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Edge Computing to save the environment!

Digital technologies have surpassed the aerospace industry in regards to carbon emissions this year. There are many ideas to counteract climate change with smart technologies, but it must not be forgotten how climate-damaging cloud environments can be. 

One solution might be edge computing: it stores the data closer to the consumer in big data centers in cities. This way the data does not have to travel as far to get to the place where it is needed. It is interesting to think about how environmental law could be used to further advance these technologies.

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“Alexa, are you listening?”

The other day I found this short video on YouTube, which explains the functionality of Amazon's Alexa and is very easy to understand for technical amateurs like me.

People strive to make things easier and faster. Smart technologies are one of these possibilities to fulfil this desire of mankind. For some, the convenience of not having to get up to turn on the light may also prevail. Nowadays an Alexa or a Google Home device is often given to you as a free supplement with the conclusion of a new contract. All in all, there are many reasons why Alexa and other smart devices are becoming more and more ubiquitous in our homes.

However, not everyone knows how the devices are working, they just know it works. Dr Stuart Reeves explains it in a very approachable way. Alexa mainly works with automated speech recognition (ASR), which is essentially detecting what has been said.

Therefore, and I don’t think this is news to anyone, Alexa has to listen to what you are saying. This raises the question, whether Alexa is also listening to your conversations when you are not talking directly to her. The Alexa FAQs deny the claim that Alexa is recording every conversation one is having. However, echo could always wake up due to a word in a background conversation sounding like ‘Alexa’ as it happened to one user, in which case her conversation was even sent to a random contact. Alexa is used in an environment where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy: your own home. Amazon follows the four principles of consent, opt-outs, limitations, and security. Even though an individual uses Alexa and consents to the recording of his or her voice, the person’s privacy rights must be maintained and it should be clarified by courts soon to settle the discussion once for all. 

Amazon has responded to the urge for privacy and is giving users more control over the stored voice recordings from Alexa. Users are now able to delete voice recordings (which also includes the transcripts of the audio requests) directly through the voice assistant and they can also check whether a conversation was recorded by asking, “Alexa, tell me what you heard.”

Just recently Amazon announced that Alexa skill personalization enables Alexa to respond uniquely to your voice and a manual switch between Amazon accounts is not further necessary. In the near future we will be able to pay our bills with Alexa. 

Alexa is getting more and more convenient and more and more people will be using one.The decision to use an Alexa or a similar voice-detection device is everybody’s own. But privacy and especially consent can become more of an issue, if one has visitors over. For the sake of privacy, but also kindness, people should inform their guests on the use of Alexa and if requested turn it off, if one is not comfortable with the use of Alexa around oneself (understandable!).

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Privacy was declared dead a long time ago. The GDPR is now trying to restore it. I don’t believe that we still have privacy as such and our data completely in our own hands, but the author is right in saying that we should strive for “transparency at all stages of collection and storage” of data.

I’m definitely a Joey though...

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Should Facebook be obliged to monitor political advertising?

In the recent congressional testimony regarding the Facebook cryptocurrency Libra Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez started questioning Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on his company’s biggest scandals. One topic was that Facebook’s new official policy allows politicians to pay to spread disinformation, which resulted in facial reactions like these by Zuckerberg.

In California someone is now running for governor only to see how much misinformation he can spread before Facebook will decide it should take responsibility for paid content on its platform. 

Twitter then took a hit at Facebook with completely banning all political ads just days after AOC’s questioning of Zuckerberg.

This raises the question on how to deal with political advertising best.

One could argue that it should not be Facebook’s task or that of any other platform to check advertisements and articles for their correctness. Spin the the idea further: does ITV have to check whether Persil really delivers unbeatable results in 30 minutes?

Checking the correctness of ads should be the task of journalists and advertising self-regulators like the ASA. These focus on the advertiser, and not the platform the ad is published on.

However, it must be borne in mind that advertising in newspapers or television, for example, is not tailored to the individual user, but rather the same advertising is placed for everyone. Facebook instead is able to target their users with specific ads and therefore has more power over what users actually see.

Moreover, detergents and other products are tested for truthfulness of claims, e.g. they must not be harmful to health. Mechanisms like these do not exist for political ads. Political statements are predominantly covered by freedom of expression. The state may not control these or only restrict them under certain principles.

Political advertising does not serve to influence buying behaviour, but rather voting behaviour and thus the whole political process. For this reason, it is of particular importance to democracy.

Election advertising on television, for example, is also regulated in the sense that all advertising must be shown,if it does not violate democratic principles,and the principle of proportionality is respected.

Twitter's decision to stop all political advertising was met with a positive response. However, a number of questions on the implementation remain unanswered, especially regarding the distinction. For example, advertising with content such as a carbon tax might be banned, but at the same time oil companies may continue to advertise on Twitter. 

Also, the total ban could mean a disadvantage for new candidates that are mostly unknown. In addition, the question of how to judge posts from political parties or individual politicians remains open. Twitter promised to provide further details in November. 

To enable fair political advertising, other steps than a ban may be chosen. Among other things, Facebook could be obliged to be more transparent. This means Facebook would have to reveal where parties are spending campaign money and also enforce spending limits. 

The main problem we are facing here certainly is behavioral advertising in politics, for which Facebook is responsible.

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The filesharing of today: giving away your Netflix password to others, so they can use your account. Is this legal or illegal? Regardless, Netflix and other subscription services might bring an end to it some time soon as it’s hurting their revenues. So this might come to an end...

Picture Source: Me.me

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Since I’m based in Edinburgh, I thought a Harry Potter meme on Article 13 (now 17) of the European Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market would be appropriate. Many are concerned ‘upload filters’ will kill the internet (and especially memes), like Voldemort tries doing over and over with Harry.

Spoiler alert: In the end of the story Harry Potter survived and we can expect the internet to survive as well. Upload filters and other measures considered as “best efforts”, are not merely bad as long as they are implemented correctly. Considering that it is in the interest of the sites hosting user-generated content and also taking into account the importance of the freedom of speech in a democracy and the copyright exemptions, I am sure that the internet will survive.

If the upload filters are however not implemented correctly, they can constitute a dangerous threat to the internet and society. As can wrongly used spells.

- The content you are trying to view has been banned by the EU copyright law. -

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Is a Tweet Eligible for Copyright Protection?

Twitter is one of the most popular mediums to spread opinions and messages nowadays. Just think about Donald Trump’s Twitter account which has become his most important tool to reach millions of people.

This raises the question, whether a tweet can be protected by copyright - meaning that if you posted something particularly funny, nobody else would be allowed to use it. Or, in contrast if it was not protected, others could use your post for commercial purposes. The distinctive feature of Twitter in comparison to other social media platforms and blogs is the limited number of characters that users have available for their posts, which makes the postings rather short.

Twitter’s Terms of Service imply that tweets can be protected by copyright by providing a Copyright reporting form and giving every user the possibility for a report. Twitter therefore recognizes the authorship of users (but at the same time grants itself a right of use for every post one makes).

For copyright infringement a tweet must be eligible to be protected by copyright in the first place. A tweet could be protected as a ‘literary work’. To qualify for copyright protection a work must be original “in the sense that it is its author’s own intellectual creation”. The question is, however, whether tweets of 140 (or now 280) characters reach the stage of originality to be copyrightable. It is important to note that copyright does not protect the idea, but only the expression. With a short post containing only this little amount of characters, it can become difficult to distinguish between idea and expression. 

In Newspaper Licensing Agency Ltd v Meltwater Holding BV the UK High Court (affirmed by the Court of Appeal) has ruled that a newspaper heading may be protected by copyright, following the ECJ decision Infopaq according to which “an act occurring during a data capture process, which consists of storing an extract of a protected work comprising 11 words and printing out that extract” can be copyright infringement.

When it comes to tweets, case law is rare. In 2017 a German District court (LG Bielefeld, case no. 4 O 144/16) took on such case and declined copyright protection. The tweet in question was not eligible for copyright protection as a ‘literary work’ and therefore the printing of the tweet on a postcard for commercial reasons was no illicit infringement. The tweet, according to the court, was lacking the necessary level of creativity as it only contained everyday language. The tweet (just like most tweets) was only of the length of an advertisement text. The level of creativity must, however, then be above average. Short texts barely ever reach the sufficient level of creativity and originality.

In conclusion, a heightened originality standard applies to short texts, such as tweets. Now that Twitter has raised its character limit end of 2017 from 140 to 280 characters, it might become easier for tweets to be protected by copyright.

Picture Source: Pixabay/self-edited

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The EU Advocate General concluded in his opinion in the Tom Kabinet-case (Case C-263/18) that the “rule of exhaustion” does not cover ebooks and thus ends the question whether the UsedSoft-decision also applies to ebooks accordingly (for now). He hints that both legal and teleological arguments are in favor of the “rule of exhaustion”, however, EU law as it now stands does not give such interpretation. This topic will certainly keep us busy for a while: TBC.

Imagine if the “rule of exhaustion” would apply to ebooks and what this would mean for libraries...