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Tuesday, April 19, 2005 |
A Taxonomy of Privacy.
Interesting law review paper by Daniel Solove. Here's the abstract:
Privacy is a concept in disarray. Nobody can articulate what it means. As one commentator has observed, privacy suffers from "an embarrassment of meanings." Privacy is far too vague a concept to guide adjudication and lawmaking, as abstract incantations of the importance of "privacy" do not fare well when pitted against more concretely-stated countervailing interests.
In 1960, the famous torts scholar William Prosser attempted to make sense of the landscape of privacy law by identifying four different interests. But Prosser focused only on tort law, and the law of information privacy is significantly more vast and complex, extending to Fourth Amendment law, the constitutional right to information privacy, evidentiary privileges, dozens of federal privacy statutes, and hundreds of state statutes. Moreover, Prosser wrote over 40 years ago, and new technologies have given rise to a panoply of new privacy harms.
A new taxonomy to understand privacy violations is thus sorely needed. This article develops a taxonomy to identify privacy problems in a comprehensive and concrete manner. It endeavors to guide the law toward a more coherent understanding of privacy and to serve as a framework for the future development of the field of privacy law.
The paper is a follow-on to his previous paper, "Conceptualizing Privacy." [Schneier on Security]
3:23:29 PM 
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The main purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright infringement but to change consumer expectations about what they are entitled to do with digital content.
[unmediated]
7:30:17 AM
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Stuart has the analogy of the week (so far), likening the feed of the Vatican chimney a Warhol epic: The Vatican TV remake of Andy Warhol's Empire
 The Vatican TV remake of Andy Warhol's Empire is gripping the newsroom. While the Conclave is taking place the news agencies are providing a locked-off shot of the most famous chimney in the world for three hours, twice a day. The nail-biting wait for that waft of smoke has become compulsive viewing. It's like sitting on a river bank with a fishing rod, anticipating the slightest twitch from beneath the water. The first puffs are the most confusing. As the furnace fires up the initial smoke is a nondescript grey colour -- and leads to a flurry of speculation over whether the new Pontiff has been chosen or not. It seems to take a few seconds for the true colour -- so far black -- to become clear. And considering that Vatican chimney is being so keenly watched, you'd have thought they'd have made more of an effort. The rusty tin contraption they've constructed looks like it has been stolen from an Indian slum.
7:27:44 AM
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Citizen media perils.
The Wall Street Journal points out that publishing reader submissions or "citizen journalism" raises legal concerns, particularly since they are reviewed before they are posted online.
"It's not like a blog or a bulletin board where people just throw things up and the publisher has no control," says Marc Gorelnik, an attorney at Townsend and Townsend and Crew LLP in San Francisco. "They're editing it, and they're choosing to place it there, so there's potential for liability."
Gary Bostwick, an attorney with Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton in Los Angeles who defends media companies against libel claims, added: "It seems to me that it's fraught with dangers."
Via CyberJournalist.net [unmediated]
7:24:19 AM
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