Markings from mandatory literature for Law, Technology & Society
Week 1
Murray (2010)
- ‘How does the environment over which the law seeks to be effective affect the rule of law’.
- The traditional measure of an economic superpower was their output. Economies were
measured by their ability to support communities
- Industrial economies made money by making things: ships, weapons, clothing, railway
tracks and later aircraft.
- Industrialists grew wealthy but the workers did not: a few grew exceedingly wealthy
while exploiting the human capital of the many.
- Following the economic downturn of the 1920s, the effects of worker revolt such as
the General Strike and the terrible impact of two world wars on the industrial capital
of European states, a new economic model began to appear in post-war Europe
- The UK economy started the painful transition from industrial values of ‘what can we
produce?’ to the newly developing service sector and the question ‘what can we provide?’
- We no longer made money from making things, we made money from providing services.
- The UK was going to be the world’s leading service economy, but then something happened
and it is that something which is at the core of this book
- The new economic model is known as the ‘information economy’ while its
correspondent theory in social sciences is the ‘information society’.
- In so doing they created a new generation of super-rich industrialists who far surpassed the
wealth of the nineteenth-century industrialists
- These were people like Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison and most famously Bill Gates who
recognized the value wasn’t in the information itself; it was in what you could enable
people to do with it.
- They started to ask the question which is at the heart of this book: ‘what can we
control?’
- The move from economic value being sited within physical goods, to economic value being
sited within information, is referred to by Nicholas Negroponte, formerly Director of the
Media Laboratory at MIT, as the move from atoms to bits
- At its simplest ‘bit’ is a truncation of the term ‘binary digit’. To expand, a binary digit
is simply either a 0 or a 1
- In the world of computer systems a bit represents a single instruction to the
computer. This instruction is either to do (1) or not to do (0) a particular function
- The brain of the computer, the Microprocessor or Central Processing Unit (CPU),
reads the instruction
- Von Neumann architecture is a four-step system that turns bits into computer operations or
data.
1. The first step is fetch, which involves the CPU retrieving an instruction (represented
by bits) from program memory
2. The second step is decode. In this step the single instruction is broken up by the
CPU in separate instructions which require the CPU to do different operations
3. Step three is the execute step. In this step the CPU will carry out the operational
instruction contained in the fetched data.
4. The final step is writeback. Here the CPU ‘writes back’ the result of its operational
process to memory
- Using the dimmer the user may select graduated illumination from complete darkness (0) to
full illumination (250)
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, - By turning the switch halfway you will get something around 125 watts of light and
at one-quarter distance about 63 watts.
- But, as Gates points out, exact replication of the level of illumination achieved in
such an analogue set-up is difficult
- If he then passes this information on to his friend in Calgary he repeats the process, but, as
anyone who has played the childhood game of Chinese Whispers, or Telephone, knows, the
message will over time change and deteriorate
- This is known as analogue drop-off and affects all analogue transmissions as anyone
who has made a copy of a copy of a friend’s mix tape knows
- Now, if I find that the perfect level of lighting for a romantic meal is in fact 93 watts, I can
set my switches as ‘off’ ‘on’ ‘off’ ‘on’ ‘on’ ‘on’ ‘off’ ‘on’ or in binary notation 01011101
- Now if I want my friend in Seattle to be able to replicate the exact level of lighting I
had I simply send him this code
- He may then send this code to his friend in Calgary who can exactly replicate
what I did without ever speaking to me
Thus digital transmissions are less likely to suffer drop-off as the message sent is
short and precise, unlike analogue transmissions
- Of course it is not just text that may be represented in this way:
- Music
- In digital photography each colour and shade
- Digital video
- As Negroponte points out: ‘the emergence of continuity in [individual bits] is analogous to a
similar phenomenon in the familiar world of matter. Matter is made of atoms. If you could
look at a smoothly polished metal surface at a subatomic scale, you would see mostly holes. It
appears smooth and solid because the discrete pieces are so small
- Likewise digital output.
- As digital information is cheaper to store, cheaper to distribute and cheaper to encode there
has been a widely publicized migration from analogue technologies to digital technologies
and with it a shift in economic values of information.
- Music could be shared directly from computer to computer cutting out all the middle men,
and uniquely music could now be passed on without the original owner of the music file
losing possession of their copy
- Soon thereafter MPEG-4 and MP4 compression achieved the same effect with film
expanding the impact of file sharing and similar technologies to the TV and movie
industries
- Example Rivalrous and Nonrivalrous Goods: If one day it is raining and I decide to borrow
my wife’s umbrella, she cannot use it during the period it is in my possession: my possession
is rivalrous to her possession. However should I choose to watch the same TV broadcast as
my neighbor, my consumption of that broadcast does not affect her ability to watch the same
broadcast. My enjoyment of the TV broadcast is nonrivalrous to her enjoyment.
- However, my use of the umbrella does not ‘use up’ the umbrella, meaning that it, as with
other durable rivalrous goods, can still be shared through time
- By contrast non-durable rivalrous goods are destroyed by their use (consumption)
and cannot be shared
- A concert ticket is a non-durable rivalrous good: if I ‘borrow’ my wife’s
ticket to see a concert by her favourite band, the fact that I can return the ticket
to her afterwards does not disguise the fact that I have ‘consumed’ the
economic value of that ticket leaving her with a worthless piece of paper
- By contrast, nonrivalrous goods may be consumed by several consumers
simultaneously
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, - Nonrivalrous goods are usually intangible
- By taking from the original owner you do not deny them of their possession and enjoyment
of the goods, nor do you deny anyone else the opportunity to consume, simultaneously, the
same good
- Television broadcasts are an example of a nonrivalrous good: if I turn on my TV set to
watch a broadcast of ‘The Good Place’ this does not prevent my next-door neighbour, or
anyone else, from watching the same show
- Goods that are nonrivalrous are therefore goods that can be enjoyed simultaneously
by an unlimited number of consumers
- All are about transmitting information from one source to another
- These experiences to some extent answer the questions ‘why are bits economically
valuable?’ and ‘how do bits effect social interaction?’ Although there is much more to explore
in relation to both these questions we can open by saying bits are economically valuable
because they represent new and revolutionary models to market and deliver products or
services, which are by nature informational products and which were traditionally embedded
in or attached to a separate carrier media
(- Disintermediation = het verwijderen van tussenpersonen in de economie uit een
toeleveringsketen, of “het wegvallen van tussenpersonen” in verband met een transactie of
een reeks transacties)
- In addition, bits effect social interaction as they provide new avenues for communication,
exchange of ideas and for challenge to traditional orthodoxy
- Although there is no doubt the vast majority of users of file sharing services were driven by
economic desire to free-ride (for which read get free music, films, TV content and video
games), these services also demonstrated the convenience of being able to access content
without going to the shops and for some the feeling of belonging to the a wider community of
viewers, listeners and gamers
The three effects of the move from the industrial to the informational society
1. It represents a shift from ownership or control of things to ownership of or
control over information.
2. It represents a new and revolutionary model to market and deliver products or
services.
3. It represents a move from rivalrousness to nonrivalrousness
- The key phrase is ‘intention to permanently deprive’ as this makes clear that to commit the
offence of theft you must take something which is physical and rivalrous
- Both of these things are regulated elsewhere, but neither is theft in the true sense of the word
- The traditional law of atomic property, and with it atomic values of wealth through owning
and retaining things, is fundamentally altered by the scalability of bits, meaning those things
which appear to be of economic value (information) seem perversely to be of no value
because anyone can replicate it at any time at almost no outlay
- The informational paradox: information is valuable. It is also (almost) infinitely scalable,
nonrivalrous and intangible
- Two secondary effects of the process also fundamentally undermine our traditional legal
settlement. The first is that digitalisation also converges different types of content into a single
category of digital, or binary, information
- This is a process known as digital convergence
- Additionally the ease with which digital information and digital content can be transmitted
around the globe adds an additional layer of complexity which challenges traditional concepts
of the jurisdictional scope and reach of lawmakers, courts and law enforcement bodies
- Digital Convergence = inclination for various innovations, media sources,
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, content that become similar with the time. It enables the convergence of access devices and
content as well as the industry participant operations and strategy
- As information and content became cheaper to gather, cheaper to process and cheaper to
distribute, the intellectual connection between information or data and concepts such as
personhood, privacy, autonomy and respect for private property were initially swept aside in a
rush to experiment with new technologies and to profit from content creation and sharing,
data mining, date profiling and data-gathering techniques
- Here they laid for the first time a legal interpretation, known as classical cyberlibertarianism,
which contends that regulation founded upon traditional state sovereignty, based as it is upon
notions of physical borders, cannot function effectively in cyberspace as individuals may
move seamlessly between zones governed by differing regulatory regimes in accordance with
their personal preferences.
- Simply put, they claimed the internet was unregulable as laws were confined to the
jurisdiction in which they were promulgated while content hosted and carried on the
internet, including obscene content, flowed seamlessly over these borders
- What we are seeing in these differences is a spectrum of community standards which range
from extremely conservative to extremely liberal
- The easiest way for a state to apply its legal standard of obscenity within its borders is to
prevent the importation of materials which offend the standard of that state, while
simultaneously criminalising the production of such materials within the state
- Prosecuting those who run pornographic websites from overseas servers but who are
resident in the UK and profit from this activity. With the removal of the physical border
between the UK and the rest of the world, internet users were afforded the opportunity to
access and view pornography held overseas in the blink of an eye and with little opportunity
for the authorities to intercept the content en route
- They could either invest large sums to attempt to enforce the law in the digital environment,
or they could de facto regulate adult obscenity and focus their attention on more pressing
problems such as child-abuse images
(- De facto = in feite of in praktijk)
- Providers of pornographic materials who do not comply with the UKs age verification
system may be blocked under s.23 of the Act
- This may be interpreted as an attempt to build a digital border where the physical
border has failed
- As noted governments from around the globe are closely examining this idea
of rebuilding borders digitally
- The law is effective in cyberspace. The difficulty is in identifying which court has effective
jurisdiction and in identifying who is the relevant person to pursue.
- The question of how we protect the value of information in an age where it is instantly
replicable, transmissible and is almost infinitely scalable is the challenge lawyers face today.
Leenes (2019)
- Yet, my students saw the prospects of the emerging technologies and were eager to produce
course papers about e-commerce and e-government. They had to focus on the legal aspects of
these developments and many seemed to follow similar arguments: a new product or service
is emerging, such as online shopping, this (type of) service is not mentioned in the law, hence
we need new rules, new law
Law has to adapt to this new reality
- Many people seem to suffer from the ‘Flawed Law Syndrome’: the urge to call
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