Dan Gillmor and Donna Wentworth are pointing to an article by Sonia K. Katyal on "The New Surveillance".
I have read the paper. Here are a few comments.
I agree with Katyal that privacy concerns are important in the debate about copyright enforcement, see my paper on "DRM and data protection".
The concept of "Panopticism" discussed on pages 317 to 320 is especially interesting. Katyal explains the origin of the concept in the design of prisons, where guards are placed in a central tower to enable them to watch all prisoners at all time.
That concept is useful when discussing the recent proposal for a EU Framework Decision with which the enemies of freedom try to promote their vision of a total surveillance state: They want to build central towers from which they can watch all citizens at all time. That might be appropriate when designing a prison, but not when designing a free society. See also this Register article by Lucy Sheriff on that topic.
On pages 376 to 379, Katyal discusses the "Privacy Protection Act (PPA)", which seems to have been passed by Congress back in 1980 when the U.S. was a free country.
If that legislation applies without changes for example to the authors of blogs, it gives some rather strong privacy guarantees.
I could not see any discussion on the questions of trusted computing or of data retention by Internet service providers in the paper. Both are rather important when discussing Internet copyright surveillance.
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at May 4, 2004 04:07 PM | TrackBack