[Commons-Law] Politics of Code Report

Fri Feb 7 22:57:10 IST 2003

Hi all

What follows is a report on the one day conference in Oxford called the Politics of Code. The report does not try to summarise the various presentations as they have been/will be put on the web by the organizers at http://pcmlp.socleg.ox.ac.uk/code/ Instead we will try and present the core of the presentations and our impressions of the conference. 

Politics of Code

6th February 2003, Oxford

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Agenda

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SESSION ONE - HOW CODE GOVERNS

Oxford Union - Debating Chamber

Keynote Speech "The Internet at a Crossroads" - 9:30 a.m.

Prof. Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University

A generation ago, in internet time, one spoke of an internet defined by code as freedom. Today the changes brought about in the code and law has changed the internet from one of freedom to one of control and sadly we have done very little about it. 

When one looks at the early Supreme Court cases on Cable Technology we notice a court that understands the architecture of cable TV as being merely one of transfer and not copying. However, every act on the internet is an act of copying and courts applying copyright have to understand that.

Secondly when we look at application software like the Adobe E - book Reader and notice the nature of restrictions that such a book places on how many extracts of the book may be copied or whether it may be read aloud. This is more absurd when the book is in the public domain like Aristotle's Politics or a text like Middlemarch. 

Another instance of this type of protections is with the Sony robotic pet dog - AIBO. When a user decided to tweak the code to allow Aibo to learn jazz Sony threatened to sue for violation of anti-circumvention protections under the DMCA. See http://aibopet.com

What we in both these cases is a layering of different layers of protection around content - a layer of law, then code and then law again. The cumulative effect of these protections is to extend copyright protection to a greater scope term and reach than ever before in the history of copyright.

Scope - the actions prohibited

Term - the duration of protection

Reach - while copyright previously regulated the acts of a small group of publishers now it regulates users of content 

When this is coupled with the increasing concentration of control over entertainment, news and information by large multinational corporations we are threatened with the increasing homogenization of our cultures. So if we value the idea of free culture as claim to have done over the last few centuries we must respond fully to this challenge.

PANEL ONE: Reflections on the Speech

 o Prof. Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University

 o Peter Davies, Oxford Internet Institute

 o Christian de Larinaga, Internet Society, UK

Followed by a Q&A session

The panel discussion surrounding the talk was too dispersed and pursued no common theme. One interesting point was about the history of regulation of communication channels by government. While in the past government regulated control over these channels through the grant of licenses, the regulation of the internet is moving towards disabling the nature of the communication channel - end to end principles etc.

Coffee Break - 10.45 a.m.

PARALLEL PANELS: From Open Cyberspace to the Internet of Control? -

11:15 a.m

Presentations and discussions on technologies that can change the

Internet - Ipv6 and Digital Rights Management

DRM Panel - McMillan Room Oxford Union

Chair: Christian Ahlert, Oxford University, UK

 o What is Digital Rights Management and why do we need it? Jens-Henrik

Jeppessen, Intel

 o The Trouble with Digital Rights Management? Ian Brown, FIPR, UK

 o Digital Rights - Peter Davies, Oxford University

DEV GANGJEE WILL POST SHORTLY ON THIS SESSION

IPV6 Panel - Debating Chamber Oxford Union

Chair: Christian de Larinaga, Ipv6 Task Force

 o The Future Internet and Ipv6 - Axel Clauberg, Cisco

 o Legal and technical privacy risks in the next generation Internet -

Alberto Escudero Pascual, Royal Institute of Technology

The IPv6 panel had two speakers. The first of these speakers presented the audience with the business case for the shift from IPv4 to the IPv6 protocol. As we were not business representatives of institutions the talk made little sense to us. However, he did flag the important issues of privacy and disruption of the end to end principle that may arise with the new protocol.

The second speaker, Alberto Escudero, was far more informative and critical of the new protocol and the risks and benefits that may arise by adopting the protocol. He raised three important privacy risks:

  1.. the use of global unique identifiers in IP addresses may make available more information about you than you would choose
  2.. seamless mobility in the internet may also mean the loss of location privacy
  3.. the analysis of traffic data with telephones, mobiles and the internet reveal qualitatively different information. While with telephones we may call the information traffic data with the latter two modes of communication we can't make the distinction between traffic and content

In conclusion he argued that the IPv6 protocol, date retention and disclosure policies should be revisited with a view to widen the scope of consultation on privacy issues before we commission these protocols. 

Alberto's contact is aep at imit.kth.se and he would welcome any queries in this regard.

SESSION 2: HOW WE SHOULD GOVERN CODE 1:30 p.m. for 1:45 p.m.

Chair: Andrew Graham, Master of Balliol College

Keynote Speech "The Future of Internet Governance" - 2:00 p.m.

Esther Dyson, founding chairman of ICANN

Esther Dyson, presented a defensive view about the history of ICANN and it's current reform policy with a view to make it more democratic and representative while maintaining it's effectiveness. The details of the reform programme are available on the ICANN website - www.icann.org

Much of the discussion focused on the US government control over ICANN, it's US centred policy making and the dominance of US citizens on the governing body of ICANN. Despite the proposal to reform ICANN many members of the audience suggested that it may be a better option to develop a new international institution, under the auspices of the UN, to replace the ICANN altogether

Followed by a Q&A session

PANEL: Lessons learned - The Future of ICANN - 2:30 p.m.

 o Chair: Bill Dutton

 o Hans Kraijenbrink, ICANN Director

 o The Reform of ICANN - The European Commissions View- Richard Delmas,

European Commission, Brussels

 o The Reform of ICANN -  The ITU's View - Richard Hill, International

Telecommunication Union, Geneva

 o Will globalized regulation of intellectual propertz stifle online

debate? - Diane Cabell, Berkman Center, Harvard University

This session just about hung together. Han Kraijenbrink continued where Esther Dyson left off, informing us about the reform initiatives underway in ICANN. Richard Delmas, representing the EC, raised some interesting issues about the challenges before ICANN. He organized these into the 3T's of the internet

Topology - the architecture of the web is asymmetrical with the root servers predominantly in the US and this was a technical problem that had to be resolved

Toponymy - the power to nominate names should be widely dispersed and not centralized as it is today

Taxonomy - where the different services of the Internet should be opened out to all parties to make it more inclusive - eg language

Richard Hill of the ITU presented what he saw to be an alternative mode of organizing internet space to ICANN. The International Telecommunications Union, is an inter-governmental institution with 189 member countries which regulates telecommunications. The ITU works through a consensus mode and is a voluntary standard setting body. Moreover by adopting practices where the minimum number of decisions are taken at the international level they allow regional concerns to dominate the key decisions in the telecom arena.

Dianne Cabell presented a confusing study by the Berkman Centre on the nature of participation in the decision making procedures at ICANN. She rolled out a wide range of figures and graphs which by her own admission showed no clear trends and left most of us as confused as when she started.

Tea break - 3:30pm

Speech - 4:00pm

Liberty by Design: the Public Interest in Code - Alan Davidson , Center

for Democracy and Technology, USA

Alan Davidson outlined the efforts of his organization to intervene in the complex institutional landscape in which internet and technology standard setting takes place. He referred to two instances of such intervention: RFID tags and OPES standards. The technical information can be found at their website www.cdt.org - the thrust of his presentation was that with early intervention there can be an infusion of values of democracy and openness into the technical protocols that make up the internet.

PANEL: Code, Governments, the Public and Internet Governance - 4:30 p.m.

 o Chair: Damian Tambini, Oxford University, UK

 o The Role of Governments in Internet Governance - Raymund Werle, Max

Planck Institute, Germany

 o The W3C and the Standardization of Control - Lee Salter, University

of Leeds, UK

 o Open Standards - Why Openess is more important than Regulation -

Harald Alvestrand, Cisco and Chairman of IETF, Norway

 o Code Governance - How to Govern Through Code - Prof. Bernd Lutterbeck

and Kei Ishii, Technical University of Berlin

Raymund Werle, from the Max Planck Institute, presented a complex theoretical account of how regulation may be organized on the internet. To be frank, it was difficult to grasp the theoretical contours of the debate with which I am rather unfamiliar. Guess those who are familiar would like to follow his papers which will be available later.

Lee Salter presented a short paper on the decision making process at the World Wide Web consortium under the 'benign dictatorship' of Tim Berners-Lee. He studied carefully the debates around the adoption of patented standards into the W3C protocols and the micropayments into browsers. Both of these were ultimately rejected but raises the prospect that in the future we must work to infuse a wider range of value consideration into these decisions than profit. Viewed from the perspective of media policy, values of democracy and wider participation should drive the setting of these standards. 

It was not altogether clear what Prof Bern Lutterbeck was arguing for and so I guess you will have to wait for the paper on the website. By contrast, Harald Alvestrand's argument could be collapsed into a pithy statement: Open and voluntary standard setting promotes the best standards. His presentation sought to demonstrate why such standards promote widespread use and thereby allow for the creation and generation of wealth on the internet. This may not equally apply to proprietary or mandatory standard setting processes.

End of conference 5:30 p.m.

Larry Lessig, concluded the conference with a short two minute speech. He recalled that James Boyle in his famous book, Shamans, Software and Spleens proposed that we must develop a new form of 'environmentalism' around technology law and the information society. It was this work among others that has promoted the development and diffusion of the debate in different geographical locations and disciplines. The hope to change the future of the internet lies in the continuation and strengthening of the debate.

Evening Reception at the Ashmolean Museum

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