mashup

Draft – Deep Packet Inspection: Privacy, Mash-ups, and Dignities

/ Christopher Parsons

This is a draft of the paper that I’ll be presenting at the Counter: Piracy and Counterfeit conference in Manchester in a few days. It’s still rough around some edges, but feels like a substantial piece. Comments, as always, are welcome.

Abstract:

Privacy operates as an umbrella-like concept that shelters liberal citizens’ capacity to enjoy the autonomy, secrecy, and liberty, values that are key to citizens enjoying their psychic and civil dignity. As digitisation sweeps through the post-industrial information economy, these same citizens are increasingly sharing and disseminating copywritten files using peer-to-peer file sharing networks. In the face of economic challenges posed by these networks, some members of the recording industries have sought agreements with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to govern the sharing of copywritten data. In Britain, file-sharing governance has recently manifested in the form of Virgin Media inserting deep packet inspection (DPI) appliances into their network to monitor for levels of infringing files. In this presentation, I argue that ISPs and vendors must demonstrate technical and social transparency over their use of DPI to assuage worries that communications providers are endangering citizens’ psychic and civil dignities. Drawing on recent Canadian regulatory processes concerning Canadian applications of DPI, I suggest that transparency between civil advocacy groups and ISPs and vendors can garner trust required to limit harms to citizens’ psychic dignity. Further, I maintain that using DPI appliances to detect copyright infringement and apply three-strikes proposals unduly threatens citizens’ civil dignities; alternate governance strategies must be adopted to preserve citizens’ civil dignity.

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Why Mash-up Matters

/ Christopher Parsons

livemashupdj[Note: this is an early draft of the first section of a paper I’m working on, presently loosely titled “Mash-up Meets Deep Packet Inspection: Culture, solutions, and the demand for transparency”. Other sections will follow as I draft them. I’ve adopted this format based on positive reactions to my similar drafting process last year on ‘Who Gives a Tweet About Privacy?‘ Comments welcome. I’ve excluded full bibliographic information, but retained enough that you can find my sources. Text has been copied and pasted from a word processing document; this may result in some links being broken *cough* footnotes links *cough*]

I’m composing the beginning of this article to the sounds of Girl Talk’s ‘Like This’ from his Feed the Animals album. His artistic technique is to take very short samples from a variety of artists – twenty-nine samples are taken in the three minutes and twenty-one seconds of ‘Like This’ – and remix the work to create entirely new songs.[i] He isn’t a DJ but a self-described musician of the digital era, and when his work was presented to Marybeth Peters of the US Registrar of Copyrights she recognized that his music was amazing. She also recognized it was likely illegal, and the fact that his own creativity clearly imbued his creations offered no defense against copyright infringement: “You can’t argue your creativity when it’s based on other people’s stuff.”[ii] This position is mirrored by Barry Slotnick, head of the intellectual property litigation group at Loeb & Loeb, who has stated that “[w]hat you can’t do is substitute someone else’s creativity for your own.”[iii] Girl Talk’s work is recognized as amazing and creative, even by defenders and advocates of the present copyright regime, but is still questionably legal (at best). Feed the Animals is a popular album that pulls together anthems of pop culture, and its artist has been used as a defender of copyright reform movements,[iv] but it is only one item in a rapidly developing and emerging ‘mash-up’ culture that draws together existing cultural artifacts to in the creation of a recombinant digital culture.

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Privacy Norms in the Bio-Digital World

/ Christopher Parsons

pixelatedworldThe Western world is pervaded by digital information, to the point where we might argue that most Western citizens operate in a bio-digital field that is constituted by the conditions of life and life’s (now intrinsic) relationships to digital code. While historically (if 30 years or so can withstand the definitional intonations of ‘historically) such notions of code would dominantly pertain to government databanks and massive corporate uses of code and data, with the advent of the ‘social web’ and ease of mashups we are forced to engage with questions of how information, code, and privacy norms and regulations pertain to individual’s usage of data sources. While in some instances we see penalties being handed down to individuals that publicly release sensitive information (such as Sweden’s Bodil Lindqvist, who was fined for posting personal data about fellow church parishioners without consent), what is the penalty when public information is situated outside of its original format and mashed-up with other data sources? What happens when we correlate data to ‘map’ it?

Let’s get into some ‘concrete’ examples to engage with this matter. First, I want to point to geo-locating trace route data, the information that identifies the origin of website visitors’ data traffic, to start thinking about mashups and privacy infringements. Second, I’ll briefly point to some of the challenges arising with the meta-coding of the world using Augmented Reality (AR) technologies. The overall aim is not to ‘resolve’ any privacy questions, but to try and reflect on differences between ‘specificity’ of geolocation technology, the implications of specificity, and potential need to establish a new set of privacy norms given the bio-digital fields that we find ourself immersed in.

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Demonstration: Another Awesome Mashup + Constituent Part

/ Christopher Parsons

200903292246.jpgFollowing up on my post two weeks ago (Demonstration: Why Mashups are Awesome), I felt obliged to put up another awesome mashup that I just came across. The first video below shows guy playing a trombone piece, whereas the second demonstrates how it was integrated into a reggae mashup. Depending on the copyright regime that you live in, the mere act of viewing a mashup like the one in this post could constitute infringement. The audio mashup linked in the image at the head of this post most definitely would constitute infringement in some jurisdictions, but in both cases aren’t citizens just taking up the cultural artifacts surrounding around them and making something new? Amateur creativity like in these mashups is categorically different from professional mashups; shouldn’t we really have different categories and legal expectations depending on what category you sit in?

Trombone Set

 

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Demonstration: Why Mashups are Awesome

/ Christopher Parsons

200903132009.jpgWhen you read Lessig, he keeps pointing to Girl Talk. That’s because Girl Talk is awesome, and is one of the most prominent mashup artists. Let’s say that you’re not into the particular sounds GT is producing (which isn’t unreasonable) – if that’s the case, and that’s why you think mashup ‘sucks’, hit the video below to see what harsh music copyright laws will outlaw. The creativity is manifest in the video is clearly original, possessing focus, and is simply awesome.