Fordham Law School professor Sonia Katyal has written an insightful article about the effect of strengthened copyright law in the digital age (the DMCA) on privacy. Professor Katyal analyzes the difference between privacy in the real world, which she posits is based upon "geographical" limits and their defense, and in cyberspace, where there are no such "geographical" limits.

Katyal claims that the increased private enforcement/surveillance powers awarded to copyright owners under the DMCA provide copyright owners with the presumptive power to limit fair use of copyrighted material and to access private information formerly protected through judicial oversight.

Furthermore, Professor Katyal proposes that the powers the DMCA grants have resulted in a panoptical surveillance system resulting in increased exposure of personal information and reduction of legitimate uses of and access to copyright protected material.

One of Professor Katyal’s more important analyses concludes that the potential effect of the DMCA and recent court cases in which she proposes that a computer user opening his or her computer to any third party (such as in peer-to-peer communication) forfeits the shield of privacy with regard to information residing on that computer's hard drive.

Given the tremendous resistance to certain provisions of the DMCA and the unintended consequences of that law, the recent hearings on H.R. 107 offer hope that Congress is revisiting this matter again.

Some choice statements Professor Katyal makes:

EFF's Deep Links (Donna Wentworth) has a practical and useful article about protecting your privacy when using web-based mail services.

On my way to DC yesterday, I picked up a copy of PC Connections, a custom publicaiton of PC Connections, Inc., which is one of the myriad "free" publications available on the shuttle.

A short piece on p.9 discusses workplace blogs and their increasing popularity. A privacy and security expert from Proskauer Rose states that "compan[ies are] liable if an employee posts libelous material. . . " The expert's analysis assumes a traditional analysis of publisher liability. But how would this play out in a "news" context, which one might argue is involved in the use of RSS or XML feeds? In other words, is there liability for simply "reporting" the statement of another? Is this publication? If I don't "report" it but link to it, am I republishing it? Are we all becoming legitimate news sources as we are publishers?