Persona rights for user-generated content: a normative framework for privacy and intellectual property regulation

This article introduces the term “persona rights” as a normative conceptual framework for analyzing the language of regulatory debates around privacy and intellectual property online, mainly from a Canadian perspective. In using the concept of persona rights to interrogate and critique the current limitations of regulatory discourses in protecting user rights online, the legal implications of persona rights law are translated into more conceptual terms. As a normative framework, persona rights is shown to be useful in addressing the gaps in regulatory understandings of privacy and intellectual property – particularly in spaces for user-generated content (UGC) – and in suggesting how policy might be written to account for user rights to the integrity of identity in commercial UGC platforms

Young Canadians’ apprenticeship labour in user-generated content

This article introduces a political-economic framework for analyzing young people’s production of user-generated content (UGC) as a kind of apprenticeship labour. Based on case studies of four young Montréalers engaged in creating user-generated content, the author developed the apprenticeship-type model of UGC labour to denote a process by which online immaterial labour or “free labour” coincides with self-directed and informal job training, channelled specifically toward a career in the creative industries. The 20- to 24-year-old participants’ online activity is seen as a non-remunerated training ground, driven by the promise of notoriety that begets autonomous future employment in areas such as fashion, music, and journalism. Throughout this process, young people must constantly negotiate their autonomy; negotiated autonomy is precisely what they are apprenticing into through UGC production, where uncertainty and flexibility serve as the hallmarks of new media working conditions

Viewing youth and mobile privacy through a digital policy literacy framework

Digital policy literacy is a critical element of digital literacy that emphasizes an understanding of communication policy processes, the political economy of media, and technological infrastructures. This paper introduces an analytical framework of digital policy literacy and illustrates it with examples of young people’s everyday negotiations of mobile privacy, in order to argue for increased policy literacy around privacy and mobile phone communication. The framework is applied to the Canadian context, where a small pilot study engaged 14 undergraduate university students in focus groups about their uses of mobiles and knowledge of mobile privacy issues. Preliminary findings show that while our participants were aware of a variety of privacy threats in mobile communication, they were not likely to participate in policy processes that might protect their privacy rights. The paper concludes with a discussion of why young people may not be motivated to intervene in policy processes and how their digital policy literacy around mobile privacy is mitigated by the construction of youth as a lucrative target consumer market for mobile devices and services

A tale of two regulators: telecom policy participation in Canada

What are the challenges to effective academic participation in telecommunications policymaking? In this article, the authors analyze their experiences with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and Industry Canada as examples. Their goal is to increase academic policy engagement despite negligible government support for public interest advocacy, as traditional public interest values are discarded by regulators because new technologies are framed as individual rather than collective. Industry Canada is deemed opaque with an “advocacy deficit,” though the CRTC is more transparent and inviting. To succeed in both venues, academics need to work with advocacy organizations as “circumstantial activists.” Such academic participation can offer new conceptual frameworks, add nuance to discourse, substantiate the use of scholarly research in policy debates, and add to policy theory building

Persona Rights in Young People’s Labour of Online Cultural Production: Implications for New Media Policy

This thesis rests on the argument that the social internet as a commercial space is basically subtended by the appropriation of user labour, in the form of what has come to be called “user-generated content” or UGC. Especially it seems for younger people engaged in the labour of UGC, online content creation also inculcates them into an economy of creative labour. As a kind of apprenticeship for more formal creative industry careers, UGC creates value for both online platforms and for the users’ development of a branded online identity. Identity work – which in this investigation mainly entails negotiating dimensions of age and gender (and to a lesser extent, class, race and ability) – constitutes an integral part of the value of UGC for individual careers as well as for commercial platforms, but also for the broader civic reverberations of online cultural production. Networked production and sociality are becoming more and more central to conceptions of contemporary citizenship alongside those of economic agency. To this end, the commercial imperatives of the social internet that tend to determine persona rights online, namely rights around privacy and intellectual property, demand re-evaluation in light of UGC as a labour practice. Legislative protections for Canadians’ persona rights are currently under debate, but internet regulation faces a number of challenges and thus should be accompanied by other strategies for bolstering people’s persona rights online. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to enumerate recommendations for policymaking around privacy and intellectual property in UGC environments, but also to suggest ways for young people to retain their persona rights while engaging in the UGC labour of online cultural production. The research questions guiding this thesis follow from its central goal of re-evaluating internet regulation from the point of view of UGC as apprenticeship labour. As such, the overarching research question asks, how might new media policy approach the issue of user labour in online cultural production to protect persona rights? This question invites an answer in the form of recommendations for policymakers, but the structural constraints of policy as a top-down protective mechanism requires alternative modes of addressing persona rights issues from the bottom-up, for instance in media and policy literacy initiatives as well as in participatory technology design. These conclusions stem from the project’s overview of policy research and scholarly work, but also from its analysis of four case studies that illustrate some of the activities and experiences of users in their early-20s, who are deeply engaged in the labour of UGC

Identification and reconstruction of low-energy electrons in the ProtoDUNE-SP detector

Measurements of electrons from $\nu_e$ interactions are crucial for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) neutrino oscillation program, as well as searches for physics beyond the standard model, supernova neutrino detection, and solar neutrino measurements. This article describes the selection and reconstruction of low-energy (Michel) electrons in the ProtoDUNE-SP detector. ProtoDUNE-SP is one of the prototypes for the DUNE far detector, built and operated at CERN as a charged particle test beam experiment. A sample of low-energy electrons produced by the decay of cosmic muons is selected with a purity of 95%. This sample is used to calibrate the low-energy electron energy scale with two techniques. An electron energy calibration based on a cosmic ray muon sample uses calibration constants derived from measured and simulated cosmic ray muon events. Another calibration technique makes use of the theoretically well-understood Michel electron energy spectrum to convert reconstructed charge to electron energy. In addition, the effects of detector response to low-energy electron energy scale and its resolution including readout electronics threshold effects are quantified. Finally, the relation between the theoretical and reconstructed low-energy electron energy spectrum is derived and the energy resolution is characterized. The low-energy electron selection presented here accounts for about 75% of the total electron deposited energy. After the addition of lost energy using a Monte Carlo simulation, the energy resolution improves from about 40% to 25% at 50~MeV. These results are used to validate the expected capabilities of the DUNE far detector to reconstruct low-energy electrons.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure

Impact of cross-section uncertainties on supernova neutrino spectral parameter fitting in the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment

A primary goal of the upcoming Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is to measure the $\mathcal{O}(10)$ MeV neutrinos produced by a Galactic core-collapse supernova if one should occur during the lifetime of the experiment. The liquid-argon-based detectors planned for DUNE are expected to be uniquely sensitive to the $\nu_e$ component of the supernova flux, enabling a wide variety of physics and astrophysics measurements. A key requirement for a correct interpretation of these measurements is a good understanding of the energy-dependent total cross section $\sigma(E_\nu)$ for charged-current $\nu_e$ absorption on argon. In the context of a simulated extraction of supernova $\nu_e$ spectral parameters from a toy analysis, we investigate the impact of $\sigma(E_\nu)$ modeling uncertainties on DUNE's supernova neutrino physics sensitivity for the first time. We find that the currently large theoretical uncertainties on $\sigma(E_\nu)$ must be substantially reduced before the $\nu_e$ flux parameters can be extracted reliably: in the absence of external constraints, a measurement of the integrated neutrino luminosity with less than 10\% bias with DUNE requires $\sigma(E_\nu)$ to be known to about 5%. The neutrino spectral shape parameters can be known to better than 10% for a 20% uncertainty on the cross-section scale, although they will be sensitive to uncertainties on the shape of $\sigma(E_\nu)$. A direct measurement of low-energy $\nu_e$-argon scattering would be invaluable for improving the theoretical precision to the needed level.Comment: 25 pages, 21 figure

Conceptual model to identify factors with influence in Brazilian beef consumption

The complexity of the consumers' behavior has taken the food industry to a new level of dynamism. Therefore, understanding the factors that influence this behavior is decisive for the differentiation of products to niche markets and even to adjust the supply according to consumers' expectancy. This article proposes a conceptual model to identify the factors influencing beef consumption in Brazil. The methodological approach was characterized by a systematic review through a synthesis of research related directly to this topic. Therefore, 76 papers published during the 2000-2014 period, including official documents (statistics), full research papers, abstracts, proceedings, and reports, were selected. Four main factors were related to influences in consumer behavior and/or directly in beef consumption: sociocultural, economic, health/food, and environmental. Among these dimensions, there was an emphasis on recent publications related to health/food and the environment. The compilation and analysis of these papers enabled the conception of the proposed model and suggests the consideration of four main dimensions in beef consumption