The Emergence of Camera Phones - Exploratory Study on Ethical and Legal Issues

One of Louis Daguerre’s1 earliest pictures of a Paris street scene was taken in 1839. Due to long exposure time required to capture the image, moving objects did not register, so the street appears empty. However, during the exposure, a man stopped on the street corner to have his shoes shined. As a result, both he and the person shining the shoes appear in the picture. It can be argued that these men are the first people to ever have been photographed. If this is one of the earliest photos, then they are certainly the first to be unknowingly photographed. Late in 2002, in the run up to Christmas, outlets acting as agents for the three mobile phone licence holders in Ireland started selling a new generation of mobile phone handsets. These handsets incorporated a digital picture messaging facility, which enables the phone user to take a digital photograph, which can be sent to others with similar handsets, and in some cases, via the Internet and email. This is an exploratory study of the usage issues surrounding camera phones. The study highlights a number of issues concerning privacy. This study identifies camera phone stakeholders and includes analyses of their attitudes regarding camera phone use. The study uncovers stakeholders’ reluctance to accept and address possible negative effects. It also highlights the lack of both formal and informal methods of regulation. The legal examination highlights the possibility of existing (Irish) legislation curtailing the use of camera phones for specific purposes. The ethical literature, while contradictory in places, mirrors in some cases, general principles of privacy outlined in Irish case la

Positive Copyright and Open Content Licences: How to Make a Marriage Work by Empowering Authors to Disseminate Their Creations

Positive copyright appears to have been progressively turned away from its normative function of ensuring a fair and efficient transmission of human knowledge. The private sector is seeking to counterbalance this phenomenon by adopting legal tools that expand the public domain of knowledge, such as web-based licences modelled on the "open access" approach. The increasing world-wide preference for Creative Commons licences confirms their aptness to transform copyright law into a tool flexible enough to serve authors' several purposes. Such a spontaneous counterbalance experiences many difficulties though, because of the structure that positive copyright has adopted over the last few years. The current situation is an excellent point from which to look back at how authors used to disseminate their works before the advent of the Internet. From a historical view-point copyright has always accomplished the twin functions of economically rewarding authors and enabling communication of their creations to the public. The latter goal is achieved by means of statutory mechanisms limiting the freedom of contract between authors and their counterparts (intermediaries in a broad sense), in order to enforce the authors' capacity to spread their works. In the current digital environment, however, these mechanisms are not likely to accomplish their original functions. This paper seeks to explore an adjustment that will permit authors to take advantage of all the new means of commercial exploitation and non-commercial dissemination of their works offered by the Internet. Such an adjustment aims also at realigning positive and normative copyright by encompassing the use of open content licensing within the current copyright framework

The Double Punch of Law and Technology: Fighting Online Music Piracy or Remaking Copyright in a Digital Age?

For the recording industry the case seems clear. Music sales are down for the third straight year. CD sales are now almost 20% lower than in 2000. Despite their successful campaign against Napster two years ago, online music sharing through peer-to-peer service such as KaZaA and Gnutella continues to flourish. To re-establish its pre-Napster margins, industry thinking goes, the record labels have to put an end to illegal music sharing over the Internet once and for all. Hence, the recent decision by the industry-leading Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to take the fight directly to file sharers, not merely to commercial file sharing services

A New Account of Personalization and Effective Communication

To contribute to understanding of information economies of daily life, this paper explores over the past millennium given names of a large number of persons. Analysts have long both condemned and praised mass media as a source of common culture, national unity, or shared symbolic experiences. Names, however, indicate a large decline in shared symbolic experience over the past two centuries, a decline that the growth of mass media does not appear to have affected significantly. Study of names also shows that action and personal relationships, along with time horizon, are central aspects of effective communication across a large population. The observed preference for personalization over the past two centuries and the importance of action and personal relationships to effective communication are aspects of information economies that are likely to have continuing significance for industry developments, economic statistics, and public policy

A New Account of Personalization and Effective Communication

To contribute to understanding of information economies of daily life, this paper explores over the past millennium given names of a large number of persons. Analysts have long both condemned and praised mass media as a source of common culture, national unity, or shared symbolic experiences. Names, however, indicate a large decline in shared symbolic experience over the past two centuries, a decline that the growth of mass media does not appear to have affected significantly. Study of names also shows that action and personal relationships, along with time horizon, are central aspects of effective communication across a large population. The observed preference for personalization over the past two centuries and the importance of action and personal relationships to effective communication are aspects of information economies that are likely to have continuing significance for industry developments, economic statistics, and public policy.new economy, information economy, personalization, mass media, communication, regulation, information theory, Industrial Revolution

Conceptualisation of rights and meta-rule of law for the web of data

This paper was previously published by Democracia Digital e Governo Eletrônico (Brazil)This article deals with some regulatory and legal problems of the Web of Data. Data and metadata are defined. Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Rights Expression Languages (REL) are introduced. Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL), Licensed Linked Data Resources (LLDR) and Creative Commons Licenses are referred. The development of REL by means of Ontology Design Patterns such as LLDR, or Open Licenses sustained by Policy Models such as ODRL, situates the discussion on metadata at the regulatory level. With the development of the Web of Data the Rule of Law needs to evolve to a Meta-Rule of Law, incorporating tools to regulate and monitor the semantic layer of the Web. This means reflecting on the construction of a new public dimension space for the exercise of rights