Information Law Possum

A funny observation: It’s now 2.40 p.m., and for about an hour now dozens of cars are performing a chorus of horns in downtown St. Gallen where I live.

This is extrordinary: Weddings (an occasion where our Italian immigrants love to do this) take place on Saturdays in Switzerland. There’s no soccer game involving Italy, Croatia, Serbia, or Turkey either. I was wondering until I remembered that Kosovo could declare its independence within the next days. So I checked the online news — and yes, a parliamentary meeting has been scheduled for 3 p.m. in Pristina to formally declare Kosovo’s independence.

What’s remarkable about this from an information point of view is that the 1-bit chorus of horns serves here as a token for a more complex message (”Kosovo is declaring its independence”), and that the internet helps outsiders like me decipher that message.

Like almost everything, this issue involves an interesting question of information law: Honking is of course only permitted as a warning signal in road traffic. When a Kosovar immigrant uses his horn to spread the message of independence, may he then invoke the freedom of speech if he is fined? I’m inclined to say yes, even if this doesn’t change anything in the result, namely that the restriction is certainly justified.

As Jusletter reports, the Swiss federal government proposes to repeal 11% of the federal statutes and to purge another 8%. 31 federal laws and parliamentary resolutions might be gone soon, together with 168 regulations.

It’s nothing new that laws are information themselves, and that they are prone to all the problems that come under the heading of information quality. But the subject nevertheless raises interesting questions:

How did they find out that they don’t need a given provision any longer? Did they check the access statistics for the (excellent) corpus juris of the Confederation, the federal government’s most popular website as an official explained to me once? Did they e-mail the competent authorities and ask them to scan the laws relevant to their field of activity? And how do they make sure that no provision will be struck that is still needed?

How much did the whole ”deep scan” of the corpus cost, and how much money do they expect to save with this clean-up? If no-one uses a law any longer, its mere existence on paper and on servers does not seem to do much harm.

This might be worth some research, which I don’t have time to do, unfortunately. The regulatory problem being to find out whether a law is still “alive”, i.e. needed and complied with, reminds me of the difficulties doctors sometimes have when they have to decide whether a patient is deeply comatose or brain dead.

The genome of the Information Law Possum has not been sequenced!

As Nature reported yesterday, a group of MIT researchers has sequenced the genome of the ILP’s close relative, Monodelphis domestica, the Gray Short-tailed Opossum.  However, as insiders know, the Information Law Possum is a Virginia Opossum and thus still conceals its genetic identity.

An update to the resume story

The Russian Yale student decided to end his fifteen minutes of fame:

First, he sent a cease and desist letter to IvyGate, the Ivy League gossip blog that posted his video on Youtube and on the blog itself.

Second, he made a DMCA complaint with Youtube:

From: DMCA Complaints
To: ivygate
Date: Oct 10, 2006 9:06 PM
Subject: Video Rejected: Copyright Infringement

Dear Member:

This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification [...] claiming that this material is infringing:

IvyGate: Worst Resume Ever: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjRZgmc3RyQ

[...]

Sincerely,
YouTube, Inc. 

As a consequence, IvyGate decided to host the video directly on its server, making a fair use claim with respect to the video.  They also might want to report the letter to chillingeffects.org.

Intermediate result: 1-1. The video and the resume are still online, but less easy to retrieve than before. As many cases before, the story tells us that it’s impossible to contain the dissemination of unwanted information over the www. This may be a good thing or not, depending on from whose perspective the information is unwanted (the Russian student, President Mugabe, me).

What is sad from a policy perspective is the fact that copyright law seems to be a more effective privacy enforcement tool that the law of privacy itself.