Network Stories

In 1962, Rachel Carson named the natural environment. Scientists were beginning to understand the complex web of ecological cause and effect; naming that web gave it independent existence and invested that existence with political meaning. In 1996, James Boyle named the cultural environment. Boyle’s act of naming was intended to jumpstart a political movement by appropriating the complex web of political meaning centered on the interdependency of environmental resources. But naming, although important, is only a beginning. The example of the natural environment shows us that to build from a name to a movement requires two things. First, you have to do the science, which means generating detailed descriptions of how this environment works and what harms it. Second, you have to generate a normative theory powerful enough to overcome all competing narratives: a story about what makes this environment good. In the context of culture, however, there is an important difference: Cultural harm is less amenable to scientific proof. Cultural change may be empirically and anecdotally demonstrated, but cultural harm is in the eye of the beholder. This means that the normative theory needs to do heavier lifting. Proponents of cultural environmentalism, then, need to tackle the normative theory: to formulate a theory of “the network” as a whole that explains what makes it good. This is part of the point of Boyle’s original argument, and also the point of Susan Crawford’s excellent paper. Although carving out open enclaves is important, in the final analysis the cultural environment won’t be saved a piece at a time. It will be saved only when we recognize it as an entity that is more than just the sum of its parts

Cyberspace As/And Space

The appropriate role of place- and space-based metaphors for the Internet and its constituent nodes and networks is hotly contested. This essay seeks to provoke critical reflection on the implications of place- and space-based theories of cyberspace for the ongoing production of networked space more generally. It argues, first, that adherents of the cyberspace metaphor have been insufficiently sensitive to the ways in which theories of cyberspace as space themselves function as acts of social construction. Specifically, the leading theories all have deployed the metaphoric construct of cyberspace to situate cyberspace, explicitly or implicitly, as separate space. This denies all of the ways in which cyberspace operates as both extension and evolution of everyday spatial practice. Next, it argues that critics of the cyberspace metaphor have confused two senses of space and two senses of metaphor. The cyberspace metaphor does not refer to abstract, Cartesian space, but instead expresses an experienced spatiality mediated by embodied human cognition. Cyberspace in this sense is relative, mutable, and constituted via the interactions among practice, conceptualization, and representation. The insights drawn from this exercise suggest a very different way of understanding both the spatiality of cyberspace and its architectural and regulatory challenges. In particular, they suggest closer attention to three ongoing shifts: the emergence of a new sense of social space, which the author calls networked space; the interpenetration of embodied, formerly bounded space by networked space; and the ways in which these developments alter, instantiate, and disrupt geographies of power

Creativity and Culture in Copyright Theory

Creativity is universally agreed to be a good that copyright law should seek to promote, yet copyright scholarship and policymaking have proceeded largely on the basis of assumptions about what it actually is. When asked to discuss the source of their inspiration, individual artists describe a process that is intrinsically ineffable. Rights theorists of all varieties have generally subscribed to this understanding, describing creativity in terms of an individual liberty whose form remains largely unspecified. Economic theorists of copyright work from the opposite end of the creative process, seeking to divine the optimal rules for promoting creativity by measuring its marketable byproducts. But these theorists offer no particular reason to think that marketable byproducts are either an appropriate proxy or an effective stimulus for creativity (as opposed to production), and more typically refuse to engage the question. The upshot is that the more we talk about creativity, the more it disappears from view. At the same time, the mainstream of intellectual property scholarship has persistently overlooked a broad array of social science methodologies that provide both descriptive tools for constructing ethnographies of creative processes and theoretical tools for modeling them

Privacy, Visibility, Transparency, and Exposure

This essay considers the relationship between privacy and visibility in the networked information age. Visibility is an important determinant of harm to privacy, but a persistent tendency to conceptualize privacy harms and expectations in terms of visibility has created two problems. First, focusing on visibility diminishes the salience and obscures the operation of nonvisual mechanisms designed to render individual identity, behavior, and preferences transparent to third parties. The metaphoric mapping to visibility suggests that surveillance is simply passive observation, rather than the active production of categories, narratives, and, norms. Second, even a broader conception of privacy harms as a function of informational transparency is incomplete. Privacy has a spatial dimension as well as an informational dimension. The spatial dimension of the privacy interest, which the author characterizes as an interest in avoiding or selectively limiting exposure, concerns the structure of experienced space. It is not negated by the fact that people in public spaces expect to be visible to others present in those spaces, and it encompasses both the arrangement of physical spaces and the design of networked communications technologies. U.S. privacy law and theory currently do not recognize this interest at all. This essay argues that they should

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

Comment: Copyright\u27s Public-Private Distinction

I would like to focus my remarks on the question of user privacy. In her fascinating paper for this Symposium, Professor Litman expresses a guarded optimism that in its forthcoming decision in MGM v. Grokster, I the Court will retain the staple article of commerce doctrine that it first articulated in Sony. She opines, however, that the user privacy strand of the Sony decision is a lost cause. I don\u27t believe that it\u27s possible to retain the staple article of commerce doctrine while abandoning user privacy. At least in the realm of networked digital technologies, the two concepts are inextricably linked. To explain why, I would like to begin by examining a concept that I\u27ll call copyright\u27s public-private distinction. This distinction does not concern the presence or absence of state action, but rather the presence or absence of conduct triggering legal accountability

Controlled flow assembly

Incorporation of isolation valves in high pressure oxygen supply system prevents occurrence of shock ignition when valves are opened. Specifications of equipment show flow rates, pressure ratings, and service life. Illustration of equipment is provided

DRM and Privacy

Interrogating the relationship between copyright enforcement and privacy raises deeper questions about the nature of privacy and what counts, or ought to count, as privacy invasion in the age of networked digital technologies. This Article begins, in Part II, by identifying the privacy interests that individuals enjoy in their intellectual activities and exploring the different ways in which certain implementations of DRM technologies may threaten those interests. Part III considers the appropriate scope of legal protection for privacy in the context of DRM, and argues that both the common law of privacy and an expanded conception of consumer protection law have roles to play in protecting the privacy of information users. As Parts II and III demonstrate, consideration of how the theory and law of privacy should respond to the development and implementation of DRM technologies also raises the reverse question: How should the development and implementation of DRM technologies respond to privacy theory and law? As artifacts designed to regulate user behavior, DRM technologies already embody value choices. Might privacy itself become one of the values embodied in DRM design? Part IV argues that with some conceptual and procedural adjustments, DRM technologies and related standard-setting processes could be harnessed to preserve and protect privacy