I’m in the middle of a large project (for one person), and as part of it I wanted to host some CRTC documents on the project’s web server to link into. You see, if you’ve ever been involved in one of the CRTC’s public notices you’ll know that there are literal deluges of documents, many of which are zipped together. For the purposes of disseminating documents over email this works well – it puts all of the documents from say, Bell, into a single zipped file – but makes a user-unfriendly structure of linking to: expecting casual reader to link to zip archives is unreasonable. Given that as part of this project I do want to facilitate ease of access to resources it’s important that users can link to the documents themselves, and not zip archives.
While I pay attention to copyright developments in Canada and abroad, and have strong stances on how academics and the Canadian government should licence their publications, I’m not a lawyer. I do, however, know that government documents in Canada are governed by Crown Copyright – unlike in the US, the Canadian government maintains copyright over its publications – and thus I wanted to check with the CRTC if there were any problems hosting documents from their site, including those presumably under a Crown copyright such as the CRTC’s decision. Read more…
There is a metric ton of cash that’s being poured into eHealth initiatives, and to date it doesn’t appear that governments are recognizing the relationship between copyright law and eHealth. That makes a lot of sense in some ways – when most of us think ‘medicine’ and ‘doctor’ we think about privacy as one of, if not the, key issues (while, other than hopefully curing whatever is making us ill!). In this light, we wonder about the security of databases, the willingness of healthcare providers to limit access to records, and so forth. People in Canada are worried enough about privacy that, on the Ontario Government’s eHealth Ontario site, ‘Privacy and Security‘ are front and center as a main link on their homepage. When we turn to British Columbia’s October 23, 2009 Heath Sector Information Management/Information Technology Strategy and search for ‘privacy’ we see that the term appears on 18 of the report’s 55 pages. Moving over to the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner’s May 2, 2006 presentation on health information and electronic health records we, again, see emphases on the privacy and security concerns that must be posed alongside any movement to massively digitize the healthcare infrastructure.
What we see less of in the eHealth debate are the prevalent dangers accompanying threats to cut citizens off of the ‘net as a consequence of copyright infringement. It’s this issue that I want to briefly dwell on today, in part to start ramping up some thoughts on the wide-ranging effects of three-strikes laws that are starting to be adopted and/or seriously discussed in various jurisdictions around the world. Read more…
Over the past little while there has been considerable attention focused on Virgin Media’s decision to trial Detica’s CView copyright monitoring system. This system uses Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology to identify data protocols and likely files that are being transferred in order to generate a Copyright Infringement Index (i.e. a ‘Piracy Index’). As outlined by Detica, CView will let ISPs work with content creators to determine whether ISPs providing content through their portals lead to reductions in ‘infringing’ transfers of content through P2P file sharing.
The story about Detica’s involvement really broke with Chris Williams’ piece over at the Register entitled, “Virgin Media to trial filesharing monitoring system.” In the piece, he recognized that the trial will encompass roughly 40% of Virgin’s customers, that the aim is to measure overall levels of filesharing rather than identify individual customers, and (at least initially) will focus on music. After I read the piece, I send some questions off to Detica and posted them (“Virgin to Use DPI to ID Copyright Infringement“) based on my reading of Williams’ piece and Detica’s consultation paper, and shortly thereafter followed up with Detica’s responses and thoughts on CView and privacy infringements (“Update to Virgin Media and Copyright DPI“). Between the posting of my questions, and the response from Detica, Richard Clayton had a meeting with representatives from Detica and posted the information they released to him over at Light Blue Touchpaper in a posting “What does Detica Detect?” The Register was also able to get face time with people working at Detica, leading Williams to produce his second piece “Spook firm readies Virgin Media filesharing probes.”
In the rest of this post, I want to pull together the information that has come to light so that we can get a better picture of what is known about CView. As such, this is very much a summary rather than an analytic post; hopefully I’ll have time to delve the information more critically in the near future. Read more…
Recently, I’ve heard back from Detica about CView and wanted to share the information that Detica has been provided. CView is the copyright detection Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) appliance that Virgin Media will be trialling, and is intended to measure the amount of copyright infringing files that cross Virgin’s network. This index will let Virgin determine whether the content deals they sign with content producers have a noticeable impact on the amount of infringing P2P traffic on their network. Where such deals reduce infringements, then we might expect Virgin to invest resources in agreements with content producers, and if such agreements have no impact then Virgin’s monies will likely be spent on alternate capital investments. I’ll note up front that I’ve sent some followup questions to seek additional clarity where the answers I received were somewhat hazy; such haziness appears to have been from a miscommunication, and is likely attributable to a particular question that was poorly phrased. Up front, I will state that I’m not willing to release the name of who I’m speaking with at Detica, as I don’t think that their name is needed for public consumption and would be an inappropriate disclosure of personal information.
The key question that is lurking in my own mind – if not that of others interested in the CView product – is whether or not the appliance can associate inspected data flows with individuals. In essence, I’m curious about whether or not CView has the ability to collect ‘personally identifiable information’ as outlined by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada in her recent findings on Bell’s use of DPI. In her findings, the Commissioner argues that because Bell customers’ subscriber ID and IP address are temporarily collated that personal information is being collected that Bell does collect personal information. Read more…
