William Carleton, Counselor @ Law

Crowdsourcing Cybersecurity

The federal government is working on a national policy to safeguard identities in online transactions, and is inviting the public to submit comments and vote on the crowdsourced ideas.

Not only can you vote on the ideas, the most popular of which float to the top; you can comment on the ideas submitted, too.

It would be even cooler if government officials or persons involved in drafting the policy would engage in the comment stream. Maybe they do, but I didn't see it in the poking around I did last night.

I noticed that the feedback and community tools for the feds have been supplied by a Seattle-area company, IdeaScale. Looks like they have also built a site for public feedback on the FCC's national broadband plan.

Pretty sweet! Imagine if you could interact with the Federal Register this way, to comment on proposed rules. 

Should a Proprietary Well Remain a Trade Secret After it Ruptures?

Speaking of NDAs, a friend and college classmate of mine notes that the assertion of confidentiality and trade secrets is impeding what we can know about what is happening in the Gulf.

Here's an excerpt from what I learned in mail from Mary J. Spry Roth, a Professor of civil and environmental engineering at Lafayette College:

The oil situation in the gulf is truly a disaster and I agree that the public is not getting much information that helps them understand what really happened and what is happening now. I also agree that this is an amazing teaching moment.  And I admit that I (and probably thousands of other folks who like me have some background that touches on the problems that are being addressed) am frustrated by the lack of information being provided in the news about the geology and technology and the interaction of those two things that is so vital to understand in order to comprehend what is happening.

That frustration is multiplied by the knowledge that the technology being used by the oil industry and the information concerning the geology of the oil fields is highly proprietary and has been kept under tight wraps by the oil industry - people in the industry maintain a high level of secrecy and those who have left the industry are almost always legally bound to maintain that secrecy.  What the equipment and materials are, how they are installed and used, and the geological conditions that are involved, is information that is known by very few people.

. . . Folks in my own field don't deal with the geology at those depths and have no training in the mechanical and chemical systems being used (and in the particular situation in the gulf - the foundations for the small structures on the ocean floor are not significant to the problems being encountered); geologists also have no training in the mechanical and chemical systems; the folks with the appropriate knowledge are those who work for the oil companies and as I mentioned above, their lips are typically sealed unless you can find a whistle-blower. . .

Two thoughts come to mind: (1) the government could indemnify and hold harmless any whistleblower who reveals pertinent information so that this problem could be crowdsourced (I don't like this one so much; it again has the taxpayer footing the bill); and (2) courts could use the common law doctrine of nuisance, or some similar theory, to declare NDAs in this area unenforceable, against public policy.

Just how solid our beliefs in private property and proprietary rights are -- that is on display here, seems to be trumping the imperative of communal or societal preservation.

Report on the AVC Seattle Meetup

A group of Fred Wilson's Seattle fans met Sunday afternoon at Duke's Chowder House on Lake Union. The meetup was part of the initiative Fred announced last month as a way to mark his 5,000th blog post on AVC. We had a great time!

Here's a picture of us. Counterclockwise around the table, starting from the lower right, are: Irene Tamura, Nikki Doan, Linh Nguyen, Joe Ludwig, Rand Fishkin, Carlos del Rio, Chad Fisher, Frank Deng and yours truly.

Everyone talked a bit about what they do, what they like about Fred's blog, and a current problem they have. General discussion topics included:

• How hard it is to find engineers (employment market has suddenly changed)
• The chart Fred recently ran showing the growth of online advertising spend
• LTE vs. WiMAX
• How we had a substantial proportion of Seattle's SEO community (i.e., Chad, Carlos and Rand) in the room

Frank gets the prize as the most intrepid, as he traveled from Vancouver BC for the occasion!

Urban Journal: Friday Night in Seattle

I had dinner night before last with a visionary technologist who has done some amazing things over the last 20 years, things that have impacted the way we live now. 

We met at Spinasse, and just so happened to be seated next to a party that included the Foursquare Mayor of the place. (I know this because a person in her party confronted me with my picture on her iPhone, after I checked in.)

At any rate, over a bottle of barbaresco, we talked about the President's non-response to the Gulf oil crisis, our children, the new project he's involved in (top secret), and my prediction of "the end of advertising." 

I admitted the flaws in my theory, as put to me last week by my youngest son. "Dad," he told me, "they're not advertising to make you aware that they're there and break through the clutter, they're marketing to condition you to want something you wouldn't otherwise need." 

My dinner companion agreed with that, but allowed I might nevertheless lay out my argument in terms of relative inefficiencies in the availablity and exchange of information, and how the mitigation or elimination of those inefficiencies deprive advertising of the conditions in which it has (a modicum of) social utility. 

Were accurate, timely, relevant information so ubiquitous you wouldn't bother even to google it to get it, no one would tolerate, or even notice, sponsored messages. Twitter was the experiment that was beginning to illustrate how that might work, even if recent news suggests they will sell themselves short and sign up to further perpetuate (if only briefly) advertising, that antiquated business model of the 20th century. 

My dinner companion said I was off 15, perhaps 20, years into the future. (Arguably good news, for some of my clients.) Moreover, he said my vision was dependent upon development of a "mind interface," such that there would be no latency between matching the thoughts one had with the information at hand. 

We then turned to imagining the privacy brouhaha there would be were a network to begin publishing the thoughts of the networked minds. It would make what Facebook's doing now seem trivial!

Wanted: Blogger with Ambition to Inspire 10,000 Teens to Become Engineers

The nation needs a civil engineer to blog about the gulf oil crisis on a daily basis, to post videos, to draft charts and draw diagrams and treat what's happening as a textbook technical challenge.

Younger children are frightened by what is happening. Older kids are disillusioned that adults have put in motion something beyond what any adult will account for.

The President famously said in a press conference last week that his daughter was asking him when the hole would be plugged. Many older kids wouldn't wait on adult answers, if they could imagine themselves with skills to assess the problem for themselves.

The gulf oil spill presents a once-in-a-decade teaching opportunity.

The teacher would be an engineer, but not one speaking to other engineers or to BP or to the impacted governments, not to them only. She would be speaking to young people, and not about the politics or the morality of what has happened, not that only. Instead, she would talk about how science and math might be applied to yield an engineer's solution to an engineering problem.

Adults don't owe children answers adults don't have. But adults do owe it to children to seize opportunities to empower them. For some kids, now is a great time to talk about pressure, velocity, the strengths and weaknesses of materials. Hearts are open and imaginations are ready to seize hold of a future.

Image: detail from "Eye of the Storm" (2007), Patti Warashina.

AVC Seattle Meetup, June 6

In celebration of his 5,000th blog post, Fred Wilson announced on his blog yesterday that there would be "meetups" on Sunday, June 6, at different locations around the world.

As of this writing (Monday night, for posting Tuesday), there are 102 planned meetup locations.

Signed up for Seattle so far are Tolis Dimopoulos, Alex Koloskov, Niall Smart, Ruchit Garg and me. Puget Sounders, indicate that you will join in, here!

Here's some background from Fred's post about the technology being used to organize the meetups: 

"Meetups Everywhere is a new feature being launched today by our portfolio company Meetup. This community is one of many that are using this new feature to bring all the relationships that are getting built online into the real world. I am very excited about Meetup Everywhere and what it can do to facilitate even more Meetups and real world relationships. As Scott Heiferman, founder of Meetup, is fond of saying, 'the internet is a great tool to get people off the internet.'"

I signed up and volunteered to organize the meeting for Seattle, and within about 30 seconds, received the following email. 

From: info@meetup.com [mailto:info@meetup.com]
Sent: Monday, May 24, 2010 12:58 PM
To: William Carleton
Subject: You're now the host of the AVC meetup!

You'll find the latest info. for the Meetup here:
http://www.meetup.com/AVC/1704/

Spread the word and make the meetup happen! 

So this app ain't fooling around!

Checking In on the Rights You Grant to Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare & Gowalla

Social media sites need to monetize soon, or so they say (so much so, they now say Facebook has been profitable for some time). That means each player is going to have to figure out how best to exploit user generated content without turning off the membership base.

That also means taking a position about the rights each service thinks it has in user generated content.

Here's a working chart that compares how each of Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare and Gowalla purport to handle the IP inherent in content generated by their users. This is from a brief analysis of the terms of service on each site on April 4, 2010. Please let me know if you see errors or have suggestions for other points to compare.

	Twitter	Facebook	FourSquare	Gowalla
Recognition of your ownership of your user generated content (UGC)	Yes	Ambiguous (license to FB is of content “covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos”)	Yes	Implicit
The UGC license you grant is perpetual	No	No (license theoretically would terminate if your friends deleted all your shared content)	Yes	Yes
You expressly grant a license to other users of the service	No	No	Yes (limited to “personal, non-commercial use”)	No
You grant a right of publicity or “personality rights” license	No	Unclear; possible you have granted an exclusive license (“You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain”)	No (but you do represent that you have publicity rights to the person you purport to be)	Yes

The most interesting thing in the chart, for me, is Gowalla's stake in the ground on a right of publicity.

In an post last fall about Twitter's terms of service, I had surmised that a moral right of attribution might emerge in the industry; but I didn't see that, at least not overtly, in the brief survey I took last night. 

No surprise: Facebook is the most mysterious and problematic all around.