Julianna Yau’s blog

I was eager to attend today’s lecture/workshop with Margaret Jane Radin because I have, for some time now, wondered whether it is legal for contracts and agreements to be enforced unilaterally (my favourite response to this can be found at the bottom of this website). Although Radin didn’t address that specific question, her lecture provided me with much background information for me to get a better understanding of the issue.

The basis for her lecture was not particularly about digitalized contracts (which for me meant the existence of contracts primarily in digital format, such as on a website), but exploring the possibility of a digital handshake between two digital entities.

Radin walked us through the different types of agreements and how the public has been moved through one to another, including End User Rights, Terms of Service, and End User Agreements. There was also quite a bit of discussion on the fact that the concept of an agreement has changed—something which concerned her and likewise concerns me. Historically, people entered into contractual agreements voluntarily, but (and I’m paraphrasing and adding my own perspective here) as business became more corporate and more private, these contractual agreements became less voluntary. For the change in agreement, Radin focused primarily on the fact that the agreement is now no longer the link between two persons but between a person and the digital object, whether that be something as physical as a cell phone or as intangible as software.

She was very excited about the prospect of contracts having the possibility of being modular now that contracts are so easily available in digital format (and therefore much more accessible than in the past). She spent a bit of time talking about how contracts can now be simultaneously more standardized and more customized because of this possibility of modularity. Not only can companies modularize their own contracts, but they can also appropriate portions of other companies’ contracts into their own. This made me wonder (perhaps dangerously so) whether contracts themselves qualify for copyright protection under current copyright law.

One thing I noticed is that both Radin and Litman spoke of the “holes” in copyright law as something intentional and good. This is certainly not the perspective of many groups (e.g. the RIAA) although, as Radin pointed out, the copyright acts we have now were written by the primary industry stakeholders in copyright.

On October 16th, I attended Jessica Litman’s lecture on Copyright Liberties and the “Trumpet Problem”. The lecture was very exciting for me, because I recently finished reading her book Digital Copyright, which I loved. At the lecture, I was relieved that she knows her material well and is not only enthusiastic about it but also current. It has been a few years since I’ve attended a lecture, and many of my professors at the time were dull enough to drive me to the Independent Studies program at UWaterloo.

She touched briefly on having to distinguish the difference between distribution and making available, which I personally find to be two different but related concepts which the music and movie industries are all too eager to call one and the same.

Litman asked us, indirectly, to look more at the reason for copyright, rather than the forms and details of existing and past copyright laws. From her overview of the history of copyright law, it was obvious that the advancement of technology was moving much too quickly for the establishment of law, and I suspect that gap is increasing now that self-publishing of not merely artistic works but also technological works becomes easier.

For me, what was perhaps most interesting was a little tidbit she dropped: the RIAA doesn’t want an “ipod levy” because they don’t want to legalize personal copying. Hmm.

So I’m finally venturing into writing my own blog. This is probably a long time coming for someone who is as enthusiastic about the internet (and technology in general) as I am. I’ve been delaying the creation and maintenance of a blog because the fluid nature of the internet poses for me some challenges in identity and categorization. I am prone to spending much of my time building a system of sorting and categorization. Recently, after watching Information R/evolution, I was able to convince myself that I need to say goodbye to the days of card catalogs and linear relationships between my thoughts.

The identity issue is one I don’t expect to change too soon. My interests position me well as “eccentric” or, more recently, “inter-disciplinary”. A quick look at my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia or my movie list on IMBD will shed some light onto my interests which most persons don’t consider to be easily compatible.

The most pressing reason for this blog is I recently discovered the Innovation Law and Theory Workshops at UofT and am interested in blogging about them. Although I already have a sculptor’s journal, that isn’t really an appropriate place for blog postings on technology and law.