Monday 23 April 2007 at 2:43 pm
Instead of recommending treatment for drivers who are addicted to Crackberry, the State of Washington is considering criminalizing texting while driving. Of course, drivers should not engage in texting or email reading while driving because in doing so is distracting and dangerous, but the recent trend of some local legislatures to regulate 21st Century behavior is getting absurd. Outlawing texting while driving is the most recent example of how legislatures are increasingly and unreflectively (in my opinion) concluding that criminalizing techno-conduct is a sensible way of alerting technology users to undesirable bahavior.
Certainly, some technology users are careless or abusive in the manner in which they use: cell phones while driving, cell phones while watching movies in public theatres, cell phones in restaurants, digital cameras while in private spaces, laptops while listening to lectures, blackberries while doing anything and other similarly inappropriate attempts at multi-tasking, but the trend toward regulating this behavior is as inappropriate as the behavior itself - - more so, since many of the laws regulating techno-conduct are facially absurd. Since the use of technolgies in daily life is likely to dramatically increase as the century advances, the use of legal restraints to control technology users is bound to increase far beyond what we imagine today, if the trend toward regulation of techno-conduct continues unabated.
Rather than the use of legal coercion, technology users should be generally free to use their devices as they please without legal restraint. Inappropriate behavior should be constrained by custom and social standards, which sometimes require time to develop.
Monday 23 April 2007 at 12:17 am
On February 7, 2007, Apple's chief executive, Steve Jobs, posted a few thoughts on music, including the idea that if the music recording industry would "abolish DRMs entirely," Apple "would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store."
Jobs proposes that we imagine "a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple..."
Jobs makes a number of interesting points, but his emphasis seems to be primarily on heading-off potential anti-trust and anti-trust-like challenges from Europe to Apple's dominance in the portable music player market and how sales of the ipod are closely tied to the iTunes music store.
I would have preferred that Jobs make more persuasive arguments against the use of DRM than he did. Once you get over the euphoria of having Jobs come out against DRM and measure his argument for what it says, the argument seems rather simplistic and inconsequential; the concession that if a copyright holder (the music recording company) stopped requiring a licensee (Apple) use DRM, then the licensee would stop using it isn't much of an argument against the use of DRM. As for the comparisons between what music companies do online with what they do in selling CDs without DRM, this point only goes so far in that it could be used to suggest that the music industry tighten up its protection of music on CDs. There are better arguments to make and perhaps Jobs has started a new dialog on the misguided use of DRM in music distribution.
Sunday 22 April 2007 at 10:28 pm
Lawyers who share documents through e-mail or electronic filing need to be aware of the existence of metadata or information that is embedded in computer-generated documents, which can reveal information the writer did not intend to disclose.
Metadata in legal work has been the source of some controversy. Lawyers who receive electronic documents are free to look for and use information hidden in metadata even if the documents were provided by an opposing lawyer, according to ethics opinion from the American Bar Association. During litigation, for example, it is unclear whether documents produced in discovery may be scrubbed of metadata, or whether the electronic documents must be produced in their original form. There are conflicting opinions on this.
Similarly, the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct do not contain any specific prohibition against a lawyer reviewing and using embedded information in electronic documents, whether received from opposing counsel, an adverse party, or an agent of an adverse party, but state bar rules may provide otherwise.
A lawyer who is concerned about the possibility of sending, producing, or providing to opposing counsel a document that contains or might contain metadata, may be able to limit the likelihood of its transmission. By scrubbing metadata from documents or by sending a version of the document without the embedded information the lawyer reduces or removes the potentially harmful consequences of its dissemination.
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