Privacy: August 2007 Archives

Twitter is an informational yard sale. You simply never know when that off-the-cuff comment you toss will alter a person's day. I'll explain via my two favorite use cases:

...The best example of this was a message I sent the last day of conference which read, "Drinks @ the W -- 4pm. I'm buying".

Three hours, thirteen attendees, and several hundred dollars later, I knew two things. First, who doesn't like free booze. Second, the definition of casual information varies wildly by who reads it. I would've happily drunk my margarita on the rocks solo at the W, which is why I threw my invite into Twitter, but it turns out twelve folks took my casual request and made it essential.

...My second Twitter use case involves keeping track of distant friends. ...I immediately started following him because I care what Brent thinks. Yeah, he's had a weblog forever, but the casual information relayed via Twitter is far more real. The act of creating casual information is a real-time slice of your life of the moment. I read messages in Twitter and think that people are giving themselves a headline or a title of a chapter of their lives. Here are the last three on my screen right now:

• Absorbing Jared's Hometown
• A Bit Early for the Cure
• The Wife's Margarita Recipe

Twitter gives me a glimpse into the lives of an interesting collection of people across the planet. It's casual information, but it's also a bit of poetry and it's all better than radio silence. I'd prefer to be drinking with y'all, but I'll take what I can get.

Should ordinary Americans face jail time for attempted copyright infringement? Should the sort of property forfeiture penalties applied in drug busts also threaten P2P users, mixtape makers, and mash-up artists? Of course not, but the Department of Justice (DoJ) has drafted an outrageous legislative proposal that applies these severe penalties and much more. A related bill, H.R. 3155, has already been introduced in Congress -- take action now to stop it using the form below.

Criminal copyright infringement already goes beyond situations involving large-scale commercial piracy. Thanks to laws like the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act and the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act (FECA), the federal government can now criminally charge (i.e., send to prison) people for simply uploading a single "pre-release" song (as two Ryan Adams fans discovered last year when they were brought up on federal charges for uploading tracks from pre-release promotional CDs).

Most of the DoJ's proposed changes to copyright's criminal provisions fall into two categories: (1) making it easier to convict people by eliminating the inconvenient necessity of proving that actual infringement took place, and (2) increasing the financial and confinement punishments. Law enforcement would also be allowed to use wiretaps and to spy on personal communications as part of copyright investigations. That potentially translates into wiretap authority for millions of American homes, since surveys show that 1 in 5 American Internet users downloads music and movies from P2P networks.