A Dark Cloud

Twice in the last two weeks, event appear to have high­lighted the poten­tial down­side of cloud com­put­ing: last week, Ama­zon had over-reached auto­mat­i­cally deleted books that end users had legally pur­chased from its store, issu­ing refunds but also oblit­er­at­ing any notes peo­ple had taken on those pages. This week, news that 4chan.org, an influ­en­tial (albeit not safe for work) site was blocked by AT&T, rais­ing poten­tial ques­tions as to whether ISPs have too much con­trol over what we can and can­not see.

The Kin­dle Incident

For read­ers who may not know this, Ama­zon unveiled an inter­est­ing elec­tronic reader called the Kin­dle, allow­ing peo­ple who bought it to legally pur­chase elec­tronic copies of books. Along the way, Ama­zon also opened up a pro­gram allow­ing small pub­lish­ers to pub­lish books directly into their marketplace.

How­ever, it appears that Amazon’s own qual­ity con­trol seemed to fail when it came to estab­lish­ing own­er­ship of the intel­lec­tual prop­erty uploaded to its site when two titles by George Orwell, Nine­teen Eighty Four and Ani­mal Farm, were uploaded and sold by a rogue bookaneer.

Sub­se­quently dis­cov­er­ing that it had sold e-books for which the pub­lisher did not have rights, Ama­zon issued refunds to its cus­tomers and removed the books from the user’s device. Where it gets a lit­tle gray in terms of what they did is that, along with the removal of the books, they also removed any anno­ta­tion users already had made, thus eras­ing con­tent that was cre­ated ON the device if not FOR the device. The New York Times story on the dele­tion listed the following:

Justin Gawron­ski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was read­ing “1984” on his Kin­dle for a sum­mer assign­ment and lost all his notes and anno­ta­tions when the file van­ished. “They didn’t just take a book back, they stole my work,” he said.

Beyond the irony of Ama­zon throw­ing a book like Nine­teen Eighty Four down the mem­ory hole (a large incin­er­a­tor in that book), Amazon’s action raise trou­bling ques­tions as to the abil­ity of online providers to remove con­tent they have not cre­ated. I leave it to legal scholar to assess whether Ama­zon could actu­ally be con­sid­ered to have infringed on the intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights of peo­ple whose anno­ta­tions were removed along with the books.

Ama­zon was jus­ti­fied in pro­tect­ing the copy­right hold­ers for the infring­ing books but where it went wrong is when it over-reached by delet­ing con­tent that was cre­ated by its cus­tomers. In that par­tic­u­lar case, one could argue that Ama­zon was respon­si­ble for cen­sor­ship. The com­pany will need to change its sys­tems and poli­cies to ensure that it does not impede the customer’s expe­ri­ence. While it cur­rently has only removed a cou­ple of titles along with anno­ta­tions, the com­pany should ensure that it keep anno­ta­tions sep­a­rate so that any fur­ther title removal does not destroy user gen­er­ated con­tent. An extra nice move would be if the com­pany were to replace the titles with their legal equiv­a­lent. The com­mon should also be a lot more thor­ough in ver­i­fy­ing intel­lec­tual prop­erty claims before offer­ing titles, espe­cially since they con­trol every piece of the deliv­ery chain from the intel­lec­tual prop­erty holder to the reader.

AT&T and 4chan.org

In a some­what related inci­dent, AT&T had a recent run-in with one of the most influ­en­tial (and that does not nec­es­sar­ily mean good) entity on the inter­net: the 4chan.org com­mu­nity. 4chan is pri­mar­ily and image and dis­cus­sion board and word started to spread that AT&T cus­tomers had lost accesses to its images over the week­end. After a sub­stan­tial amount of noise in sev­eral online forums, AT&T claimed that it had blocked the site because it was suf­fer­ing from a denial of ser­vice attack from it.

What is inter­est­ing here is that AT&T acted with­out prior notice and blocked a site with­out pro­vid­ing any infor­ma­tion upfront as to the rea­son for block­ing the site. While AT&T stopped block­ing the site as the result of a con­certed effort by its fans, the founder of 4chan hit the nail on the head when he said (empha­sis is mine):

In the end, this wasn’t a sin­is­ter act of cen­sor­ship, but rather a bit of a mis­take and a poorly exe­cuted, dis­pro­por­tion­ate response on AT&T’s part. Who­ever pulled the trig­ger on black­hol­ing the site prob­a­bly didn’t antic­i­pate [nor intend] the con­se­quences of doing so. We’re glad to see this short-lived débâ­cle has prompted renewed inter­est and debate over net neu­tral­ity and inter­net censorship—two very impor­tant issues that don’t get nearly enough atten­tion—so per­haps this was all just a bless­ing in disguise.

Net Neu­tral­ity is the basic idea that any broad­band provider should offer access to the inter­net with­out any lim­i­ta­tions as to what kind of con­tent can be accessed and here we have an exam­ple of an ISP selec­tively block­ing a site. While the AT&T exam­ple is only the most recent one to come to light, it appears that this is a phe­nom­e­non that could become more com­mon as inter­net ser­vice providers decide what kind of con­tent takes too much band­width or for other reasons.

In the past, such cen­sor­ship would have meant that a provider cen­sor­ing access were to be con­sid­ered as a pub­lisher. In 1995, with Strat­ton Oak­mont vs. Prodigy, the supreme court of the United States held that online ser­vices which were remov­ing con­tent from their online forums could be con­sid­ered as pub­lish­ers and there­fore held liable for any con­tent they gave users access to. Since then, Lob­by­ists in the tele­com indus­try have ensured that such deci­sion would no longer be applic­a­ble by get­ting the US Con­gress to amend the US code and reverse the Supreme Court deci­sion.

The Urge to kill(switch)

About a year ago, a storm arose around rumors that Apple’s iPhone devices were sport­ing code that could dis­able appli­ca­tions run­ning on them. The exis­tence of such code, also known as a kill switch, was later con­firmed by Steve Jobs:

Jobs con­firmed that iPhones rou­tinely check an Apple Web site that could, in the­ory, trig­ger the removal of the unde­sir­able soft­ware from the devices.

He told the paper that Apple needed the capa­bil­ity in case it inad­ver­tently allowed a mali­cious pro­gram to be dis­trib­uted to iPhones through the App Store.

Once again, we see here a com­pany with the best of inten­tions (pro­tect­ing peo­ple from mali­cious pro­grams) with its fin­ger on a but­ton that could be very scary if mis­use. It is worth not­ing that Apple is not uniquely in this posi­tion as Google fessed up to hav­ing sim­i­lar code embed­ded in Android-based phones:

Google may dis­cover a prod­uct that vio­lates the devel­oper dis­tri­b­u­tion agree­ment … in such an instance, Google retains the right to remotely remove those appli­ca­tions from your device at its sole discretion

And while one may think that such devices are lim­ited to high end cell phones cater­ing to a lim­ited com­mu­nity, it appears that such devices are now becom­ing more com­mon in chil­dren com­put­ers, cheap lap­tops, and even cars. And while many will claim that the solu­tion to this is to open up source code, the Mozilla foun­da­tion itself has admit­ted to the appear­ance of such kill switch in the pop­u­lar Fire­fox browser.

So kill switches are there for the best of inten­tions but how does one define those?

Apple and the App Store

The same kind of issue arises out of the treat­ment of appli­ca­tions to enter the Apple Appli­ca­tion Store. A month doesn’t seem to pass by with­out another exam­ple of a devel­oper see­ing Apple remove his/her pro­grams from their store.

The lat­est exam­ple is that of a devel­oper who appar­ently com­mit­ted the crime of offer­ing an appli­ca­tion that allowed iPhone users to use Google Voice, a Voice over IP pro­gram. And appar­ently, sim­i­lar appli­ca­tions were sub­se­quently removed from the Apple App Store.

While no offi­cial word has been given as to whether the fact that appli­ca­tion were poten­tially rep­re­sent­ing a threat to the busi­ness model of Apple’s exclu­sive part­ners in the tele­com indus­try, it doesn’t seem to be too much of a stretch to think so.

Can such inten­tion be con­sid­ered in the best inter­est of the end user? or in the best inter­est of the device man­u­fac­turer? And can such inten­tion be changed retroac­tively, lever­ag­ing the pres­ence of an exist­ing kill switch?

Ques­tions about the future?

In a pre­vi­ous entry, I’ve argued that we were mov­ing to an econ­omy where goods tended to be rented rather than bought. Embed­ded in what I was try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate there was the ques­tion around what own­er­ship actu­ally means.

If an exter­nal party can con­trol when or how you can use a device or decide on what you can or can­not see, or select what pro­grams you can install on it, are you still own­ing it?

And while today’s cor­po­rate inter­ven­tions are based on the best of inten­tions, what about tomorrow’s? or the next day’s? Will those inten­tions still sync up with yours?

Related Terms

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