Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Media Corporations: Incorporating Human Rights Through Rankings, Self-Regulation and Shareholder Resolutions

This article examines the emergence and evolution of selected ranking and reporting frameworks in the expanding realm of business and human rights advocacy. It explores how indicators in the form of rankings and reports evaluating the conduct of transnational corporate actors can serve as regulatory tools with potential to bridge a global governance gap that often places human rights at risk. Specifically, this article examines the relationship of transnational corporations in the Internet communications technology sector (ICT sector) to human rights and the risks presented to the right to freedom of expression and the right to privacy when ICT sector companies comply with government demands to disclose user data or to conceal information users seek. Specifically, it explores the controversial role of transnational ICT corporations in state censorship and surveillance practices. The article explains how conflicts over corporate complicity in alleged abuses served to catalyze change and lead to the creation of the Global Network Initiative, a private multi-stakeholder project, and the Ranking Digital Rights Initiative, an industry independent market-based information effort. Both aim to promote more responsible business practices in the social media industry sector. In conclusion, the article argues that regulating corporate reporting of information relevant to assessing the potential for adverse human rights impacts is necessary

Review of Ian Kerr and Jane Bailey, The Implications of Digital Rights Management for Privacy and Freedom of Expression, 2 Journal of Information, Communication & Ethics in Society 87 (2004)

Ian Kerr, who passed away far too young in 2019, was an incisive scholar and a much treasured colleague. The wit that sparkled in his papers was matched only by his warmth toward his friends, of whom there were many. He and his many co-authors wrote with deep insight and an equally deep humanity about copyright, artificial intelligence, privacy, torts, and much much more. Ian was also a valued contributor to the Jotwell Technology Law section. His reviews here display the same playful generosity that characterized everything else he did. In tribute to his memory, we are publishing a memorial symposium in his honor. This symposium consists of short reviews of a selection of Ian’s scholarship, written by a range of scholars who are grateful for his many contributions, both on and off the page

The evolution of anti-circumvention law

Countries around the world have since 1996 updated copyright laws to prohibit the circumvention of "Technological Protection Measures", technologies that restrict the use of copyright works with the aim of reducing infringement and enforcing contractual restrictions. This article traces the legislative and treaty history that lies behind these new legal provisions, and examines their interaction with a wide range of other areas of law: from international exhaustion of rights, through competition law, anti-discrimination measures, regulation of computer security research, constitutional rights to freedom of expression and privacy, and consumer protection measures. The article finds that anti-circumvention law as promoted by US trade policy has interfered with public policy objectives in all of these areas. It picks out key themes from the free trade agreements, legislation and jurisprudence of the World Trade Organization, World Intellectual Property Organization, USA, EU member states, and South American, Asian and Australasian nations. There is now a significant movement in treaty negotiations and in legislatures to reduce the scope of anti-circumvention provisions to ensure their compatibility with other important policy objectives

IFLA statement on privacy in the library environment

Introduction The rapid advancement of technology has resulted in increasing privacy implications for library and information services, their users, and society. Commercial Internet services, including those used to deliver library and information services, collect extensive data on users and their behaviour. They may also sell data about their users to third parties who then act on the data to deliver, monitor or withhold services. Using identification and location technology, governments and third parties can analyse a library user’s communication and activities for surveillance purposes or to control access to spaces, devices and services. Excessive data collection and use threatens individual users’ privacy and has other social and legal consequences. When Internet users are aware of large-scale data collection and surveillance, they may self- censor their behavior due to the fear of unexpected consequences. Excessive data collection can then have a chilling effect on society, narrowing an individual’s right to freedom of speech and freedom of expression as a result of this perceived threat. Limiting freedom of speech and expression has the potential to compromise democracy and civil engagement

Some Reflections on Copyright Management Systems and Laws Designed to Protect Them

Copyright management systems (CMS)—technologies that enable copyright owners to regulate reliably and charge automatically for access to digital works—are the wave of the very near future. The advent of digital networks, which make copying and distribution of digital content quick, easy, and undetectable, has provided the impetus for CMS research and development. CMS are premised on the concept of trusted systems or secure digital envelopes that protect copyrighted content and allow access and subsequent copying only to the extent authorized by the copyright owner. Software developers are testing prototype systems designed to detect, prevent, count, and levy precise charges for uses that range from downloading to excerpting to simply viewing or listening to digital works. In a few years, for example, an individual seeking online access to a collection of short fiction might be greeted with a menu of options including: Open and view short story A — $0.50, or$0.40 for students doing assigned reading (verified based on roster submitted by instructor) Open and view short story B (by a more popular author) — $0.80, or$0.70 for students Download short story A (encrypted and copy-protected) — $1.35 Download short story B —$2.25 Download entire collection — $15.00 Extract excerpt from short story A —$0.03 per 50 words Extract excerpt from short story B — $0.06 per 50 words CMS also loom large on the legislative horizon. Copyright owners have argued that technological protection alone will not deter unauthorized copying unless the law provides penalties for circumventing the technology. Although a bill to protect CMS against tampering failed to reach a vote in Congress last year, the World Intellectual Property Organization\u27s recent adoption of treaty provisions requiring protection means that Congress must revisit the question soon. Part II describes these developments. The seemingly inexorable trend toward a digital CMS regime raises two questions, which the author addresses in parts III and IV, respectively. First, broadly drawn protection for CMS has the potential to proscribe technologies that have indisputably lawful uses and also to foreclose, as a practical matter, uses of copyrighted works that copyright law expressly permits. How may protection for CMS be drafted to avoid disrupting the current copyright balance? Second, and equally fundamental, CMS may enable both pervasive monitoring of individual reading activity and comprehensive private legislation designed to augment—and possibly alter beyond recognition—the default rules that define and delimit copyright owners\u27 rights. Given the unprecedented capabilities of these technologies, is it also desirable to set limits on their reach

Keystones to foster inclusive knowledge societies: access to information and knowledge, freedom of expression, privacy, and ethics on a global internet

The transnational and multi-dimensional nature of Cyberspace and its growing importance presents new frontiers with unparalleled opportunities and challenges for access to information and knowledge, freedom of expression, privacy and ethics. The Internet Study being undertaken by UNESCO is seeking to provide the necessary clarity to support holistic approaches to addressing this broad range of interrelated issues as well as their short and long-term effects. The study was built on a year-long multistakeholder consultation process, which involved several rounds of consultation with member states and other actors, as well as almost 200 major responses to an online questionnaire. The Study includes the Options for future actions of UNESCO in the Internet related issues, which has served as a basis for the Outcome Document as adopted by the CONNECTing the Dots Conference on 3 and 4 March 2015. The Study also affirmed that the same rights that people have offline must be protected online, and good practices are shared between Member States and other stakeholders, in order to address security and privacy concerns on the Internet and in accordance with international human rights obligations. The Study also supports the Internet Universality principles (R.O.A.M) that promote a human rights-based approach, including freedom of expression, privacy, open Internet, accessible to all and characterized by multistakeholder participation

Examined Lives: Informational Privacy and the Subject as Object

In the United States, proposals for informational privacy have proved enormously controversial. On a political level, such proposals threaten powerful data processing interests. On a theoretical level, data processors and other data privacy opponents argue that imposing restrictions on the collection, use, and exchange of personal data would ignore established understandings of property, limit individual freedom of choice, violate principles of rational information use, and infringe data processors\u27 freedom of speech. In this article, Professor Julie Cohen explores these theoretical challenges to informational privacy protection. She concludes that categorical arguments from property, choice, truth, and speech lack weight, and mask fundamentally political choices about the allocation of power over information, cost, and opportunity. Each debate, although couched in a rhetoric of individual liberty, effectively reduces individuals to objects of choices and trades made by others. Professor Cohen argues, instead, that the debate about data privacy protection should be grounded in an appreciation of the conditions necessary for individuals to develop and exercise autonomy in fact, and that meaningful autonomy requires a degree of freedom from monitoring, scrutiny, and categorization by others. The article concludes by calling for the design of both legal and technological tools for strong data privacy protection

Internet Governance: the State of Play

The Global Forum on Internet Governance held by the UNICT Task Force in New York on 25-26 March concluded that Internet governance issues were many and complex. The Secretary-General's Working Group on Internet Governance will have to map out and navigate this complex terrain as it makes recommendations to the World Summit on an Information Society in 2005. To assist in this process, the Forum recommended, in the words of the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations at the closing session, that a matrix be developed "of all issues of Internet governance addressed by multilateral institutions, including gaps and concerns, to assist the Secretary-General in moving forward the agenda on these issues." This paper takes up the Deputy Secretary-General's challenge. It is an analysis of the state of play in Internet governance in different forums, with a view to showing: (1) what issues are being addressed (2) by whom, (3) what are the types of consideration that these issues receive and (4) what issues are not adequately addressed

All or nothing: this is the question? The application of article 3(2) Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC to the Internet

The Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC (hereinafter the “Directive”) was passed in 1995 to harmonise the national data protection laws within the European Community with the aim of protecting the fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals including their privacy as set out under Art. 1 of the Data Protection Directive. The rules governing the processing of personal data are deemed to be inapplicable in the two instances outlined by Art.3(2). Processing of personal data taking place as part of activities falling outside of Community law are excluded from the DPD. The Directive is also deemed to be inapplicable if the processing of personal data is undertaken by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity. It is the second part of Art. 3(2), which is examined in more detail. The ruling by the European Court of Justice in Lindqvist provides us with a fresh opportunity to re-examine whether the policy justifications for the exclusion under Art 3(2) continue to remain relevant in the light of widespread use of new technologies such as blogs, podcasts and web pages for processing and distributing information. Greater clarity regarding the implication of new communication technologies for DPD policy is necessary if the laws on data protection are to evolve in a coherent and principled manner