books, Computers, and the Law” by James Grimmelmann on Wednesday, December 2, 2009, at 2 p.m. in room 014, Rush Building (30 N. 33rd Street).Mr. Grimmelmann will review the history of the Google Books project, lawsuit, and proposed settlement, then discuss the questions it raises for information policy and the rule of law. These touch on issues of copyright, antitrust, privacy, free speech, and civil procedure, and are connected to bigger themes in public policy. He is an Associate Professor at New York Law School and a member of its Institute for Information Law and Policy.

Background: http://www.nyls.edu/centers/harlan_scholar_centers/institute_for_information_law_and_policy/events/d_is_for_digitize/programhttp://thepublicindex.org/

http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/home/about/calendar/details/?event=1569

The Cookie Before Dinner; Open Book Aliance, 8/31/09

Peter Brantley via Open Book Alliance; The Cookie Before Dinner:

"Last Friday, I was fortunate to participate in an event on the Google Book settlement and the Future of Information Access. Hosted by the UC Berkeley School of Information, the event brought together a couple hundred academic, legal, and industry minds to discuss the promise and the pitfalls of the controversial settlement proposal between Google, the Authors’ Guild, and the Association of American Publishers.

My takeaway from the panels and hallway conversations is that the academic and scholarly community – among the parties who would be most affected by this settlement – are fairly critical of the settlement proposal in its current form.

Four issues in particular kept cropping up during the panels – the utility of the service that Google says it will deliver; the diminished competition that will occur as a result of the de facto exclusivity offered by the settlement; significant privacy issues that are yet unanswered by Google; and the quality of the books and their descriptive metadata that Google intends to offer.

On the last point, Geoff Nunberg from the School of Information gave what may have been the most interesting and entertaining presentation of the day, highlighting a sampling of the errors in Google’s book scanning efforts to date. In his words, “GBS (Google Book Settlement) metadata are awful.”

Media coverage of the event highlighted the point that many in the academic community seem to agree on – while the digitization of books can offer tremendous benefits to all, there are better, fairer ways to go about making that future a reality. We don’t have to grab the cookie that’s offered to us before dinner."

http://www.openbookalliance.org/2009/08/the-cookie-before-dinner/

Librarians apply scrutiny to Google Books at Berkeley con; ZDNet Government, 8/27/09

Richard Koman via ZDNet Government; Librarians apply scrutiny to Google Books at Berkeley con:

"If you’re in the Bay Area and you want a full day of wonky debate, check out UC Berkeley’s Google Books Conference. It features panels on how the Google Books settlement affect data mining, privacy, information quality and public access.

The conference comes hard on the heels of the formation of the Open Book Alliance, an organization driven by the Internet Archive and including Amazon, Yahoo and Microsoft, as well as library and small publishing groups among its members. Most of the speakers are opposed to the deal but Google’s Tom [sic] Clancy will be there to make the company’s argument....

But if Google is the last library, as Berkeley linguist Geoff Nunberg says, it’s a pretty bad one. That means serious library science must be applied to the online collection before we should outsource the history of human (or at least Western) knowledge to Google:

Google Book Search is almost laughably unusable for serious research, UC Berkeley’s Nunberg said. For example, he pointed out that the Charles Dickens classic “A Tale of Two Cities” is listed in Google Book Search as having been published in 1800; Dickens was born in 1812."

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=5309

Google's One Million Books; Forbes, 8/28/09

Steve Pociask via Forbes; Google's One Million Books:

There is still major concern over Google's settlement with author and publisher groups.

"Imagine that your home and the homes of millions of your neighbors are burglarized. Now, say you catch the perpetrator and the case goes to trial. What would you expect--the return of all of your valuable possessions, stringent penalties for damages and jail time for the perpetrator? But instead, the judge agrees to a settlement that lets the perpetrator avoid any penalties, jail time or probation; he lets the perpetrator use the stolen contents for as long as he wants, provided he pays each victim a one-time fee per item; and, for those victims not knowing that their contents were stolen, the perpetrator can keep and use it, without any compensation or penalty at all. Would such a settlement seem fair?

While just an illustration, there are similarities to what is happening now in a court case involving online scanning and use of millions of books, which is in direct violation of copyright protections given to authors and, in this case, the Department of Justice has taken notice, as have a number of state attorneys general and the European Union's competition commission.

In the coming days, authors must decide whether to opt out of the settlement, and in the coming weeks Judge Denny Chin is likely to decide on a settlement involving copyright infringement claims against Google."

http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/27/google-book-copyright-opinions-contributors-steve-pociask.html

Microsoft, Yahoo Unite Against Google Book Search; InformationWeek, 8/21/09

Thomas Claburn via InformationWeek; Microsoft, Yahoo Unite Against Google Book Search:

A new coalition opposed to Google's Book Search settlement has been formed.

"The major areas of contention revolve around issues of privacy, exclusivity, and indemnification from liability. Critics of the settlement want Google to commit to: offering online readers the same privacy protection enjoyed by offline readers; an open registry system rather than one controlled by two publishing industry groups; and indemnification from copyright claims for those who want to scan orphaned works -- books for which the copyright holder cannot be found -- as Google has done.

In May, Google said that it planned "to build and support a digital book ecosystem to allow our partner publishers to make their books available for purchase from any Web-enabled device," showing that Google Book Search will become a platform for Google book sales. This presumably explains Amazon's reported decision to join the coalition opposing the settlement.

To Google, Microsoft's public opposition seems incongruous because the company shuttered its Live Book Search project last year "to focus on search verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel...

Google insiders have acknowledged being surprised by the breadth of the opposition to the Book Search settlement and the company has recently been more energetic about making its views known."

http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=219401064

At Panel on Google Book Settlement, Support, Criticism, Contentiousness, Library Journal, 1/29/09

Via Library Journal: At Panel on Google Book Settlement, Support, Criticism, Contentiousness:

• "Pricing issues unresolved
• Is public library access “product placement”?
• Will city managers think Google is a library?
  
  In a lively, sometimes contentious discussion Saturday at the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting in Denver, Dan Clancy, engineering director for the Google Book Search Project, diligently explicated the proposed settlement with publishers and authors over books scanned from libraries, but was unable to answer some pressing questions from librarians, noting that the settlement itself remains unresolved."

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6633319.html

Laptop searches at border might get restricted, Wired.com, 12/8/08

Via Wired.com: Laptop searches at border might get restricted:

"Customs and Border Protection, part of the Department of Homeland Security, asserts that it has constitutional authority to conduct routine searches at the border - without suspicion of wrongdoing - to prevent dangerous people and property from entering the country. This authority, the government maintains, applies not only to suitcases and bags, but also to books, documents and other printed materials - as well as to electronic devices.

Such searches, the government notes, have uncovered everything from martyrdom videos and other violent jihadist materials to child pornography and stolen intellectual property...

While Homeland Security points out that these procedures predate the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, civil liberties groups have seen an uptick in complaints about border searches of electronic devices in the past two years, according to Shirin Sinnar, staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus. In some cases, travelers suspected border agents were copying their files after taking their laptops and cell phones away for anywhere from a few minutes to a few weeks or longer.

Now Congress is getting involved. A handful of bills have been introduced that could pass next year.

One measure, sponsored by Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., chairman of the Constitution subcommittee, would require reasonable suspicion of illegal activity to search the contents of electronic devices carried by U.S. citizens and legal residents. It would also require probable cause and a warrant or court order to detain a device for more than 24 hours.

And it would prohibit profiling of travelers based on race, ethnicity, religion or national origin.
Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., is sponsoring a bill in the House that would also require suspicion to inspect electronic devices. Engel said he is not trying to impede legitimate searches to protect national security. But, he said, it is just as important to protect civil liberties."

http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/T/TEC_LAPTOP_SEARCHES?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-12-08-07-08-40