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Bits changed everything. We are so familiar with the transformation that most of us barely remember the old way. Before bits, only people could transform information, re-arrange it so that it served a different purpose. The phonebook listed names in alphabetical order. Want to know the name that belonged to a number and you were out of luck. Want to know the phone number of the person who lives at a particular address – out of luck again. Not so now that bits have arrived. Digital information can be rearranged and repurposed. Type a phone number into Google and bingo, the name appears.

For the most part the ability to manipulate data is wonderful. Sometimes, though, it’s a bit creepy.

We’ve written about the difference between information that is available and information that is accessible. I came across a mashup the other day – the combination of a couple of existing components – that definitely fell into the creepy category. Federal Elections Commission data has been available for years, and the tools to search that database have been getting better and better. Combine FEC data and Google maps and you get Fundrace. Take a look at http://fundrace.huffingtonpost.com

Just like the phonebook example, rearranging the data and presenting it in new ways transformed the experience. No need to search just by name any more. Want to see who your neighbors are supporting – just look at the map. How about searching by employer? Color coding by candidate, dots that correspond to the size of the donation Рpretty soon data become information, and what once seemed to be a relatively private activity becomes public and accessible.

Sara Rimer has a nice piece in the Memorial Day New York Times about sustainability houses on college campuses‚Äìresidences where students time their showers, use the drained water to flush their toilets, and so on. Some reported behaviors, such as not bathing at all for extended periods, remind me of ’60s naturalism. Other activities are timelessly collegiate, and unlikely to last a day beyond graduation‚Äìsuch as plastering a picture of John Edwards to the shower stall ceiling as an encouragement to shorter showers.

But one sentence in this story is strikingly modern. “By¬†next fall, the house‚Äôs 24-hour energy-use monitoring system will be fully up and running. Every turn of the faucet, every switch of a light, will be recorded, room by room.”

‚ÄúIt‚Äôs not about telling people, ‚ÄòYou have to do this, you have to do that,‚Äô¬†‚Äù explains one of the students. Not today, at least. I’m betting that the monitoring technology will become more widespread and more coercive‚Äìperhaps not through direct government surveillance, but through economic incentives and social pressures. And all the standard problems with bits will arise with that information about faucet turns and light-switch-flips: who has access to the data, what will it be used for, is it deidentified, will it leak?

Today’s New York Times has a lovely account of corporate surveillance that gives a flavor of the sort of thing that can go wrong. Deutsche Telekom, a large German phone service provider, irritated by repeated leaks about layoff plans, decided to use the data at its disposal to figure out if the leaks were coming from its board of directors. So it turned a lot of call records from 2005 and 2006 over to a third party to check for conversations between directors and reporters. (You may recall that almost exactly the same thing happened at HP not long ago.) Happily, the Germans seem not to be taking this privacy violation lightly. But it’s another example of a general fact about bits: Once they are collected for one reason (in this case, billing, or perhaps traffic analysis), it’s easy to hang onto them just in case they might come in handy later. With the passage of time, the odds go up that someone with access to the data will hatch a bright new idea about how to use it.

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google doesn’t say it wants to be the only source of the world’s information, but it has now moved a step closer to monopoly in the book search area.¬†

Microsoft dropped its book digitization project, stating “Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries.¬†With our investments, the technology to create these repositories is now available at lower costs for those with the commercial interest or public mandate to digitize book content.”

Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive is “disappointed” and plans to keep up his book-digitizing efforts. But along with Microsoft’s thus far unsuccessful struggles to absorb Yahoo!, the death of Microsoft’s book-digitizing project is another sign that the company that defined the software industry is having a hard time shifting to the new economy defined by bits themselves rather than the computer programs that manipulate bits.¬†

Harvard’s University Librarian, Robert Darnton, has a good piece in the New York Review of Books on the future of research libraries. It begins, “Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?”

Nice metaphor, Professor Darnton! (Full disclosure: We were far from the first to use it. “Information Explosion” is the title of a paper by Latanya Sweeney, and the image surely wasn’t original with her either.)

While we’re at it, a tip of the hat to my colleague Stuart Shieber, the architect of Harvard’s open-access policy for research papers. He’s just been named head of Harvard’s newly created Office of Scholarly Communications.

Some estimates of the value of Facebook run as high as $15 billion. How can that be? It’s just some software and some people, right?

Wrong. It’s data about who hundreds of millions of people know, and who those people know, and how often they communicate, and what they are interested in. Every time someone agrees to be your Facebook friend, the two of you have established a link in Facebook’s gigantic friendship graph. Even the fact that you asked that person is probably recorded somewhere, even if he or she ignores you.

As far as I know, the connections between Reverend Wright and Barack Obama, and between Reverend Hagee and John McCain, were not discovered by electronic sleuthing. But such connections are going to be easier to discover in the future than in the past. Facebook data would be a gold mine, but it won’t help much if you decide to stay off such social networking sites. It’s easy for computers to connect people whose names appeared together in old newspaper articles. Photos and videos will be subject to face recognition, so it will be possible to build a huge “appears-in-the-same-image-with” graph automatically. Public figures will have to worry more and more about their associations, as it looks like the public interest in their circle of acquaintances will not diminish anytime soon.

And the power of the government to create such structures of social connections will be even greater than what can be gathered from public sources. The UK may implement a massive data aggregation system, including data on every phone call, email, and instant message in the nation. The fight against terror demands such ubiquitous surveillance, goes the claim.

Would we live our lives differently, fearing that our everyday social contacts, and our adventurous escapades, are all going to wind up in the government’s great social network? How will the world change when clumsy attempts at romantic outreach, phone calls placed to wrong numbers, and group photos snapped at parties all turn into contextless edges in that permanent, all-encompassing social graph?

This gentleman unwisely posted¬†some photos of himself waving a $20 bills as part of a Craigslist ad, and now believes that copyright law, as well as criminal fraud statutes, will come to his aid in encouraging Gawker to take them down. Gawker doesn’t seem to agree.

What’s interesting here is the gentleman’s confusion between public and private spaces, the conceit that the photos he posted on Craigslist were still “his” to control. Theoretically, Craigslist might have an argument with Gawker, since the Craigslist¬†terms of service state, “You ‚Ķ agree not to reproduce, duplicate or copy Content from the Service without the express written¬†consent of craigslist.” As a practical matter, Gawker is right: “Craigslist is a public place.”

Also interesting are the gentleman’s threats of legal action to respond to what might kindly be called a personal misjudgment. What people think might be done about the problems they have created for themselves has changed, not only with the litigiousness of society in general, but with the litigiousness about bits in particular. Before the RIAA and the MPAA started going after teenagers for music downloading, people like this might never even have heard of copyright law, much less have thought (however mistakenly) that it could protect their reputation. Another thing for which the recording industries can be thanked, I suppose.

In Blown to Bits, we write about the various reasons we willingly surrender our privacy. Promises of convenience, economy, and safety all make practices acceptable that would once have been offensive.

Enter Teensurance, a mashup of automobile insurance and global positioning systems aimed at parents of teenagers. With the GPS installed, Mom and Dad can: locate the car instantly; find out instantly when Johnny is exceeding a 60mph; find out when Johnny has driven more than 10 miles from home; know whether Johnny actually arrived at Sam’s house; and get a phone call or email if Johnny is driving after his midnight curfew. The company reports lower accident rates in families using their service.

Whatever its lifesaving merits, getting young people used to such a way of life accommodates them to a new and different understanding of civil liberties. And it is another step toward the infantilization of teenagers, a phenomenon about which I have written in another book.

I wrote a few days ago about the overreaching federal prosecution in this sad case. Blogger Susan Crawford has a good explanation today of just how great the stretch is, and how far the same principle could be taken by ambitious prosecutors to criminalize speech acts never meant to be prohibited by any existing law.

And, as Lawrence Lessig explains in today’s New York Times, Congress seems bent on making it even worse. An “orphaned” work is something that is copyrighted but whose copyright owner can’t be found. Such works can’t be reproduced, performed, or otherwise used in violation of copyright law, but it’s also difficult or impossible to obtain permission to use them since the copyright owner has died or disappeared. Because everything written, photographed, or drawn has been copyrighted automatically for the past thirty years, there are vast numbers of orphaned works, creations that are effectively lost to human culture until the copyright term, nearly a century, expires.

To “fix” the orphaned work problem, Congress proposes immunity from copyright infringement charges for those who make a “diligent effort,” defined as “reasonable and appropriate,” to locate the copyright holder. But it assigns to a bureaucracy the problem of fleshing out that standard. As Lessig explains, this will do more to foster bureaucracy than it will do to liberate orphaned works.

Lessig describes several other problems with this legislation. We would note one broader troubling aspect. The law follows a pattern seen in the past, for example with the Deleting Online Predators Act discussed in Blown to Bits. Congress has developed a habit of handing off to the executive branch of government the job of defining vague terms on which the full force of its legislation depends. The definitions are hard to get right, and require discussion and compromise over fine points of language. So Congress, in its hurry to show that its heart is in the right place, comes up with some verbiage that sounds good but is so vague as to vest vast power in unelected officials charged with implementing it. The courts may overturn such laws later, but by that time Congress has proclaimed its accomplishments, and can blame the courts for their activism and heartlessness. Rather than going to the trouble of legislating carefully, elected officials have been able to devote the full measure of their attention to the earmarks and sports videotaping investigations on they prefer to spend their time. Politically, if the members of Congress can malign the courts at the end of the process for what is really their own legislative laziness, so much the better.

If you purchase some software, do you have the right to run that software on your computer? Blizzard Entertainment, maker of the popular multiplayer game World of Warcraft, is asking an Arizona judge to rule that you don’t have that right. As Blizzard would have it, running a program ‚Äì even software you’ve bought and paid for ‚Äì is copyright infringement unless it’s done with explicit permission from the software publisher. This legal theory rests on the claim that when the computer moves program code from disk to memory in order to run the program, the bits are being copied, hence the liability for copyright infringement. This is the same interpretation of ‚Äúcopying‚Äù that raised its head in the early 1990’s. As described in Blown to Bits, it would lead to the conclusion that almost any use of a computer is potential copyright infringement if done without explicit permission from the software publisher.

In the Arizona case, Blizzard is suing MDY, Inc., which makes a program called Glider. Glider is a bot that that automates some of the activities in playing World of Warcraft, such as fighting. Fire up Glider and you have a large unfair advantage in your game playing that lets you skip ahead to advanced levels of play. Blizzard’s attitude towards Glider is much the same as the International Olympic Committee’s attitude toward steroids.

Using Glider or other bots is against the rules in WoW and violates the user license agreement for the client software. Accordingly, one of Blizzard’s claims is that MDY is encouraging players to break the license and should therefore be liable for so-called ‚Äútortious interference‚Äù with contracts.

Contract violation may be all well and good, but Blizzard goes further, and claims that WoW players who use bots or break other game rules are infringing copyright when they run the WoW client program on their computers. These players may have bought the program, but in Blizzard’s theory, they don’t actually own the copy of the program they paid for: they’ve merely licensed it for certain use. Any other use (including breaking the WoW rules) is unauthorized. And so, the theory goes, copying the program from disk to memory is unauthorized copying, hence infringement; and MDY is therefore guilty of secondary infringement.

What difference does it make whether this is contract violation or copyright infringement? Plenty, as readers of Blown to Bits know. The penalty for copyright infringement includes mandatory statutory damages of at least $750 per violation. That is, a judge must award at least this amount if infringement is proved. MDY, which has sold over 100,000 copies of Glider, would be facing statutory damagers of at least $75 million.

MDY’s fortunes aside, the real losers of a judgment in Blizzard’s favor would be all all of us who use sofware.¬† We’d find that any violation of software license conditions would be copyright infringement with the consequence risk of liability for mandatory statutory damages.¬† This would be the case even though nothing is being copied ‚Äì unless you count the copying of the program into memory to run it. For example, it’s against the rules in WoW to use bots, and it’s also against the rules to give your player a name that includes a title: name your WoW character ‚ÄúKing Alfred‚Äù and bingo ‚Äì copyright infringement and a $750 fine.

In March, both Blizzard and MDY filed motions for summary judgment. Let’s hope the judge throws Blizzard’s copyright claim on the legal junkheap. The world of bits and the world of copyright law have an uneasy enough relationship without resurrecting this absurd legal theory.