Primavera De Filippi

ONTOLOGIES OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Keywords: Ontology, copyright, metadata

As both the quantity and the variety of published material continue to grow over the years, keeping track of the different publications available and of their respective versions and editions has become a complex task. Besides, given the malleability of digital content, identifying the copy of a work consistently over time has become increasingly difficult. An ontological framework capable of identifying the different aspects of a work should therefore be developed in order to determine the extent to which the terms and conditions of a copyright license may or may not apply to the various instances of a work.

FRBR

With the dramatic increase in the amount of information that has become available in the information society, a need has emerged for society to archive and organize information according to a set of established standards and principles that would allow for every piece of information to be identified and retrieved by anyone in a consistent manner. The Functional Requirement for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) constitutes an attempt to individuate the various attributes of a work that are being commonly referred to in bibliographic records. In particular, the FRBR framework subdivides a work into four constitutive elements: (1) the work as a distinct intellectual creation, (2) the expression as a particular realization of the work, (3) the manifestation as the physical embodiment of the expression and (4) the item as a single exemplar of the manifestation.

The scope of copyright protection

Copyright law provides authors with a series of exclusive rights against the unauthorized exploitation of their works. The law does not however provide a uniform level of protection to every aspect of the work.

The work as a purely abstract and conceptual idea is not eligible for protection because the copyright does not protect the ideas underlying the work but only the expression thereof. In order to be protected, the work must therefore assume a sufficiently detailed structure which consists of more than a basic idea and which can be easily recognized in the case of non-literal copying.

Although it is generally said that copyright ultimately vests in the expression of a work, protection does not apply to the expression as the entity has been defined in the FRBR framework (according to which even a minor change in the content will inevitably produce a new expression of the work). In the framework of copyright law, the scope of protection extends far beyond one particular expression of the work. For instance, the translation of a work from one language to another or the conversion from one medium to another (e.g. the making of a movie based on a literary work) would constitute copyright infringement in so far as it entails the reproduction of the overall structure of the work.

As for the manifestation, it may sometimes be eligible for protection whenever the copyright regime provides for the protection for typographical arrangements of published editions, although this is limited to very few jurisdictions.

The correlation between copyright law and the FRBR is therefore not as straightforward as it may seem. While the expression of the work is what constitutes the ultimate unit of analysis, it is not unconditionally protected. On the one hand, copyright only protects against actual copying, so that the independent making of an identical or substantially similar expression would not necessarily amount to copyright infringement. On the other hand, copyright only protects the "original expression" of a work, so that whenever a work incorporates facts or elements that have been taken from the public domain, certain parts of the expression will not be protected under copyright law. Accordingly, in spite of its widespread application in the framework of bibliographic records, the FRBR does not appear suitable to describe the scope of protection granted to any original work of authorship.

The object of the copyright

In the context of the licensing of rights, the FRBR framework may be unable to properly determine the object of the rights that are being licensed, as well as to identify the various entities that constitute the copy of a work.

As a general rule, the item is the best candidate to qualify as the copy of a work since it is the only entity that can actually be identified in the real world. 1 In the digital world, however, the physical 1 The FRBR framework distinguishes between the work (as a general concept), the expression (as a particular realization of the work into a specific arrangement of signs or symbols), the manifestation (as a particular concretization of the expression into a specific format) and the item (as a particular instance of the manifestation into a given medium of expression). Given that everything that subsists above the level of the "item" is fundamentally intangible, the item constitutes the only concrete entity of the whole item has lost most of its significance to the extent that it refers to an ephemeral entity which can no longer be used to identify the copy of a work. If it cannot be identified according to its physical characteristics, a different approach has to be adopted to consistently identify a digital copy over time.

A different layer of abstraction may therefore have to be taken into account in order to identify the copy of a digital work. Yet, neither the work as a general concept, nor the expression or the manifestation of the work is likely to constitute a suitable alternative. 2 A solution might be that of introducing additional layers of abstraction into the FRBR framework in order to provide another set of entities that could fundamentally act as a link between the manifestation of a work and the physical representation thereof.

As such, the notion of a digital copy would no longer be regarded as a 'token' but rather as a 'type' which could be instantiated into a variety of items that do not have to be either physically or digitally identical as long as they can be logically identified as belonging to the same type (i.e. as long as they incorporate the same digital entity). Yet, even though it would theoretically be possible to introduce a series of new entities into the FRBR in order to produce a framework that is more compliant with the specificities of the digital environment, when it comes to identifying the actual copy of a digital work, the actual structure of the FRBR is however likely to be debilitating given that every entity may only subsist within one particular layer of abstraction. 3 An alternative method of identification might therefore be necessary.

framework and is as such the only entity can actually be observed and experienced in the real world. See IFLA (1998) Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. IN SAUR, K. G. (Ed., IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records.

2 Identifying the copy of a work according to the general concept it embodies is likely to be too general, as it would not account for the copyright vesting in the different expressions of the work. Likewise, identifying the copy of a work according to the way it has been expressed would necessarily ignore the distinction between the different manifestations of the work which may as well be eligible for copyright protection. Finally, identifying the copy of a work according to its manifestation (e.g. PDF versus HTML) would ignore the fact that the same manifestation could theoretically be conveyed to the public in a variety of manners (e.g. with a different set of metadata, different technological measures of protection, etc) which are likely to affect the ultimate consumption thereof.

IAO

The Information Artifact Ontology (IAO) is a new ontology of information entities, whose structure is based upon the principles of the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO),4 an upper-level ontology whose structure and design are grounded into a robust realist approach. The purpose of the IAO is to identify the basic entities that constitute an 'information artifact' (i.e. any piece of information that does not exists in nature but has been produced by a particular individual or machine) and to incorporate them into a formal taxonomy in order to define the relations that subsist amongst them. 5 The basic configuration of the IAO is fundamentally composed of three core categories of entities:

(1) the information entities themselves, (2) the processes they are involved in, and (3) the material bearers by which they are being conveyed to the public. These three categories are ultimately linked together through a series of connections that indicate the various relationships they each entertain with each other or with other kinds of entities. 6 In particular, in so far as it relates to the realm of information artifacts, the core and the most interesting entity of the IAO is likely to be the Information Content Entity (ICE), which basically represents the entity that qualifies as the actual content of information. Yet, according to the degree of granularity that is being taken into account in the analysis of a particular information artifact, different entities may need to be identified at different levels of abstraction.

Universals and particulars

A universal is a 'type' which may only exist in so far as it has been instantiated into a 'token', which is generally referred to as a particular.7 Universals and particulars are therefore inherently related by a relationship of instantiation. 8

The main role of universals is to provide a basis for the classification of particulars.9 However, it may sometimes be necessary to introduce an additional order of classification that does not exist in nature so as to allow for different entities to be identified according to their belonging to an arbitrary categorization. The notion of a class may therefore be introduced in order regroup a series of particulars together under a common entity whose identity has been established by a series of arbitrary criteria10 that designate the specific characteristics that must be shared by every particular it comprises. 11 available to define the boundaries of universals. Defined classes can thus be composed of a completely arbitrary set of entities which are not necessarily related to each other if not for the mere fact that they belong to the same class. For instance, the members of the class unionOf(chocolate, dog, sun) are not related to each other according to any universal concepts, but only according to an arbitrary classification. As opposed to universals, classes are generally defined not only on the basis of material properties and attributes, but also on the basis of conceptual properties that can only be observed in a particular cultural system. See e.g. READ, D. W. (1989) Intuitive typology and automatic classification: Divergence or full circle? Journal of Anthroopological Archaeology,8, A defined class represents a particular collection of particulars which are regrouped together according to specific criteria which have been arbitrarily established (e.g. 'employee of a particular bank', 'fans of a particular band', etc) and could not be understood without taking into consideration the social and cultural context that pertains to the particular portion of reality that is being analyzed. For a more detailed overview of the differences between universals, classes and defined classes, see SMITH,

Continuants and occurrents

Another important distinction established in the BFO is between the category of continuants and the category of occurrents. Continuants are entities that retain their identity and their form over time (such as, for instance, persons, books, ideas, etc) whereas occurrents are entities that do not possess a persistent identity or form and may only occur during a particular period of time (such as, e.g. the life of a person, the writing of a book, the formulation of an idea, etc). Common instances of occurrents are generally described as processes, events, or any other occurrence that is intrinsically bound in time. 12 Within the BFO framework, the category of continuants has been subdivided into a series of subcategories. On the one hand, independent continuants 13 are concrete and material entities whose identity can be defined independently from that of any other entity (e.g. a person or a book). As 12 According to Zemach, things are entities which are bound in space and continuous in time, whereas events or processes are entities which are bound in time but not in space given that they have no spatial boundaries. For more details, see ZEMACH, E. (1970) Four Ontologies. Journal of Philosophy, 67. In particular, the latter category of entities can be distinguished in two kinds: (1) entities that unfold themselves through a particular period of time, and (2) entities that constitute the temporal boundaries of the former kind of entities. See GRENON, P. & SMITH, B. (2007) Persistence and Ontological Pluralism. IN KANZIAN, C. (Ed.) Persistence. New York, Springer. 13 The IAO defines an independent continuant as a continuant that is a bearer of quality and realizable entity entities, in which other entities inhere and which itself cannot inhere in anything. Examples include an organism, a heart, a leg, a person, a symphony orchestra, a chair, the bottom right portion of a human torso, the lawn and atmosphere in front of our building. For more details, see http://www.ifomis.org/bfo/1.1/snap#IndependentContinuant such, they are likely to exhibit a series of distinctive characteristics which may eventually change over time without however affecting the overall identity thereof. 14 On the other hand, dependent continuants 15 are entities that require the existence of another continuant in order to come into being or in order to subsist over time (e.g. an idea can only subsist insofar as it has been incorporated into a particular support, such as the human brain). More precisely, the entities that pertain to this latter category have been further distinguished into generically dependent continuants (GDC) 16 -e.g. the content of a book -which can be incorporated into any kind of support regardless of the identity thereof, and specifically dependent continuants (SDC) 17 -e.g. the actual patterns of ink that represents the content of a book -which are inherently dependent upon the subsistence of that specific book as a support. The main difference between a GDC and a SDC is that the former can inhere into more than one entity at a time and could potentially continue to exist even after the entity into which it has been originally incorporated has ceased to exist. As a general rule, in fact, a GDC is generically dependent upon the subsistence of at least one SDC which represents a particular concretization thereof, and that particular SDC is in turn specifically dependent upon the subsistence of the particular entity into which it inheres. 18

14 Independent continuants can be of very diverse nature. Yet, one of their defining characteristics is that they are such as to allow for other continuants (e.g. qualities, dispositions, functions, etc) to inhere unto them. While independent continuants can be distinguished by their distinctive attributes, the actual value of these attributes may be subject to change without actually affecting the identity of the independent continuant to which they relate. For more details, see SPEAR, A. D. Ontology for the Twenty First Century: An Introduction with Recommendations. Saarbrucken, Germany, Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science. 15 The IAO defines a dependent continuant as a continuant that is either dependent on one or other independent continuant bearers or inheres in or is borne by other entities. For more details, see http://www.ifomis.org/bfo/1.1/snap#DependentContinuant 16 The IAO defines a generically dependent continuant as a continuant that is dependent on one or other independent continuant bearers. For every instance of A requires some instance of (an independent continuant type) B but which instance of B serves can change from time to time. An example of a generically dependent continuant is a certain PDF file that exists in different and in several hard drives. For more details, see http://www.ifomis.org/bfo/1.1/snap#GenericallyDependentContinuant 17 The IAO defines a specifically dependent continuant as a continuant that inheres in or is borne by other entities. Every instance of A requires some specific instance of B which must always be the same. Examples of specifically dependent continuants include the mass of a cloud, the smell of mozzarella, the liquidity of blood, the color of a tomato, etc. For more details, see http://www.ifomis.org/bfo/1.1/snap#SpecificallyDependentContinuant 18 A SDC can fundamentally be regarded as a bridge between a particular GDC and any given independent continuant upon which is has been incorporated. Accordingly, although a GDC can potentially be instantiated into an indefinite number of entities, it may only be materialized by the means of a particular SDC that basically represents the concretization of the GDC into a particular entity upon which it specifically depends. While the SDC is specifically dependent upon the existence of the particular entity to which it refers, the GDC is thus only generically dependent upon the existence of at least one entity into which it inheres. For more details, see SPEAR, A. D. Ontology for the Twenty First Century: An Introduction with Recommendations. Saarbrucken, Germany, Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science.

Information artifacts

An information artifact should not be confused with a physical artifact. In the context of the IAO, in fact, an information artifact has been defined to include not only the information bearer as the physical medium of expression (independent continuant), but also the information carrier as the specific properties of that medium that incorporate the information (specifically dependent continuant) and the information content entity as the particular pattern that constitutes the actual body of information (generically dependent continuant). 19

Information content entity

Defined as an entity that is generically dependent on some artifact and that stands in relation of 'aboutness' to some entity, 20 the Information Content Entity (ICE) is the pattern that constitutes the content of any given piece of information.

An important requirement is that an ICE must have been intentionally produced, in the sense that it must have been created either by a sentient with the intention to produce an information artifact, or 19 Although there is no official definition of what constitute an information artifact for the purposes of the IAO, the term has been loosely defined as "a dependent continuant or its bearer that is created as the result of one or more intentional processes." Examples include: uniprot, the english language, the contents of this document or a printout of it, the temperature measurements from a weather balloon, etc. For more information, see the project home page at http://code.google.com/p/information-artifact-ontology 20 An information content entity has been defined by the IAO as "an entity that is generically dependent on some artifact and stands in relation of aboutness to some entity". See http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/IAO_0000030 by a machine which has been intentionally designed for that purpose. 21 Therefore anything created by a natural phenomenon may not qualify as an ICE in spite of the fact that it may actually provide information to a potential receiver.

Another distinctive characteristic is that in order to qualify as an ICE an entity has to be related to (i.e. be about) something that actually exist in the real world. 22 Under the IAO framework, reality has however been given a very general definition so as to be able to include not only tangible things that can be observed in the physical world, but also universals, general beliefs, ideas, or concepts subsist in the mind of people.

Finally, given that it can only be observed in the real world after it has been concretized into a particular medium of expression, an ICE does not actually stand on its own. 24 The subsistence of an ICE necessarily relies upon the existence of at least one independent continuant that constitutes the particular medium of expression by which the information is conveyed to the public. Yet, the extent that it can be reproduced in many perfect copies and on a variety of different media, an ICE does not actually depend upon a specific medium of expression and is therefore to be regarded as a GDC as opposed to a SDC.

Information carrier

Before it can be incorporated into a new medium, an instance of the ICE needs however be produced. In order for an ICE to actually inhere into a particular medium of expression (e.g. a given piece of paper), it has to be first concretized into a particular entity (e.g. a given pattern of ink) which basically qualifies as an carrier by virtue of the fact that it actually instantiates the ICE.

As such, the instantiation of an ICE always and necessarily leads to the production of a particular carrier of information whose key function is to identify a series of attributes and physical characteristics which have to be assumed by a particular medium of expression in order for it to be capable of conveying the relevant information to the public. 27 These qualities are what actually constitute the information carrier. Indeed, in so far as it describes the way in which a particular ICE has to be materialized into the real world, the information carrier can fundamentally be regarded as that particular quality of an independent continuant that ultimately imparts the information content.

Information bearer

The information bearer is the physical object into which the content is encoded. It basically consists of any material entity (e.g. a book, a photograph, a CD, a hard drive, etc) upon which an ICE generically depends. 28 Regardless of its nature or type, any medium of expression could eventually assume the quality of an information bearer by virtue of the mere fact that it incorporates a particular type of ICE. Conversely, any medium which currently qualifies as an information bearer could eventually be deprived of this quality to the extent that it no longer exhibits the particular set of attributes by the information carrier (e.g. a book whose pages have been burnt, a defective CD-ROM, etc).

The concept of a copy

For the same reasons why the item has become unable to identify the various copies of a work that subsist in the digital environment, the notion of an information bearer as it has been described by the IAO has equally lost its value as an indicator of what constitutes the copy of a digital work.

Yet, the greater flexibility of the IAO allows for its basic structure to be continuously enhanced with a series of arbitrarily defined classes. The copy of a digital work could therefore be described by means of a defined class which would basically regroup a number of information bearers together under a single entity provided that they fulfill a particular set of criteria. 29 Accordingly, while there can be only one instance of a copy in the physical world, in the digital environment, the copy of a work may potentially be instantiated into a variety of information bearers which may or may not subsist at the same time. As such, a digital copy does not therefore qualify as an actual entity with a predetermined scope, but should rather be regarded as a generic place holder for information bearers which may eventually gain or lose their pertinence to the class according to their specific attributes of content and form.

As such, however, the digital copy does not subsist at any specific layer of abstraction. Even though the work, the expression and the manifestation of a work are actually related to each other by a directional link (i.e. the manifestation is a particular representation of the expression, which in turn qualifies as a particular realization of the work), the digital copy does not perfectly fit into that structure. One the one hand, it may in fact assume different manifestations while nonetheless retaining its identity as a particular copy of the work, whereas, on the other hand, various digital files which are identical on a bit-wise level of abstraction do not necessarily qualify as the same copy of the work.

If the function of a 'copy' is to determine the scope of the rights granted to any given licensee, it is ultimately for the right holder to determine the extent to which the various provisions of a copyright license should be applicable to the different instances of the work. Given that the 'copy' does no longer have any physical corpus in the digital world, only the copyright license can provide a definition of what constitutes the copy of a digital work. 30 30 Given that the rights granted under an end-user licensing agreement exclusively refer to one particular copy of the work, the only way to establish the identity of a copy in the digital environment is to analyze the terms and conditions of the license under which it While, in the physical world, the copy of a work is what determines the scope of application of an end-user licensing agreement, in the digital world, instead, it is the actual end-user licensing agreement that determines the scope of the copy that is being licensed, the identity of which ultimately depends upon the terms and conditions that have been incorporated into the copy itself.31 2.4.1. Identity criteria Given that a digital copy may inhere into more than one information bearer, it is not possible to rely upon the physical attributes of the information bearer in order to identify the copy of a work. A different set of criteria must therefore be employed to determine equality amongst the different entities that qualify as the same copy of the work.

One condition is that all information bearers incorporate the same expression of the work. While they may not incorporate the same ICE (i.e. the same manifestation), in order to qualify as a particular copy of the work, they must necessarily refer to an identical expression of the work. This does not mean, however, that the content may assume any kind of structure or form. Whenever a copy is produced, in fact, the copyright owner may introduce a series of requirements that any ICE has to comply with in order for the bearer thereof to be regarded as an instance of the digital copy. An information bearer incorporating a different manifestation will therefore be regarded as an equivalent copy of the work only to the extent that it complies with these predefined attributes in terms of quality and format. 32 Finally, the identity of a digital copy depends upon the way in which the public can dispose of the work, i.e. according to the terms and conditions of the copyright license (legal metadata). 33 has been released. While the physical representation of a copy may change as it is moved from one device to another, and the digital representation may vary as a result of compression, encryption or conversion, the digital copy will nonetheless retain its identity over time to the extent that there exists some kind of genetic link between the various instances of the digital copy and only provided that these instances are actually legitimate (i.e. they have been produced in compliance with the terms and conditions of the copyright license). For a more detailed overview of how the concept of a digital copy could be modeled into the framework of the IAO, see supra Chapter 2. Section 3: The IAO approach. Subsection 4.3: The concept of a copy. of a digital copy is ultimately determined by the definition given to the copy in the copyright license. Yet, the identity of any digital copy is fundamentally determined by the various criteria which have been established by the copyright owner at the moment in which the first instance was made. By varying the level of flexibility and the severity of these criteria, the copyright owner can therefore decide the extent to which various digital resources with different properties and attributes could actually be regarded as belonging to the same class and as such qualify as the same copy of the work. 32 For instance, the owner of the copyright in a literary work may decide to produce a particular copy of the work encoded into the PDF format and require that it stays in that format. Any other encoding of the very same work (e.g. HTML, XML, PostScript, and so forth) would therefore qualify as a different ICE which does not belong to the same digital entity. Likewise, the owner of the copyright in a musical work encoded into the MP3 format may either expect it to remain in that format, or alternatively, allow for it to be converted into a variety of different formats (e.g. WAV, WMA, OGG, etc). In addition, the right holder may however prescribe that, even though the ICE can be freely converted without affecting the identity of the digital entity, the quality of the encoding has to remain within a particular range (e.g. the identity criteria may require that an MP3 encoded with a quality of 56kbps may only be converted into an MP3 of a lower quality, or into a WAV with a quality of no more than 28kbps). 33 Legal metadata basically consists of any metadata that refer to the legal status of a work. Various rights expression languages are being used in order to encode legal information into the particular copy of a work, in terms of copyright status, access and use Combined together, these three elements constitute the criteria for establishing the identity of a digital copy. To the extent it fulfills these criteria, the copy of a digital work may therefore inhere into an indefinite number of digital files which may considerably differ in terms of their digital and/or physical attributes but would nonetheless refer to the same copy of the work as long as they retain the distinctive properties thereof.

conditions, permissions, rights and obligations, or any other contractual terms that may affect the legitimate exploitation of that copy. Legal metadata may or may not be used in conjunction with DRM systems in order to make sure that the various terms and conditions are actually enforced. For a general overview of how different legal data can be encoded into a particular digital work, see e.g. COYLE, K. ( 2004) Rights Expression Languages. Library of Congress.

Genetic link

Although necessary in order to determine equality between different instances of a work, identity criteria are not sufficient as such. Unless a link can be established between the various instances of a work, they cannot qualify as the same copy of the work even if they are identical in their digital representation. 34 A genetic link must illustrate the various steps separate each instance from the others. For example, whenever a copy is transferred from one device to another, the instance at the original location is destroyed and a new instance is produced which is intrinsically related to the former by virtue of the fact that it constitutes a reincarnation thereof. Similarly, the compression, encryption or conversion of a digital work from one format to another necessarily results in a new instance of the work which is no longer bitwise identical to the former but is nonetheless related through a relationship of substitution. Hence, even though the particular sequence of bits that a digital file is composed of may eventually mutate over time, by virtue of its common origin, the resulting digital file could nonetheless be regarded as an instance of the same copy.

As such, the identification of a genetic relationship is a necessary but nonetheless insufficient condition to determine the scope of a digital copy. In spite of their genetic connection, the various instances of a work may in fact only be regarded as the same copy to the extent that they each satisfy the conditions established by the copyright owner whenever that particular copy of the work has been produced. 35 For instance, if the license under which a copy has been released does not actually preclude reproduction, the duplication thereof will qualify as new instance of that copy as opposed to a new copy of the work. Similarly, to the extent that it does not preclude the conversion into different formats, encoding a digital file into a new format would not result into a new copy of the work but merely into a new instance of the same copy.

In order to actually contribute to the scope of a digital copy, the genetic relationship that subsists between the different instances of a work must therefore be justified on the basis of a legitimate process.

34 A digital entity essentially has the function of regrouping together a series of items which can be logically regarded as the same copy of a work. As such, the identity of a digital entity is not concerned with the physical representation of a digital work (i.e. the way in which it is represented in the physical memory of a digital device), but only with the digital representation thereof (i.e. the way in which it has been encoded into a digital medium). Yet, the digital entity fundamentally differs from the concept of a digital file in at least two ways. On the one hand, the digital entity can be much more flexible than a digital file because it is not limited to one particular sequence of bits in so far as it may assume more than one digital representation. On the other hand, however, the identity of a digital entity can be much narrower than that of a digital file to the extent that different items that incorporate the same sequence of bits may actually not all qualify as the same digital entity depending upon whether or not they all originate from the same source.

Conclusion

While both the IAO and the FRBR frameworks are capable of identifying the physical copy of a work, the structure of the FRBR is however likely to be too rigid to accommodate the various components of a copy in the digital environment.

Conversely, the IAO implements a more practical framework for the analysis of digital works and is therefore likely to be more suitable to the digital environment. In fact, in so far as the terminology of the FRBR can be imported within the framework of the IAO, the latter is likely to provide a more comprehensive mechanism to determine the object of the rights which are being licensed. Besides, through the notion of a defined class, the IAO is capable providing an exact description of what constitutes the copy of a digital work, even though, in order to actually determine the scope of that copy, the terms and conditions under which the work has been released must necessarily be accounted for.

Accordingly, although it may never replace the FRBR in the description and the retrieval of bibliographic records, the IAO may well constitute a viable alternative for the licensing of digital works, in particular, in the context of DRM systems.

  B., KUSNIERCZYK, W., SCHOBER, D. & CEUSTERS, W. (2006) Towards a Reference Terminology for Ontology Research and Development in the Biomedical Domain. Proceedings of KR-MED.

The structure of the FRBR is a taxonomy in which every node may have an indefinite number of children at the lower level of abstraction but only one parent at the higher level of abstraction. While it is theoretically possible to introduce new entities into the hierarchy, this entity would however have to be inserted between two other categories and cannot as such encompass different entities at different levels of abstraction. Yet, in view of the specificities of the digital medium, it is difficult to locate the entity that should be regarded as the copy of a digital work into one particular layer, given that different copies may actually have to be situated at different levels of abstraction.

The Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is an upper-level ontology which basically consists of a series of sub-ontologies that can be regarded as a series of perspectives on reality. Each ontology represents some partition of reality into categories or universals. They are however only partial ontologies, i.e. they only represent that particular portion of reality which is visible through the particular perspective that each ontology focuses on. Besides, most of the entities defined in the BFO are abstract entities which may or may not accommodate concrete entities. For more details, see http://www.ifomis.org/bfo/overview

The Information Artifact Ontology (IAO) provides a framework for the identification and of different entities that pertain to the realm of information artifacts and for the description of their corresponding relationships with a particular portion of the world. For a more detailed overview of the Information Artifact Ontology (IAO), see http://code.google.com/p/information-artifact-ontology/

The scope and subject matter of the IAO can fundamentally be subdivided into four categories: (1) information content entities, (2) processes that consume or produce information content entities, (3) material bearers of information, and (4) relations in which one of the relata are information content entities. See RUTTENBERG, A. (2009) Introduction to Ontology. ICBO: International Conference on Biomedical Ontology. Buffalo, NY.

As a general rule, one subject can be attributed more than one predicate, which necessarily leads to the conclusion that both 'a is X' and 'b is X' can be regarded as true. Accordingly, although a and b constitute two distinct and separate particulars whose diversity has to be acknowledged, they nonetheless are related to the extent that they share an identical property X which constitutes a universal type. See[START_REF] Russell | On the Relations of Universals and Particulars[END_REF] On the Relations of Universals and Particulars. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Blackwell Publishing.

The relationship that subsists between universals and particulars is that of instantiation. For instance, the predicate 'x instance_of X' asserts a relation between a certain instance and a certain type or universal. Conversely, a relationship of characterization can generally be inferred from that particular relationship to the extent that it associates the inhering entities with their bearers. In order to exist, universals must have at least one entity that instantiates them. Accordingly, to be a particular is therefore equivalent to being one of the entity on which the universal is non-rigidly dependent. On the other hand, the relation of characterization is rigidly dependent upon the universal it refers to. Accordingly, the particular bearer of a universal quality could not exist without that given universal. See e.g. JANSEN, L. (2007) Dispositions, Laws, and Categories: A Critical Study of E. J. Lowe's The Four-Category Ontology. Metaphysica, 8.

The particulars that can be observed in the real world are the bearers of certain attributes or qualities that may potentially constitute a basis for classification. Universals allow for a classification of particulars that is objective, in the sense that it is theoretically independent of people judgments. Accordingly, a dog is a dog because it instantiates the universal type 'dog' and not because it is regarded as a dog by someone. Similarly, its color is black not because it appears to be black to someone, but because it instantiates the universal quality of 'being black'. See ZALABARDO, J. L. (2001) Towards a Nominalist Empiricism. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Blackwell Publishing.

Classes can be defined by using a particular set of operations such as, e.g. union, intersection, complement, etc which are not

According to the IAO, information entities are necessarily intentional, in the sense that they must be produced by a sentient, intentionally, or by a machine made for that purpose. This limit the scope of the IAO to exclude any kind of information not created by man (such as e.g. information created by wind, or random patterns on a beach), even when it could actually be regarded as a method of communication (such s e.g. bee waggle dances, or ant pheromone communication). From the perspective of the IAO, therefore, communication is a broader class of processes than the actual transmission of an information entity. See RUTTENBERG, A. (2009) Introduction to Ontology. ICBO: International Conference on Biomedical Ontology. Buffalo, NY.

The IAO recognizes a basic relation that relates an information artifact to a particular entity (is_about). An ICE is about another entity whenever there exists a portion of reality to which every concretization of the ICE specifically refer to, whether because it specifically or materially denotes it, or because it does at least mention one or more entities that pertain to that same portion of reality. For more details, see http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/IAO_0000136

It is however arguable to what extent is it possible to stretch reality in order to accommodate a particular entity into the realm of information content entities. Indeed, any given instance of a particular work of authorship could be regarded as being about the work as a general concept, which would basically subsist by virtue of the fact that people recognize it as a separate entity in their mind. However, it is unclear from the definition of the IAO whether it is possible for an ICE to actually stand in relation of aboutness to itself or whether it necessarily has to be about another entity.

Information entities do not stand on their own. They do not amount to independent entities but are ultimately dependent upon the subsistence of (a) the entities to which they refer to (i.e. in order to fulfill the requirement of aboutness, an ICE is intrinsically dependent upon the existence of the entities it mentions or denotes) and (b) the medium upon which they are being conveyed to the public (i.e. in order for an ICE to exist in the real world, it is necessarily dependent upon the subsistence of at least one independent continuant). For more details, see[START_REF] Ruttenberg | Introduction to Ontology[END_REF] Introduction to Ontology. ICBO: International Conference on Biomedical Ontology. Buffalo, NY.

The IAO defines an information content entity (ICE) as an entity that is "generically dependent on some artifact" in the sense that every instance of an ICE requires some instance of an artifact, but that the actual identity thereof is completely irrelevant and may actually change over time. The ICE can be instantiated into a variety of different artifacts and will continue to subsist as long as there exists at least one independent continuant that incorporates a particular instantiation thereof. For more details, see http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/IAO_0000030

An information carrier is currently defined in the IAO as the quality of an information bearer that imparts the information content, such as, for example, the pattern in ink on a page of a paperback novel. See http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/IAO_0000125

For instance, any piece of paper that incorporates some piece of information can basically be regarded as having been marked with a particular pattern of ink which is specifically intended to denote that information. Similarly, as soon as a digital file is saved into the physical memory of a computer, the magnetic pattern of the hard disk has to be modified in order to assume a property that basically denotes the information contained into the digital file. Besides, whenever an individual is consuming a particular piece of information, an actual mark is created into the memory section of the brain which specifically denotes the content of that information.

An information bearer is currently defined in the IAO as a material entity, such as a hard drive, upon which an information content entity generically depends. See http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/IAO_0000120 In other words, whenever an ICE (i.e. a particular pattern of ink) is incorporated into a physical medium of expression (i.e. a particular piece of paper) according to the specific configuration described by the information carrier which instantiates the ICE (i.e. as a result of the incorporation of that particular pattern of ink into that particular piece of paper), the physical medium will ultimately qualify as an information artifact.

Within the IAO framework, a defined class is an entity that fundamentally acts as a container in the sense that it basically gathers various entities together according to a series of criteria which have been arbitrarily defined. Every entity that fulfills all of the established criteria can be regarded as a member of the class, regardless of its nature or kind. A defined class is therefore not limited to one particular level of abstraction, given that it can encompass a number of entities from a variety of different levels. In the case in question, every digital copy of a work would therefore constitute a new class which would refer to all the different information bearers which actually incorporates that particular copy of the work at a particular moment in time. As such, the population of the entity is likely to change over time, as the copy is transferred from one place to another, as it is converted from format to the other, or as it is being legitimately reproduced. For more details, see supra Chapter 2. Section 3: The IAO approach. Subsection 4.3: The concept of a copy. Subsection B.1: Identity criteria

Since there is objective definition of what constitutes a copy in the digital environment, it could be said, basically, that the concept

The modification of a work at the level of the expression, the alteration or the removal of legal metadata, or the conversion of the work into a format which has not been specifically endorsed, will necessarily lead to the production of a new instance of the work which does no longer qualify as the same copy.


Primavera De Filippi
email: pdefilippi@gmail.com

Smari Mccarthy

Cloud Computing: Legal Issues in Centralized Architectures

Keywords: Cloud Computing, Centralization, Privacy, Confidentiality

Cloud computing can be defined as the provision of computing resources on-demand over the Internet. Although this might bring a number of advantages to end-users in terms of accessibility and elasticity of costs, problems arise concerning the collection of personal information in the Cloud and the legitimate exploitation thereof. To the extent most of the content and software application are only accessible online, users have no longer control over the manner in which they can access their data and the extent to which parties can exploit it.

Introduction

The advent of "cloud computing" has created an imbalance in authority structures that is very similar to the structural changes witnessed during the Industrial revolution. Just as the industrial revolution has progressively alienated workers from the means of production, today, most of the means of production (in terms of hardware, software, content or data) are concentrated within the hands of large Internet service providers.

Although the Internet constitutes a great opportunity for users to express themselves and to engage in collaborative production, many modern web applications are decreasing the capacity (or willingness) of people to produce content by their own means. The problem has been exacerbated by the deployment of Cloud Computing. Given that everything can be stored, processed, or executed on any computer system regardless of its whereabouts, most of the means of production, as well as the output of production (user-generated content), are increasingly owned or at least controlled de facto by large companies.

The trend is clear. Resources are moving away from end-users, towards centralized systems that possess huge processing power and storage capacities. Users' devices are devolving from personal computers to laptops, smart phones or integrated devices whose main function is to access particular sections of the Cloud through browsers or mostly dumb applications. While front-end processing is perhaps becoming slightly more common in the form of in-browser application, data storage is heavily biased towards centralized back-ends.

The implications are numerous: users are giving away their labor under an expectation of reciprocity; they are giving away their privacy for the sake of a more personalized service; they are giving away their rights in the name of comfort and accessibility; but, most importantly, they are giving away their freedoms and very frequently they do not even realize it.

The paper will analyze the impact of Cloud Computing on society. By analyzing the way the Internet has developed over time, it will draw attention to the fact that the Internet has been and is evolving in a way that might strongly impair the right to privacy of endusers and endanger the confidentiality of information stored into the Cloud.

The Emergence of Cloud Computing

-Definition of Cloud Computing

Given its recent and very fast adoption in everyday language, the actual definition and scope of Cloud Computing are still under debate. In part, this stems from the fact that Cloud Computing does not actually provide much in terms of new technology, but rather an alteration of the use of older technology to serve new types of business structures. For the purposes of this paper, we consider Cloud Computing to represent the sharing or storage by users of their infrastructure or content on remote servers which are accessible online. Although this can be achieved at many levels -i.e. at the level of the infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS), or software (SaaS) -this paper is only intended to analyze the consequences of Cloud computing on the privacy of end-users. The focus will therefore be set on the concept of public Clouds, intended as a variety of applications that users can access and use through their browsers as if they were installed on their own computers or devices [1]. Although not all public clouds are browser-based, this focus does not come out of thin air, as the browser is increasingly used as a catch-all approach for user applications.

Although this is generally seen as an advantage by end-users, in terms of flexibility of access and scalability of costs, these benefits necessarily come with a cost. Indeed, while the Internet might have been regarded early in its existence as a possible implementation of a decentralized market economy [2], we are moving toward a thoroughly centralized market where the power of the service providers increases as the power of end-user terminals decreases. Since the heavy processing is performed in the Cloud and only the results are displayed to the users, neither high processing power, large amounts of RAM, nor even hard drives are nowadays required on the user-side to perform most everyday operations. A smart phone connected to the Internet can be more powerful than an actual computer because it can borrow storage capacity and computational resources from the thousands of machines that constitute the Cloud; any complex processing is done remotely while the front end simply deals with presentation. The technical characteristics of the terminal are no longer relevant as (a) software is for the most part executed through online servers, and (b) data no longer resides on end-user devices, but is instead stored in the Cloud.

This trend suggests that most of the computing activity that is today performed locally on end-user computers will eventually shift into the Cloud. Whether or not this is desirable, from the perspective of end-users, depends on the way the Cloud is implemented and on the policy of the Cloud provider, in particular, in terms of privacy and data protection. The problem is, however, that policy is inherently malleable. In practice, there is not any privacy policy, uptime assurance or data protection mechanism that can eliminate the added operational risk created by shifting to a third party infrastructure. At best, the risk can be minimized by not storing sensitive data and mitigated by not relying on one single cloud platform.

-The changing face of Networked Services

On the early Internet, centralized services were uncommon. Service providers were of small enough scale that utilizing the distributed nature of the network was a necessity. To wit, most early websites were developed to cater local communities, competing head to head with older peer-to-peer (P2P) systems and protocols, such as e-mail and Usenet, and working from a very limited set of use-cases and metaphors. There was a strong initial momentum towards community-based websites and user-driven journalism, with lengthy articles and feedback. Before the advent of blogging platforms such as Wordpress.com, Livejournal.com or Blogger.com, it was not uncommon for small groups of people to set up a web server to host personal home pages, frequently running on custom made software managed by somebody in the group. Likewise, instant messaging and interactive discussions were generally done through direct communication between peers and on decentralized platforms, such as the Internet Relay Chat (IRC), as opposed to the more centralized systems which have emerged today, such as ICQ, Microsoft Messenger or Skype.

The case of social networks is particularly interesting given their manifest evolution from a local and community-centric to a global and extremely centralized architecture. Prior to the globalization of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, smaller scale social networking sites were common within local communities, such as hugi.is, an interest-based social network in Iceland, irc-galleria.net, a Finnish website providing social networking and photo gallery services to IRC users, and cu2.nl, a Dutch social network offering forums and photo galleries, amongst other things. Most early social networks did not manage pair-wise relationships between users. User relations were typically flat and unrestricted, with all users of the system seeing each other profiles and general information. Initially introduced in such systems as MySpace, Orkut and Bebo, pair-wise relationships have since then become part and parcel of any system intending to provide social networking, although symmetric relationships are not always necessarily the desired format. Twitter was the first major social network to demonstrate the value of asymmetric relations. Today, the majority of social networking websites provide similar features and characteristics. All provide public and private messaging systems, albeit with variable levels of service and emphasis [3]. Some systems allow photographs or other media to be added, such as Facebook and MySpace in particular, which allow photo albums, videos and other rich media.

Accepting these variations on the theme and acknowledging the untold other differences, we will focus the remainder of this study on two social networking sites; one local, the Icelandic site Hugi [4], and one global, the infamous Facebook.

Technologically, Hugi is very similar to the early Facebook [5]. Even today, apart from the improved friendship management, the technology behind Facebook is not far removed from that of Hugi. Facebook most certainly has a far more polished user interface and a much more weighted approach to features such as internal chat, external chat through XMPP, statuses and other aspects of messaging, but most features are primarily user experience tweaks which have come along over various iterations of the Facebook user interface [6].

Until 2003, a large portion of Icelandic people aged from 16 to 24 were actively contributing on Hugi. Today, however, most of the user-base has nowadays shifted to Facebook. As of 2011, it is estimated that over 65% of people in Iceland have accounts on Facebook [7].

While there are certainly many elements of user interface which influence people towards using Facebook, as the various interface changes to Facebook have shown, it is hard to believe that the trigger is merely a technical one. Rather, we claim that the key factor for the shift from Hugi to Facebook was essentially due to the more integrated and international nature of the latter, as opposed to the local character of the former.

In order to back up this claim, an online questionnaire was sent to some former users of Hugi and current users of Facebook. The results reveal that the scope of the service (i.e. its extension in the Internet landscape) weights very strongly in the mind of end-users. Despite a general inclination towards the private management of personal data, all users have declared to value the size of the community and the worldwide scope of the platform above other factors [8].

As a result of their difference in scope, the two services are not even considered to serve the same function by many users [9]. Hugi is little more than a communal sounding board which maintains a local culture fitted to meet the needs of its original operator, Síminn, a telecommunications company. Facebook, on the other hand, is both an agora and a marketplace. Like Hugi, it is controlled by a single company, but, unlike Hugi, it has reached global significance. As a commercial start-up, the goal of its operator is to increase the number of users on the network, as well as their dependency upon it, so as to lock a maximum number of users into the system [10].

Network effects are such that the more users are on a platform, the more valuable the platform is to each user. In spite of their significance in the context of social networks, network effects are not, as such, a sufficient justification for there to be only one centralized social networking platform [START_REF]Natural monopolies are justified by large economies of scale: a producer's cost curves decrease when the scale of production increases[END_REF]. The network is fully capable of allowing for decentralized systems, as various peer-to-peer protocols have demonstrated [START_REF]Domain Naming System protocol (DNS), the SMTP protocol for e-mails, Bittorrent and Gnutella for file-sharing[END_REF]. It is possible to devise a peer-to-peer infrastructure based on an open protocol, which would allow users to keep control over their own data, and, theoretically, even to use the social network locally on their computer, without the need for any Internet connection. This is, for instance, the ultimate goal of Diaspora, a distributed and open-source social network that purports to enable users to control their respective nodes in the network [13]. The problem is that social networking platforms were primarily developed by companies with vested interests in holding as much mind-share as possible. Thus far, with the exception of Diaspora, no peerto-peer system has emerged to compete with such centralized systems.

Although the analysis has focused exclusively on social networks, the intention was to provide an example to illustrate a general trend: the increasing concentration of the market and the consequent concentration of power in the hands of a few enterprises. We believe the conclusions of this analysis to apply, by and large, to the majority of applications provided by large centralized companies over the Internet.

Because of their dominant position, large service providers can exert a degree of subjugation never conceived of by smaller and more local services, and a degree of control that would be impossible in a peer-to-peer network. This creates a series of legal issues in terms of control, privacy, and confidentiality of information that will be specifically addressed in the following sections.

Legal Issues of Cloud Computing

It takes only very basic examples to show the danger of over-centralization in the sphere of the Internet. In addition to the most common examples, such as Google and Facebook, there are a very large number of actors whose operations are crucial in the everyday life of many Internet users. While the level of dependency increases, the effects of not having control over the infrastructure become more apparent, although some of the implications might become very subtle. As user no longer control nor understand their infrastructure, they are increasingly controlled by those who do know how to control the infrastructure -and by those who own it.

-Centralized Control

Today, no matter how much one tries to keep it secret, there exist many mechanisms or devices that collect personal data and communicate it to third parties without the consent of the data subject [START_REF]malware) are malicious software that collects personal data about users without their consent. As users perform tasks such as browsing the Internet, spyware programs collect information about users and their behavior. Although commonly acknowledged in the digital world, similar devices are commonly deployed in the physical world[END_REF]. Most often, however, it is actually the user who willingly communicates information to a variety of interested parties. On the Internet, this is done on a daily basis through blogs, forums, newsgroups, mailing lists, search engines, etc.

While this is not a concern in itself, a series of problems might eventually arise if all that data were to be gathered together into one large database. If one single entity were to provide a large variety of services and the data collected through all of these services were to be processed into an integrated framework of analysis, that entity would fundamentally be able to know much more about its user-base than what has been voluntarily disclosed by each individual user.

Technically, this is already a possibility, and, as a matter of fact, this is already part of reality. Let's take a look at Google. With a mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", Google offers a large variety of services, mostly for free for the end user, whose ultimate purpose is not only that of presenting information in a more organized way, but also that of gathering as much information as possible. Services such as Google Mail, Google Documents, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google News, Google Reader, Orkut, Youtube, Picasa and many more -are all intended to collect information about the users of that service. Even a service apparently as harmless as the Google search engine is in fact able to collect very important pieces of information. A cookie (whose expiration date is irrelevant for any practical matter) is stored into every computer so that it can be identified at every subsequent connection Although it allows Google to collect all sort of information about users, this cookie is presented as a valuable service to the users who would otherwise be unable to enjoy the benefits of personalized search results and customized advertisements.

Since most of these services are either available online or automatically synchronized whenever a user connects to the Internet, Google can keep track of every user activity performed on its system. This data can be very valuable for the purposes of mass profiling understanding the preferences of the user-base as reflected by the behavior of each individual user) and user profiling (i.e. understanding the preferences of each individual user through the analysis of its specific interests, activities, and social surroundings)

Google, however, is ultimately not interested in monitoring the activities of its users, nor in gathering information about the socio-demographics of its user-base, but rather in the maximization of profits. Profiling is necessary for Google to know what users want, so as to eventually offer them the most personalized results and the best kind of advertisements. The greater the user-base, the most accurate the profiling can be, and the higher the profits that can be extracted from a system of customized advertisement dependent upon the interests of each individual user. In this case, the fact that the end-users do not pay for the service means that they themselves are the product being sold, or rather, statistics about them are.

Various companies have built successful business models around the realization that, instead of getting money in exchange of a service, it is often more valuable to provide services for free in order attract a maximum number of users. By accepting the terms of services, users agree to share most of their data and information with Google, regardless of the privacy or the confidentiality thereof [17]. Hence, although the majority of Google's services are offered for free, users pay -willingly or not -with their own data, which is only turned into profit by Google AdSense or other forms of advertisement. In this context, the scope of the Cloud is extremely important. By offering such a wide variety of services, Google is able to obtain different pieces of information which pertain to different fields of endeavor. When users search for something on the web, Google can learn about their interests; when users read their emails on Gmail, Google can learn more about their personal or professional life; when users check out a location on Google Maps, Google can learn where each user has been or wants to go. The greater the scope of the the greater is the amount of data that can be gathered together and the more valuable is the information that can be obtained with the processing and correlation of such data [START_REF]with information from other Google services or third parties in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services[END_REF]. While this is likely to help Google increase its profit, the collection and processing of user data into a common integrated framework can also benefit the users when it comes to increasing the quality of the service. Many users are therefore not merely agreeing, but even eager to share their personal data and information with Google in order to obtain a more customized and integrated service. Google Calendar is more valuable because it can be integrated with Gmail for e-mail reminders and notifications and with Orkut for discovering new events and remembering the birthdays of some friends. As the value of a service increases not only with the number of users connected to that service but also with its degree of integration with other services, the wider is the portfolio of services offered by the most users will be attracted to these services. The problem arises when the information given to separate (and apparently independent) services is actually aggregated together by one single entity (either because it is the common provider of said services, or because it has acquired the data from third parties). Even though the information had been voluntarily provided by users, aggregated data might provide further information about users, which they did not necessarily want to disclose.

-Privacy & Confidentiality

There is an inherent security risk in the use of the Internet to transfer sensible information and personal data. As a general rule, information wants to be shared, as most of the value that can be extracted from it emerges from the usage and communication thereof. However, whenever it is published on the Internet, the privacy and confidentiality of information is necessarily put at risk [START_REF]The advent of Internet and digital technologies introduced a series of concerns that might significantly affect users' willingness to communicate personal data and confidential information over the Internet. Given that there can be no perfectly secure mechanism to transfer information, publishing information on the web necessarily involves the risk of data loss or spill over[END_REF].

These risks have been considerably increased with the deployment of Cloud Computing, which requires more careful attention to be given to its actual or potential consequences on the privacy of personal information and confidentiality of business governmental information. What kind of information can be shared into the Cloud? Can anything be kept private in the Cloud? Individuals are generally free to share information in the Cloud, even though they are often not fully aware of the terms of services set out by the Cloud providers and of the of storing information in the Cloud In the case of an institution, privacy laws may sometimes prohibit or limit the disclosure of personal information to third parties. The possibility for a business or corporation to share information in the Cloud is subject to a series of standards established by different bodies of law, whereas government agencies are restricted by internal rules and public regulations on data protection. For instance, in the USA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) establishes a series of rules regulating the use and disclosure of identifiable health information, which can only be transferred to a service provider that promises to comply with the same set of standards (often incompatible with the terms of services established by a cloud provider). Similarly, the Violence Against Women Act precludes domestic violence service providers from disclosing information without the consent of the data subject, unless compelled by statute or a court (Public Law as amended by Public Law 109-271); tax preparation laws provide statutory and regulatory protection that limits the disclosure of tax return information without the taxpayer's consent (Internal Revenue Service rules U.S.C. § 6713 and § 7216; 26 C.F.R. §301.7216); whereas the disclosure of personal information concerning the financial situation of a consumers by a financial institution is precluded under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (15 U.S.C. § 6802); and the disclosure of video rental and cable television subscribed records is protected under the Video Privacy Protection Act (18 U.S.C. § 2710) and the Cable Communications Policy Act (47 U.S.C. § 551).

Despite the fact that the law may restrict the ability of these institutions to rely upon the services of a Cloud provider by introducing a series of procedural and/or substantive barriers, many corporate and governmental institutions (and in particular municipal governments) do store their data remotely on databases and file systems operated by a third party by contract. The problem is that information stored in the a third party may have weaker protection than information that remains in possession of users.

The chances for inadvertent exposure increase substantially with every new intermediary and with every new layer of abstraction. While securing the infrastructure is obviously very important, it is not sufficient if the interface or application running on that infrastructure has not been properly secured as well. Although users need a way to log into system in order to transfer data from or into the Cloud, this could constitute a significant security risk unless proper access control and secure transfer protocols have been adopted. Likewise, even though users are made to access the services by password, unless there is filesystem level encryption of the data with a key held only by the user -which is impractical in most cases operator of the service or anybody else who gains physical access to the servers can peer into the stored data. In more extreme cases, attacks on the hardware can be used to extract information that is resident in runtime memory [21].

In most cases, security issues are due to lack of or poor application of cryptography and a general lack of tradition for security. Various campaigns have tried to remedy this, such the Tactical Technology Collective's ONO Robot campaign, Survival in the Digital Age [22], and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's HTTPS-everywhere campaign Yet, regardless of the degree of protection promised by the cloud provider, the security and confidentiality of information is ultimately determined by the weakest link in the chain. Insofar as data is transferred through several intermediaries, only one of them needs to be violated for any malicious user to obtain the relevant information.

In addition, the laws of certain countries oblige cloud providers to communicate to the authorities any information that constitutes evidence of criminal activities. This means that government agencies can, under certain circumstances, require the disclosure of personal or confidential information. This information can be more easily obtained from a third party than from the original owner, who, in the absence of proper notice, does not have the opportunity to object. For instance, in the USA, although the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) provides a series of protections against the access by governmental agencies to personal information held by third parties (18 U.S.C. § 2510-2522 and § 2701-2712), these protections have been subsequently weakened by the USA PATRIOT Act, which entitles the FBI to compel, following a court order, the disclosure by Cloud providers of any record stored on their servers (50 U.S.C. § 1862).

Finally, the international character of the Cloud adds an additional layer of complexity. Information stored in the Cloud can be subject to a variety of different laws according to the location where it is being stored or transmitted. A Cloud provider might avail itself of the of other Cloud providers located in different jurisdictions, or, if the Cloud provider has data centers in multiple countries, it can transfer data between centers depending on economic factors such as the price of electricity. This means that a file being served from one moment could be served from the Philippines the next. The difficulty for the user to know with certainty which law applies to the information stored into the Cloud raises a number of data protection questions.

According to the European Union's Data Protection Directive, national data protection laws apply to all information located in the territory of a Member State, regardless of its origin or destination [24]. However, it is often difficult to determine in advance and with certainty the actual location of information stored in the Cloud. In particular, a crucial problem that emerges from the international character of the Cloud is the question of forum-shopping. Unless it has been contractually precluded to do so, a Cloud provider can theoretically move information from one jurisdiction to another in order to benefit from the most favorable laws. This can be used as a means for any service provider that does not want to respect domestic regulations on data protection. In order to overcome this problem, the European Union introduced the rule that data cannot be transferred to countries outside the EU which do not provide an "adequate level of protection" [25]. This is likely to reduce the possibilities for Cloud providers to outsource their services in the EU, because, even if data is merely being processed in a Member State, it might be difficult to export it after it has entered the EU.

As Cloud Computing is being adopted by an increasingly larger number of businesses and individuals, the underlying technology and infrastructure is continuously evolving, but the law does not seem to follow the pace. Given that commercial Cloud providers are more interested in making profits than in protecting the interests of their user-base, users should be wary of their privacy online and of the confidentiality of their data stored in the Cloud. Given the degree of legal uncertainty that is emerging in the sky, there is a real need for the law to be reformed in order to better accommodate current and future users concerns in terms of data security and privacy.

Conclusion

There are many consequences to the deployment of cloud computing: some intended, others unintentional; some good, and others bad. Many are already noticeable and measurable, while others can only be foreseen by analyzing the trends that have been set.

There is a trend fueled by the shift of control from end-users towards increasingly centralized services providers. As many such services, and in particular social networks, heavy privacy and confidentiality burdens, the threats to the privacy of end-users increases. Service Level Agreements and privacy policies are useless in the face of events which are irrevocable, such as the exposure of private data. Users of Sony's PlayStation know all too well that this danger is not a hypothetical [26]. Smaller networks catering to more local communities distribute the risk and limit the scope of potential damage, but at a steep utility tradeoff.

The advantages offered by cloud computing are clear: infrastructure providers can benefit from strong economies of scale, whereas Internet service providers can benefit from enhanced flexibility and scalability of costs. From the perspective of end-users, the main advantages are the possibility to access data from anywhere and at any time regardless of the device they are connected from and the ability of avail themselves of the computing power and storage capacity of the cloud. Further, it allows for outsourcing the obligation of maintaining complicated infrastructure and having to maintain up-to-date technical knowledge, while externalizing the cost of purchasing and running the infrastructure.

This does not, however, come without costs. Exporting data to the cloud means that users can no longer exercise any kind of control over the use and the exploitation of data. Data stored in various data centers can be processed without the knowledge of users, to be further redistributed to third parties without their consent. If everything has been stored in the cloud, the cloud provider can ultimately determine everything that users can or cannot do. As most Internet users are no longer in charge of their own data and are no longer capable of managing their own infrastructures of production, storage, and distribution, the control is in the hand of few corporate entrepreneurs.

[20] While many users do not even bother to familiarise themselves with the terms of services of the cloud computing platform they wish to use, doing so is often not an easy undertaking even for those who try to understand the consequences of entering into such agreement. Besides, it is fairly common that the provider reserves the right to vary the terms and conditions on which the service is provided without notifying the users. For more details, see Dan Svantesson, Roger Clark (2010), Privacy and consumer risks in cloud computing, in Computer Law & Security Review, 26 (4), 391-397.

[21] An interesting example is the Cold boot attack, allowing anyone with physical access to a computer to retrieve encryption keys from the operating system after restarting the machine. The attack relies on the "data remanence" of DRAM and SRAM memory in order to retrieve memory contents that remain readable for a short period after power has been removed. For more information, see J.Alex Halderman, Seth D. Schoen, Nadia Heninger, William Clarkson, William Paul, Joseph A. Calandrino, Ariel J. Feldman, Jacob Appelbaum, Edward W. Felten (2008): Lest we remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys, in Proceedings 2008 USENIX Security Symposium.

[22] The Tactical Technology Collective and ONO Robot produced a series of animated films to raise awareness about the digital traces users leave behind. Its main aim is to engage people in better understanding the information and communications technologies they are using, so that they can decide when and if they want to take risks. For more details, see www.onorobot.org [23] HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox extension produced as a collaboration between The Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It encrypts communications with a number of major websites using Transport Layer Security. For more details, see http://www.eff.org/https-everywhere [24] Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, Article 4 (National law applicable) specifically states that each Member State shall apply the national provisions it adopts pursuant to this Directive to the processing of personal data where: (a) the processing is carried out in the context of the activities of an establishment of the controller on the territory of the Member State;; (b) the controller is not established on the Member State's territory, but in a place where its national law applies by virtue of international public law; (c) the controller is not established on Community territory and, for purposes of processing personal data makes use of equipment, automated or otherwise, situated on the territory of the said Member State, unless such equipment is used only for purposes of transit through the territory of the Community [25] Ibid, Article 25 introduces the principles that Member States shall provide that the transfer to a third country of personal data which are undergoing processing or are intended for processing after transfer may take place only if, without prejudice to compliance with the national provisions adopted pursuant to the other provisions of this Directive, the third country in question ensures an adequate level of protection; where the adequacy of the level of protection afforded by a third country shall be assessed in the light of all the circumstances surrounding a data transfer operation or set of data transfer operations; particular consideration shall be given to the nature of the data, the purpose and duration of the proposed processing operation or operations, the country of origin and country of final destination, the rules of law, both general and sectoral, in force in the third country in question and the professional rules and security measures which are complied with in that country.

[26] In April 2011, Sony suffered a breach in the Playstation online video game network. As one of the largest Internet security break-ins, this breach led to the theft of personal data, such as names, addresses, birth dates, passwords and possibly credit card numbers belonging to 77 million user accounts. This required Sony to shut down the network, and although Sony given notice of the breach to its customers, no information has been provided as to how the data might have been compromised.

Just as, after the industrial revolution, governments have been urged to exercise their authority for the creation of labour and consumer protection laws, today, during the digital revolution, governmental intervention has become necessary in order to promote civil liberties and to protect fundamental rights on the Internet, at least with regard to those risks which cannot be properly addressed through the adoption of clearer policies by cloud providers and better practices by users.

[1] Cloud Computing can be implemented at various levels of abstractions and deployed either internally of externally. In the common sense of the term, Cloud Computing refers to the concept of a "public Cloud" as a service offered by a third-party that dynamically provides a series of resources accessible on-demand through the Internet, often via web applications. This can be contrasted to the concept of a "private Cloud" as a service for private networks allowing a company to host applications or virtual machines on its own premises.

[2] During its early phases, the Internet was often regarded by many pioneers and visionaries as a potential implementation of a pure market economy characterized by free exchange of information, low transaction costs and very few barriers to entry. See, e. [3] While they all provide users with a way to communicate with each other, different platforms provide different means of communication. Some allow threaded messaging while others only allow linear messaging. Some restrict the number of characters allowed in messages, for example 140 on Twitter, 450 in Facebook public status updates and 10000 in OkCupid private messages, while others do not impose any such practical restrictions.

[4] Hugi was originally operated by Síminn, the former state telecoms company which was privatized in 2005 with the sale of 98.8% of its shares to Skipti. It is now operated by Skjá miðlar ehf. For more information, see www.hugi.is [5] Developed in the PHP programming language with MySQL as a database, and not providing much in the way of Web 2.0-style services beyond the level of user interaction presumed in such a setting; there is no post-loading processing which accesses server data, as through AJAX or other asynchronous HTTP requests.

[6] It can be expected that if Hugi had not been "neglected" similar updates would have followed there, although perhaps not with as great rapidity. In conversation with Hugis webmaster, in May 2011, it was said that, although Hugi had seen better times, a large cause of its decline was the neglect of the site's original owner.

[7] As of 2011, Iceland ranks first in terms Facebook penetration, with over 65.76% of the population on Facebook or 203 140 in total. For more updated statistics, see http://www.socialbakers.com/facebookstatistics/iceland [8] In a small and informal questionnaire (n=30) amongst former users of Hugi, when asked whether, all other things being equal, they would prefer a service such as Facebook, but with their personal data hosted within Iceland, exactly half said they would; when asked if they would prefer a service where their data was hosted on their own private computer, 64% said they would. Younger people, in particular, seem less concerned with sovereignty over their own data, while older users appear more concerned about the locality of their data. Yet, all of those questioned said that the size and international aspect of Facebook mattered either much or very much.

[9] In the same questionnaire amongst former users of Hugi who also use Facebook, 82.15% claimed that Facebook and Hugi serve different roles, with the rest claiming that they only partially serve the same role.

[10] As for 2011, Facebook is valued at roughly 80 billion dollars (according to a recent private-market transaction on SharePost, an online marketplace for private investments) and has over 500 million users; meaning that each user's contribution, if we ignore the network effect, is about $160. Of course, given the nature of network effects, the most recent user added is always the most valuable. With 7% of humanity registered on the world's largest social network, the only way for Facebook to increase shareholder value is to aggressively reach out to an ever-growing group of users, while minimizing the risk that current users leave.