people, part of my 2014-2015 lectures at the university of bergamo

People.

Privacy, yet also Copyright,

and Creative Commons

Roberto Peretta

UniBg 44111 2014-2015 .:. IT for Tourism Managers

#09 .:. Thursday, December 4, 2014

Università degli studi di Bergamo. Area didattica di Lingue e Letterature straniere

Progettazione e gestione dei sistemi turistici / Planning and Management of Tourism Systems

Centro Studi per il Turismo e l’Interpretazione del Territorio (CeSTIT)

IfittItaly

People. Privacy, yet also Copyright, and Creative Commons

2

What are we talking about, today?

1. State Of The Net

2. What Privacy Is About?

3. Cryptography and Security

4. Copyright and Creative Commons

5. Monopolies, Bottlenecks, and Sharing ©UniBg 44111 2014-2015 .:. IT for Tourism Managers .:. Roberto Peretta .:. December 4, 2014


State of the Net is simply the title of a conference irregularly held in Friuli-

Venezia Giulia. It was organized for the first time in Udine in 2008.

The next State of the Net conference will probably be held in Trieste sometime in

June 2015.

Your lecturer appreciated the 2012, 2013 and 2014 conferences.

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State Of The Net

State of the Net is “a meeting to learn about Internet initiatives in Italy and the rest

of the world.”

By assuming a State-of-the-Net approach today, we’re introducing some concepts

about the Web and human rights.

UniBg 44111 2014-2015 .:. IT for Tourism Managers .:. Roberto Peretta .:. December 4, 2014


Privacy is a concept of Anglo-Saxon origin linked to the idea of human rights,

which concerns the right of everyone to live their lives free from prying eyes.

(Privacy does not have limitations shared – much less standardized – and in the

eyes of different people, or different cultures, can mean different things.)

It is argued that privacy is now disappearing. For example, telecoms collect data

on where (in which cell) any caller’s and recipient’s cellphones are located –

even when phones have no call in progress –, and data on when, where, how

long, and between whom each and every call takes place are recorded.

This is among the results of the “digital revolution”.

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What Privacy Is About?



From a customers’ point of view, privacy means that

1. if someone collects data on you, he must inform you that he keeps those data,

who’s legally in charge, and what data have been collected;

2. you must be assured that any data collected about you is certainly and

radically erased, if you ask so (with the obvious exceptions of data collected by

public services, like city councils or hospitals, and public business data, like

invoices);

3. webpages containing critical data (such as a bank accounts ID, sensible data,

or any serious passwords) should be encrypted.

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Legal Responsibilities



The concept behind encryption is quite simple – make the data unlegible for

everyone else except those specified.

This is done using cryptography – the study of sending “messages” in a secret form

so that only those authorized to receive the “message” be able to read it.

The easy part of encryption is applying a mathematical function to the plaintext and

converting it to an encrypted cipher.

The harder part is to ensure that the people who are supposed to decipher this

message can do so with ease, yet only those authorised are able to decipher it.

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Cryptography



To be accurate, what financial institutions and commercial firms must guarantee

to their customers while encrypting their message is not simply their privacy. It is

rather called transactions’ security.

Encrypted webpages use a different transmission protocol: https instead than

http.

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Security



Another concept dealing with human rights and the Web is the copyright.

It concerns the intellectual property of a product (a song, a poem, a piece of

software, a new type of wash basin…) that someone has created.

Let’s put it this way. If you’ve written a best seller, you wouldn’t be happy if

someone reprints it, and earn money from the copies sold…

According to international laws, you cannot take a picture from someone else’s

website, and publish it on your website. Why? Because that picture is not yours,

while your website is!

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Copyright

©UniBg 44111 2014-2015 .:. IT for Tourism Managers .:. Roberto Peretta .:. December 4, 2014


In a shared world like the Web, copyright has always been a problem. A sort of

“right to copy” has always been perceived as assured – think of Wikipedia, from

which you can copy whatever you want.

The most serious attempt to contribute a solution to this problem is run by

Creative Commons.

The infrastructure provided by Creative Commons consists of a set of copyright

licenses and tools that create a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved”

setting that copyright law creates.

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Creative Commons



In short, if you adopt Creative Commons, you can decide whether

you allow a free reproduction of your product (picture, video, text) by someone

else

you allow such free reproduction, and also allow your product be transformed,

edited, adapted etc.

you allow any of the free reproductions above, but want the original creator be

mentioned

you don’t allow any reproduction, unless under specific conditions to be

discussed about.

The last corresponds to the copyright

declaration “All Rights Reserved”

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Creative Commons in Short



More generally speaking in terms of human rights, we might observe that

the Web, despite its open-source origins and a persistent open-source

approach, is currently run by de facto monopolies like

Apple for stylish mobility and music

Google for search engines and web maps

Microsoft for operating systems.

This is obviously a harsh simplification…

Think, on the other hand, of how important are for all of us some de-facto-

monopoly open-source initiatives like Wikipedia,

or on the current fight between the Microsoft operating system (which has

absorbed Nokia), the Apple iOS and Android (the Google operating system)…

Anyway, for future professionals like you, it is important to acknowledge that the

Web is not a completely free world,

and always keep in touch with what will be going on.

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Monopolies



Moreover, bottlenecks have been, and are still, always possible.

Think for instance of other sorts of monopolies like telecoms and their fares,

or of the effective availability of wi-fi hot spots,

or of censorship in non democratic countries.

Web servers – as you certainly know – can be managed in order to stop some

websites from being reachable…

and, on the other hand, social sharing is a legal problem, too.

As Andrew Keen underlined in 2012 in his book Digital Vertigo, “today [...] the

social has become [...] the ‘default’ setting on the Internet.”

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Bottlenecks



The most common action we perform on the Web every day is sharing, that is

putting our UGC (or User-Generated Content) in someone else’s database.

When we post on Facebook, we put our creation in some of Mark Zuckerberg’s

databases, and present it to him.

When we post on Google+ we put our creation in some of Larry Page’s or

Sergey Brin’s databases, and present it to them.

When we comment on TripAdvisor, we put our creation in some of the IAC

databases, and present it to them.

When we post on YouTube we put our creation in some of Larry Page’s or

Sergey Brin’s databases, and present it to them.

We accept to make these presents – and accept to give our privacy away –

because sharing is certainly useful and easy.

Nonetheless, we have to be well aware of what we do.

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Sharing


people, part of my 2014-2015 lectures at the university of bergamo

Education