IGF 2010
VILNIUS, LITHUANIA
14 SEPTEMBER 10
SESSION 85
1100
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Note: The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during Fifth Meeting of the IGF, in Vilnius. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> Welcome to Session 85 civil impairment on line. Are we moving toward a new public sphere. Cases of tension between protection and access to knowledge on line, and governmental and private over information and personal data. The format, as you see here, is a round table where we will have panelists speaking on three specific types of sessions and a very interactive dialogue, I hope, with the audience. The expectations that we hope coming out of this is to have a more in depth and rounded understanding of the issues that impact the potential democratisation potential of the internet, what are the impact of the issues, what is the current knowledge on these issues, and the regulatory frameworks, initiatives, policies and strategies that could be put in place to foster freedom of expression, control over personal discussion say who they are, the organizations they are with and a short bio. We will break into three sessions, there will be panelists on line and access to knowledge on line and governmental and private control over information and personal data. Each speaker will speak for five minutes and then we will have a 50 minute discussion period that's open first to the panelists if they have questions of each other and then to everyone as a whole.
There is transcripts and the session is also being webcast and audio streamed. So, first, I will ask the representatives from the Centre for Internet and Society of India to briefly introduce themselves.
>> ANJA KOVACS: My name is Anja Kovacs. I'm from the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India. I do research on the state of on line activism in India and look at why grass roots movements do not engage with technology in India very closely and are in fact very reluctant to do so, and I also work on the human rights and internet governments drawing on my research.
>> Representative from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to briefly introduce themselves.
>> I'm Kurt Spassal, an attorney with the Frontier Association. It promotes civil liberties on line. My work focuses on freedom of expression, and privacy as we are trying to make sure that the future on line is one that we would want to live in.
>> Next from the academic sector, I will ask the representative from Consumers International to please introduce himself.
>> JERMEY MALCOLM: I don't know if I qualify as being in academic sector anymore, but I'm currently leading Consumers International's global campaign on access knowledge. Consumers International is a global federation of consumer groups, and this happens to be our 50th anniversary, so we are pretty well established in India, and I'm based out of the Kuala Lumpur office, which is the Asia Pacific regional office for CI handling its access to knowledge campaign.
>> I will ask the representative from the Swedish ministry of foreign affairs to briefly introduce himself.
>> JOHAN HALLENBORG: Good morning, thank you. My name is Johan Hallenborg, I work with the ministry of foreign affairs and the department for international law and human rights, more specifically on the human rights issues and freedom of expression. And one of the things we have been working on and still are working on is freedom of expression and right to privacy, on the internet. So that's the reason why I'm here.
Thank you.
>> Thank you, I will ask the representative from Google to briefly introduce himself.
>> Hi, I'm council for Google Brazil and I imagine a lot of different issues on privacy and copyright, internet liability.
>> I will ask from the business sector now, as well, we have a representative from Microsoft.
>> CORNELIA KUTTERER: Hello, it's a pleasure to be here. My name is Cornelia Kutterer. I work for regulatory policies in the E.U. in Brussels, I focus on issues of freedom of expression and consumer policies.
>> Then from a stakeholder initiative that brings together civil society and business, I will ask the representative from the Global Network Initiative to briefly introduce yourself.
>> SUSAN MORGAN: Hello, I'm Susan Morgan. I run the Global Network Initiative, which as Robert says is a multistakeholder initiative bringing together companies, civil society, academics and investors. We are working to protect freedom of expression and privacy on line and we do it through accountability and policy engagement. We have a number of members of the GNI here including Google, Microsoft, Electronic Frontier Foundation.
>> Thank you.
>> My name was not
>> I will also now ask the organizers as well to introduce themselves.
>> MARILIA MACIEL: Hello, my name is Marilia Maciel. I am a researcher at the Center for Technology and Society. We are co organizing this workshop together with Anja and Jeremy, and in the Center for Technology and Society we do research on intellectual property. I personally lead a project for culture, and the project aims to investigate the impact of new media and internet on intellectual property. Thank you.
>> Thank you. I'm going to start off with the first part of our workshop, which is civic empowerment on line. Are we moving towards a new public sphere. There are three main questions I will ask the speakers to try to answer in their comments. First of all, what is the status of civic impairment on line what are the achievements and setbacks, what are the main problems that hamper civic activism and freedom of expression on line? And what measures should or could be taken to foster civic impairment? We have three speakers, Anja, Johan and Kurt. I will ask Anja to speak first.
>> ANJA KOVACS: Thank you, Robert. I want to try to answer some of these questions by having a critical look on way debates on freedom of expression are faced today. I think when you speak about civic empowerment be it on line or off line. Freedom of expression remains of tremendous importance. Article 9 reads everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression. This right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Now, seek, receive and impart information, that is then clearly an internet government issue. In this day and age, everyone would agree, I presume, that to seek information, access to the internet is crucial if everyone is to have right to receive and impart information, the network is crucial. Especially in developing countries where people cannot afford to pay their way around restrictions, to seek and receive information requires that we means that we need legal regimes that insure equitable access to knowledge and provide strong protections in intellectual property right. Access intellectual property rights are all issues that affect freedom of expression on the global scale and I am happy to see they are getting attention in the IGF as well. They do not construct the dominant framing of freedom of expression. The dominant framing of this whole debate today is a fairly between democratic western countries on the one hand and inevitably developing countries on the other hand.
What we actually have in effect is a reduction of the debate on freedom of expression to censorship in non democratic regimes. And the issues that I was addressing earlier access network neutrality, IPR at least on debates of freedom of expression, they do not seem to hold centre stage. From a few of the developing countries, that is, and especially a democratic developing country, that is quite worrying because for us these issues are very, very crucial to insuring freedom of expression for all.
It's because this framing of the debate also accomplishes two additional things. First, it hides from view the way in which freedom of expression is under attack in many western democracies today as well. I think the three strikes rules that were proposed earlier are a very good example of this. If you claim to be a harbourer, I think it's important source of information in many people's lives. The fact that such purposes could nevertheless even just be formulated is because they are couched in defense of the right of property only. That was the right that was defended.
The challenge freedom of expression by moving to the right of intellectual property regimes, especially under the impulse of western countries is something that has remained insufficiently addressed. And then I come to my second point, from the perspective of a democratic developing country at least, it's very difficult not to see in this somewhat one dimensional propagation of freedom of expression only a censorship in countries a different duplicity and as a consequence, even though these efforts may be well intended, they are very counterproductive. I could give a long list of examples of reasons which things that are done with good intentions in the west are read very different in developing countries and I'm happy to expound on more of them if people want information later. In most of the English language western press, the majority of attention and certainly the majority of the headlines was devoted to the access served by the United Arab Emirates in Saudi Arabia and that was almost completely couch in I would say fairly hysterical terms as an attack on freedom of expression. And one critic actually
>> One minute remaining.
>> ANJA KOVACS: What about then the Indian request for access conveniently most critics kept quiet about this which didn't fit into the existing framework. If one would have to talk about Indian access in that context as well you would have to talk in depth about the security issues underlying this request. Even though the threat to freedom of expression was real, that was not necessarily the only reason why this request was made.
In this context then, as an Indian activist for a lot of people it became very difficult to denounce the Indian demand for access because demands of western countries were not criticized in this context either. So we ended up defending a myth which actually ultimately works against our own interests. And the Indian give the government a recent amendment, give the government fairly sweeping powers of surveillance, restrictions on freedom of expressions, and this whole incidence around Blackberry might have been a good occasion for us to actually draw more attention to this within the country, but because of the way this debate was faced internationally, we actually ended up siding with the government. To just report, I am not, of course, arguing that we should not fight against censorship, that is very important. What I do think though is that we need more rounded understandings of freedom of expression, and that we need to be more aware of these sensitivities. If freedom of expression is under attack everywhere, then we need all of the allies we can get, and a sensitive approach to the debate is crucial to that. Thank you.
>> Thank you very much, Anja, I will net pass to Johan, please, you have five minutes.
>> JOHAN HALLENBORG: Thank you very much. Can you all hear they? Is that okay? Is that better? Just a few notes then or a few comments, generally speaking from a human rights perspective the ability of civil society to engage through the internet and through new technologies has created a completely new playing field for human rights monitoring. We see this in several countries. We all know this now since several years, but it's worth mentioning again. Many of the things that happen today we would never have heard of in the past.
But so the society is not only doing monitoring. Empowerment through networking and education and better technological solutions and more openness has provided civil society actors with knowledge and ability to share experiences and conditions for a better and more effective way to participate in public life. And here governments such as ours have an important role to play to strengthen and facilitate this. A precondition for civil society participation is freedom of expression. But also the right to privacy and the absence of threats of serious repercussions.
Limitations to human rights can only be done in accordance with international human rights law and this includes also security related limitations, which you remember that more than 100 bloggers and activists are in jail because of their activities on line. And these are, to answer one of the questions, these are some of the threats.
Importantly, when violations take place, not only civil society must react, but also governments. And such political statements and reactions should not be under estimated, I think. On our behalf, we have reacted twice in the last six months in the U.N., in the human rights council, first in March and then in June. In June we had a cross regional statement on the importance of freedom of expression on line with governments from all over the world.
But also, the U.N. human rights council the framework needs to be strengthened to protect activists on line, for example, human rights offenders and we can do more in this respect. To encourage civil empowerment on line includes several aspects. As government we can play a role by creating the preconditions for effective participation and dialogue.
One such project we have done in Sweden on a national level is to create a web platform for dialogue on human rights and democracy issues. Now, we have 173 different organizations in Sweden using this platform for dialogue between themselves. This dialogue consists of sharing best practices, a common database on materials and methods for dialogue, et cetera.
In our development corporation work, we are also trying to facilitate civil empowerment on line, the so called ICT for development. This is essentially about everyone's rights to seek, receive and impart information. And we do support programs in both eGovernment, eGovernance, as well as empowerment. A few examples of that are support from Costa Rica. Support to the APC in South Africa, but also support to individuals, not only civil society networks. For example, in Tanzania where we are helping people to react on the quality of public services through interactive methods. Generally speaking access to ICT in the developing world is very uneven and this is a human rights challenge as well and this is something that Anja also dwelled on.
Equal access to ICT gives equal opportunities to use freedom of expression and participation as well. I think the national level there is currently a need to interpret how human rights should apply to the internet. Sweden is currently collaborating with Frank Laru in this endeavor and trying to give him support in his work to feedback thoughts on this to the human rights council next year. But this is only one way and there are several other governments doing similar things. We strongly believe from our perspective that there is a need for critical number of like minded countries here, that not only countries from the west, and, again, touching on what Anja was saying this needs to be a broader consensus around the world. It will continue to be important to do this in a multistakeholder initiative.
>> Thank you very much for your comments. I will can Kurt from EFF to make his five minutes of comments, thank you.
>> Thank you. So to allow people to hold opinions without interference and to seek and receive and impart information is very important to have the policy infrastructure that allows and encourages free expression and access to knowledge. Today, I will talk about two aspects of this policy infrastructure, one is the role of internet in as a platform that allows for the freedom of expression and the second is the importance of allowing anonymous for pseudo anonymous speech on line. Regarding internet areas, the internet has been an extraordinary advance in the availability of educational materials, informational resources, political discourse, developing cultures, diverse intellectual activities and this information is hosted by intermediaries. And why can these intermediaries host so much of this information? In part, by a policy where people pushed first and asked questions later. This was enabled by a policy which is of non interference in regulatory minimization on the intermediaries. So it is to maximize the availability of information, the good policy is to for hosts to allow the posting without prior review.
So You Tube, yelp, flicker, Ebay, these are a set of services which could not effectively function if they were required to do a prior review. And these services allow a diverse means of communication for people to post their thoughts or conduct commerce, to undertake activities on line, and post things at a tremendous rate of speed, a speed beyond which any human could review it before it goes out.
But if you want to encourage the diversity of information, it has to be protecting intermediaries for liability for the acts of their users, because the speaker is standing upon a platform, and the platform should not be held liable for what the speaker has said. A reason for this is that liability rules are forcing intermediaries to internalize some of the negative externalities. This makes for a bad set of choices choice for intermediaries for an individual statement on line is a trivial benefit. And to have a human assess the proprietary, propriety or legality of a speech will normally exceed the benefit received by the service provider. This creates a situation where the economically rational decision is to not host controversial content. Consider, for example, a defamation. If a user posts that a politician is taking bribes, this would be defamatory, if it were false, but extraordinarily valuable information to the public discourse if it were true. The intermediary is not in a position to assess whether it is true or not. If they are going to be on the hook in case it is false, then the decision would be to remove it and then if it turns out that it is true, we have lost a valuable piece of the conversation.
Another aspect of the importance of internet intermediaries is the role they play in innovation and providing new means for people to connect and communicate and organize on line. A lot of the companies and intermediaries that have provided robust and powerful communication tools have started out as being very small companies with a handful of employees that don't have the capacity to do a thorough review of materials before they are posted and thus by protecting these intermediaries from the imposition of liability for what the users are due it allows for innovators to come along in a small company without significant resources, and make these innovations available. Turning now to the importance of anonymous speech, this comes down to the ability to have conversations that shield the speaker from the tyranny of the majority, to protect unpopular views from retaliation based on their society. And people should be permitted to interact pseudo anonymously or anonymously with each other so long as activities are not in violation of the law. And this contributes greatly to open communication and robust debate. This comes up in the context of criticism of political figures, of corporations, of bureaucrats. It also comes from a point where there are
>> One minute remaining.
>> Who may be stigmatized or embarrassed by the discussions they would have. So people who are members of opposition political parties or victims of violence, sufferers from AIDS, survivors of abuse may wish to find places on line where they can have full and unfettered discussions, but without having to reveal to the world their identity for fear of embarrassment over the sensitive nature of what has happened to them. And anonymity on line allows for whistle blowers to report on government or corporate malfeasance, and there by contribute to transparency and debate in situations where if they were forced to be identified they would be a fear of reprisal and would not be able to contribute that information. Thank you very much.
>> So now, we would like to ask the three speakers if they have any comments or questions for each other. Anja, any questions?
>> I will just open it up to the floor then.
>> I will just open it up to the floor to see a raise of hands to see who wants to ask any questions. Question have any questions. A question here, please, I would ask for those asking questions to first briefly your name and affiliation and then ask your question and please be as brief as possible. Thank you.
>> JONATHAN ZUCK: Hello, my name is Jonathan Zuck and I'm with the Association for Competitive Technology. My question for Anja, it struck me when you were talking about the three strikes rule and the dangers to free speech. And we already live in a society where people take other people's property, their rights are infringed upon, including their access to freedom of expression if they are put in jail or something like that. So that already happens every day in both the developed and under developed world, so I wonder what the alternative is to not devalue intellectual property rights above other property rights, but still address those issues and preserve freedom of expression for legitimate expression?
>> ANJA KOVACS: Thank you. I think the main question here is the issue of proportionality. I often have to think how in earlier so we say now the internet is crucial not just for freedom of expression but also for access to knowledge, et cetera, and also for education, for so many aspects of our lives. What you basically end up saying here is that, so, if somebody has been downloading music, you can cut them off from that crucial resource in their lives for a full year.
It's the same as saying in earlier ages if a student photocopies books, you can fully cut them off from education? It comes down to a similar thing. So I think the main issue here, I'm not saying the property rights should not be defended. I don't think that is the discussion here. But I think there is a big issue of proportionality here. So this was the point what I meant with intellectual property rights moving intellectual property rights regimes moving to the right is that I think that the sense of proportionality is getting lost, that exercise is not being done consistently in a proper manor, so I'm not saying there should be any measures taken any punishment, but this punishment for that mistake, the proportionality is not there.
>> Any other questions or comments?
>> Don Katz, EFF. I had the same reaction to the press on the rim issue in regard to the united emirates and found that the several articles there were on India and was interested in learning more. What I am surprised by, and would be interested in elaborating on is the conclusion that if I understood you correctly, to defend the Indian government's demands to have access to individuals' account information, and in terms of the contrast between free expression and surveillance, whether or not there is this oppositional western, eastern, north, south, I'm not sure if you could focus on freedom of expression in surveillance, how surveillance might be defended in regards to freedom of expression.
>> ANJA KOVACS: About the rim issue, so for me the crucial thing is that there is the underlying issue was actually the security concerns. And the way the issue got phrased in the media, that point was not made at all. It was made to seem as if this was purely a kind of another nasty attempt of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to attack freedom of expression. Like I said earlier, I think it has consequences for freedom of expression, but by only highlighting that aspect we never started to talk about the security issue. For me, that is very important because in the Indian context, and I think to some extent also in the U.S. from what I understand, in India, the argument of security is actually used quite often to justify attacks on freedom of expression.
And it's done, so let's say recently there has been this unrest in Kashmir, there are activists who posted video clips of atrocities committed by police on protesters and those people were called to the police station, and I think were not arrested but heavily intimidated and then again used the internet to spread the word about that. So security is constantly a reason for not to spread information. For us is would have been much more helpful if that issue was addressed, but if you address that issue in the debate, you would need to talk about the access, the U.S., gets, for example, to Blackberry data. That was my issue. So I was looking continuously how does this work? What access to other countries get? Because for me that was important to judge whether or not the requests from the Indian government was reasonable in the context of a larger international political economy. And in the context of international political relations. And so I took a different stance looking at that international political relations than I would do at home. And seeing that nobody would I have not found information on the kind of access the U.S. government has, if you have some, I would really like to see actually. So that was kind of the point, that it's not as if freedom of expression could not be talked about at all, but the security issues should have been addressed as well, and that would have given us actually much more to fight with in favor of freedom of expression.
>> I just want to get away maybe a little bit from rim and Blackberry. I as moderator want to ask a question but want to open it up to the floor so I want to ask if there are any other questions from the floor to any of the speakers that just spoke? Going once?
>> It's not for any of the speakers but I wanted to hear more about networking neutrality, one thing that the main thing on security openness and privacy is expecting from us here is that we point out some of the characteristics of the internet that are important in regard to security and privacy so I wanted to hear more from the speakers about important stuff of network neutrality in regards of the recent policies and legislative frameworks that have been put forth by Verizon and something that we are discussing also in Brazil this is an important topic for us. We are trying to frame a word or sentence we put into law that would enforce network neutrality. It's hard for the F.C.C. and it's hard for us. I want you to make comments on this in regards to freedom of expression.
>> As a moderator let me ask the three panelists for a quick two questions based on Maria's comment. If there were two main points that you would want to feed into the main session in regards to what are key issues in regards to the network whether we have heard about internet intermediaries, network neutrality, whether you agree that those are issues or other key issues about the infrastructure that is of concern. So I will just ask Kurt to comment just two points of the key infrastructure that you think are important for civic empowerment on line to be kept open for freedom of expression.
>> This is Kurt with EFF, and two points I think would come out of the network neutrality proposal. One is that on the whole, that network neutrality is a very positive thing for freedom of expression because it allows small players to be able to participate fully and share their ideas. But the second point is that if we allow the FCC to regulate the internet, that opens the door to the possibility of F.C.C. being more harmful than good for being captured by repeat players that participate often before the FCC. And exert undue influence over the network.
>> I just ask the panelists to be brief, but two points that you would want to feed into the main session. Anja?
>> ANJA KOVACS: One is the whole issue of access to religion and intellectual property rights but I think more people will talk about that later. The second issue related to network neutrality is the openness of platforms or the lack of openness of platforms and mobile phones. If the developing world supposedly is going to connect to the internet mostly through a mobile phone, it's very important that people get access to the same internet as we do, and at the moment because mobile phone platforms are proprietary they effectively don't, so that's a big challenge.
>> Thank you, Johan, two quick points.
>> JOHAN HALLENBORG: Thank you. Regarding network neutrality, this is something which our government is looking positively on. Right now we are just giving our agencies the task to look more deeply into the issues and come up with policies, but generally speaking, giving this, giving this a positive policy look is definitely something that we do, and also from a human rights perspective, of course, this would remain important. Regarding the intermediary liability, this is something that was discussed in the context of our expert meeting in June together with a special repertoire, and to have as it's been indicated here, to have less liability for intermediaries is something which we would look favorably on from a human rights perspective.
>> Thank you. As moderator, I would have asked as a Canadian that's here to ask a question about rim, but I will save that for a side discussion for afterward. Any last chance for any last question from the floor, please?
>> Hi I am from Bangkok. I will actually internet as spectrum things like, so in the context of Thailand, we were talking about internet, in terms of new media and one of the things that's why consider there is two things another thing is that for video to get 20% in the spectrum to be like private ownership of things and that's common property, and the freedom of expression and access to knowledge. I just wonder if there would be any possibility to have that kind of thing in the internet as well, to make it more decentralized, the infrastructure, and also ownership as well. Thanks.
>> Panelists, comments, Kurt?
>> So I had a little difficulty understanding your question. You wanted to see what could be done for, to make a more decentralized ownership of the internet, and spread out a little bit of the means of communication? Is that
>> Two things so from the technical infrastructure perspective of the internet, you have to have a server and so that's become an issue of internet and it can be it's centralized in this way that is very difficult to transit by. This is from the technical of the media. Another thing is that the first one is about decentralization, the second is about ownership. To my understanding, in many countries they have been talking telecommunications, right, or the creation in some country like 10% or 20% to the public for public use for free that everybody can access. So that's the kind of thing.
>> One thing that can be advantageous towards freedom of expression is having a diverse population of our hosts and different voices by having more and varied hosts, it stops having a single point of failure or something which is subject to regulatory pressure. And in terms of anonymous speech, one of the advantages of decentralization, you can go bounce your packets through several different hosts before they emerge and thus make it more difficult to trace back and provide that diversity of ownership, again, has the advantage of reducing bottle necks and reducing single points of failure.
>> Great, so we are out of time for the first session, we will come back if we have more time. The second of the three parts is the cases of tension we talked about in the first part regards copyright protection and access to knowledge on line. And there is three main issues to come up and I would ask the panelists to comment on is what are what's the status, and we heard a little bit at the very beginning, what are the name problems that hamper or threaten access to information and knowledge, and what measures should be taken? I will ask March Marilia to speak first, followed by Jeremy, each of you have five minutes and we will open up to discussion first. The floor is yours.
>> MARILIA MACIEL: Thank you. I would like to begin with preliminary comment about the topic. Although I participated in framing the topic, I don't believe that it is honest, because it puts access to knowledge and copyright protection at two distant poles and somehow give us the responsibility to try to strike a balance between the two. And I don't see that access to knowledge and copyright protection are at odds, are two different things, are at two different points. I believe it's always important to remember that what we call copyright protection or author's rights, it's nothing but a legal monopoly that was given to authors and the to this monopoly is the belief that there will not be intellectual creation if there were no exclusive rights to explore work. So the monopoly exists first of all to benefit the author so he can continue to create and have a profit from the creation, and secondly, to benefit society, so society will continue to benefit from the creation.
So the conclusion is if authors, they don't receive that much from the creation. If the profit was with intermediaries or if society does not have access to works be it because of economic barriers in terms of high prices, be it because of legal barriers, be it because of technical barriers, DRM, that this system we have created called intellectual property regime is not being justifiable. And I think that this is the thing that we are living right now. I believe that the bottom line that copyright protection and access to knowledge they should not be a tension because the first should exist as a means to achieve the second. The government that dominate discourse in the IP regime right now have some consensus that are difficult to argue against them that cannot be questioned in the intellectual property arena such that intellect truly property is a tool that developing countries have to obey in order to receive foreign investments, that intellectual property leads to more development. This is something that's really hard to question, but it's not exactly true in developing countries. And this issue that intellectual property protection and access to knowledge are at odds is another consensus that has been repeated so much that we start to believe it, and I believe that the way we frame this question here to the workshop contributes to lead us to believe it's something that is not exactly true. In terms of the first question that Robert asked about the context, I believe that we had some really important setbacks in terms of access to knowledge in previous years. First of all, I would point out to the improvement and the endorsement of the right for copyright treaties that make it really hard to expand limitations and exceptions in national laws.
And it's really clear that WIPO is moving to a focus on intellectual property protection on line. In the general assembly last year it was really clear from Francis Gerry that he said WIPO has lost in intellectual property regime so one thing that can put us in the forefront of the debate again is talk about copyright protection on line. So this is dear to WIPO and we are not making the connection between what is being discussed in the IGF in terms of access to knowledge on line and what is being discussed in WIPO and I think this is a failure that we are having on this debate here.
The second set back we had is the negotiation of actor, which I believe that it's a very bad foreign shifting, a second foreign shifting that we have in this intellectual property regime. The first was moving the debate from WIPO to the WTO and now we are having another forum shifting and acting something that even if your country is not going to sign to ACTA, it is going to put to the standards of protection higher and it's going to be very difficult for other countries to be against it in the future. And the third
>> One minute remaining.
>> The third I'm not going to talk about. But I believe that the two policies that we have to discuss in order to prevent the approval of response in our countries is network neutrality and access, access to the internet being framed as a human right. This is important that we add that in our national relations. To finish, I believe that we have some strategy that we should look at here in the IGF. First of all, I believe access to knowledge has lost a lot of space here in the IGF and throughout the years access to knowledge is not a thing that is being discussed in the main session of access. It is not a very important theme in the session of security, openness and privacy and I believe this is really serious. If you want access to knowledge to be discussed here, there should be strategy of which thread to place it. I believe this is important. What opportunity that we have is the session about IG for that is not clear what this session will be really about so I believe we have a window of opportunity to try to bring access to knowledge in IG4D can be agreed between what is being discussed here in terms of access to knowledge and development and the development agenda that WIPO is trying to move forward. And I believe that by discussing access to knowledge here, we try to clarify some political inconsistencies, like, for instance, if we ask developed countries representatives here how to you form access to knowledge, they say we are for access to knowledge, that's great, but if you go to WIPO, the representatives of the sate countries say oh, no we can't approve a treaty that benefits for the blind, because we don't want a treaty that will be beneficial for the so the same people that saying they want access to knowledge here are the same people saying they don't want access to knowledge to be improved in other organizations and if we bring the debate here it will be an opportunity to bridge windows and bring more coherence in the debate about access to knowledge.
>> Thank you, Jeremy, please.
>> JERMEY MALCOLM: Thanks very much. I'm going to talk firstly about, very briefly about three cases of tension between copyright protection and access to knowledge. Specifically as folks can see who are the constituents of the organisation I represent and then we will move onto the research we have done and launch a new initiative today. So the first of the three cases of tension, I think, is that copyright flexibilities what I prefer to all user rights, haven't kept pace with the new fair uses that have emerged in the digital environment, such as basic things like the use of search engines, the creation of mash ups, format shifting, place shifting, time shifting.
These are seconds nature to consumers around the world, but in many countries they don't have fair use rights that actually legalize those uses which everyone agrees are actually fair. So we need to look at the user rights up to in the digital environment. That can be done on a country by country basis but as Marilia has pointed out that's difficult, in WIPO that's so even blind users being disadvantaged in WIPO, how hard is it going to be for sighted consumers. The second contention between copyright protection and access to knowledge on line is consumers are constrained in using the user rights they do have, even though they may have few rights they are constrained in exercising even those because of digital logs, DRM and the use of proprietary formats. The third contention is there is a great deal of attention given by governments, intergovernmental organizations, and corporations to protecting proprietary knowledge, but there is very low priority given to protecting non proprietary knowledge, such as open source software. For many governments they put millions and millions of dollars of resources and hundreds of staff working on the protection of proprietary knowledge but they completely ignore non proprietary knowledge. They use that to the civil society sector to promote and I think that's a real mistake.
So leading then to talk about some of the things that international has been doing to work on these problems, I did have two books that you could take copies of, but the mistake that I made is I left them out before the last workshop, and they have all been taken except for these two. So if you haven't got one, these are the only ones you can get. Otherwise you have to download them from our web site, so come and see me if I want these, for free, of course, yes.
So we do research covering 15,000 consumers in 24 countries administered in 13 languages. I can't tell you all of the results we found, but one of the key things is we found consumers are willing to pay for original copyright works because they want to get access to the highest quality works, but it needs to be price affordably. The only reason we piracy is so rampant is that they can't get quality work at affordable price. If they could, they would be quite happy to pay money for it.
We also did research on copyright flexibilities in Australia and Israel. The Australia one was on time shifting, format and space shifting exceptions to copyright law and we found that before this was introduced the industry was saying oh, no, don't introduce it's going to cause job losses and decimate our industry and we studied and we found it beneficial for everyone, and in fact, believe it or not, it may have increased consumers' compliance with copyright law because they had more after this was introduced. We did research in Israel, which I think I'm running out of time so I won't cover that. Come and down load a copy of the bit. I would like to arrange
>> You have a minute.
>> JEREMY MALCOLM: I will have if you can put out the others. We have a new campaign to amend the United Nations Consumer Protection Guidelines. You may not have heard of these, but they are non binding consumer protection guidelines that many developing countries in particular have followed as the basis for their consumer protection law. We are trying to get those amended to include principles. We think this is a fantastic opportunity to get this to bypass to getting our interested heard in WIPO. The IGF is a maybe friendly forum but it doesn't have much influence yet but the United Nations consumer guidelines do have influence so I are run out of time, but you can pick up a copy of the press release. There are still a few copies of that on the side table, and I would be happy to answer questions as well. Thank you very much.
>> Thank you panelists, I just want to ask a question that kind of relates to the first session to the second session. Anja and her comments at the first session and one of the questions that came up was the cases of tension between copyright protection and freedom of expression in regards to civic empowerment on line. I want to raise the issue that she mentioned in terms of how copyright at times has been used to limit freedom of expression in regards to the three strikes law. I want to ask the two panelists what their comments might be on two recent developments, that have taken place, one a few days ago in regards to Microsoft, and reports in the New York Times that in under the guise of copyright infringement that NGO has had computers seized.
So the issue how can, you know, copyright protection and those of you who have worked on it, where can it be seen to empower or not civic empowerment on line. So just trying to link the two parts of the session together, so just if you could make some really brief comments is that you see copyright protection and access to knowledge being limited together or whether they are freedom of expression issues related to copyright protection. Jeremy first and then Marilia and I will ask that you limit your comments to maximum one minute.
>> JEREMY MALCOLM: I will just take on the second part of your question and that is about the seizure of computers under the guise of copyright infringement but targeted at disabling NGO's. This is actually a new tactic. Things like this have been going on. Under the DMCA in America, for example, you are allowed to see the notice to internet content host to have material taken down for copyright infringement. This is very often misused to take down material for Meryl that have to do with freedom of expression. There is a certain church which has a history of putting take down notices to remove religious content from the internet. There are political web sites that have been taken supposedly on grounds of copyright infringement. It doesn't pay the content host to look too carefully at whether the content is copyright infringement or not. It's a self option for them to take it down without questions asked. So, yes, it's a serious concern.
>> Short comments, please.
>> MARILIA MACIEL: I believe that balanced laws have the power to foster freedom of expression on line. If others were really remunerated by the works they are developing they would be encouraged to create more, but I believe that the general context in most of the countries is that authors get very little remuneration and other money goes for the intermediaries so they are not being encouraged to write or record or to make works, but I believe that freedom of expression can be put forward by giving authors the possibility to choose the kind of protection that though want to give to their works. That's why I believe it is important that countries recognize what flexible kinds of protections such as creative comments, for instance, that can say to the author, okay, if you want your work to be shared with others, you can do that. You don't have to say everything is protected or nothing is protected. You have a middle ground. So creative comments does that, gives the opportunity for the authors to choose what kind of protection they want to give to their works. If someone can share it, if someone can make a commercial use of the work or not. So I believe that freedom of expression comes first from balanced laws and secondly from freedom to choose what kind of protection you want to give to a particular work.
>> We will answer questions from the floor? Any questions please?
>> I have a comment, not a question. I am coming from Latvia. My background is academic and I'm very thankful to you taking up the question of the access to knowledge because let's be realistic, there will not be a day when everybody in the world will have equal access to internet. There are different problems which are facing western countries, eastern countries, different parts in the world, and taking up this question about access to knowledge we are moving one step up because we cannot speak all of the time talking about the access to internet, what should the other countries do who already has this access to internet.
We have to move on. The second point is a little bit more practical. I have done the research in my country about the, I think, fantastic tool called Twitter. It's very good platform where everybody can join and everybody can discuss wherever it wants. We are just 2 million in our country but at the moment we have a little bit more than 30,000 people using Twitter, and it's the research shows that most of the users are people with higher education and a lot of students. This is the audience who really need this access to knowledge.
Thank God we haven't had so far any court cases or anything regarding the copyrights, and I hope it will not happen, and, therefore, we need this discussion about how to proceed with these issues. Thank you very much.
>> Any comments? Don?
>> Yes, in regards, in regards to the tension between copyright and access to knowledge or authors' rights, it is my understanding and from the history of the development of the idea of access to knowledge that it's root in article 27 of the universal declaration on human rights, one part of which says there is a right to participate in culture, the second of which says that everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from scientific literary or artistic production as an author. And it's in this tension of within the end context of rights language oriented towards authors' rights and protecting an author in the moral sense, not just in the incentive sense, that is seen as a justification for copyright maximal copyright protection, and this is actually a question, and to Jeremy, the other part is the right to participate in culture, which is, I think, a lot more friendly to freedom of expression, and as access to knowledge has moved more towards sort of a development oriented justification rather than a rights oriented justification, as consumers, and as consumer guidelines which I'm not familiar with at the UN level, one of the almosts that sort of constitute that freedom of expression, do consumers as just, you know, people who purchase material goods, what is what does it mean freedom of expression, and is that something that is relevant to the consumer guidelines that you will be looking into?
>> JEREMY MALCOLM: Consumers are really all of us, and gave a speech when he launched the first set of consumer rights in 1964, he explained that really unlike any other category you might think of, consumers are everyone, whether we pay for goods, whether we get them from free, some knowledge goods, of course, should be free, we are still consumers of those goods and consumer rights have a very long history. They are well established in the U.N. system and in national, various national legislatures. So we think a shift of the framing of from being about copyright and the rights attached to copyright to a consumer protection issue could be a good tactic. One of the problems we have is as you said that copyright are themselves the subject of rights and why its discourse can help us but also hinder us. We want to really step out of the intellectual rights framing and go to consumer protection framing and say does the use of this copyright hurt consumers? We think that way of reframing the debate is a way to make progress that we can't make in any other forum.
>> Any comments or questions from the room? Going once.
>> I guess the role Jonathan Zuck is my name again, I guess the role of copyrights and patents in benefiting consumers is something that has to be treated directly and indirectly for that debate to happen in a legitimate way because if the works aren't created that's not in the consumers' interest either. I had a particular question for Marilia because you mentioned something about allowing flexibility in copyright, and the things like the other types of licensing and other copyrighted materials. Are there actually barriers to authors choosing those mechanisms around the world for the protection of their copyrighted material now? I wasn't aware of that. I thought those things were a choice today. We are mostly concerned about other people making choices than the authors, but creative comments seems like it's become popular around the world and are there barriers to it. That's my question.
>> Just, if you want to ask another question as well, we have two more minutes for this round. So if you have a question.
I’ll get a response back from the panelist first, thank you.
>> MARILIA MACIEL: It is important that these kinds of regulations such as the existence of creative comments is recognized inside the country. In Brazil the so we had to adjust the licenses of creative comments to our environment. We had to translate everything in order for it to be recognized inside Brazil so it is very important that each country has a representation from a creative comments in order to recognize and translate the licenses so people can understand the licenses in their own languages. So it requires some kind of national organisation for it to work. So it is important that it takes place.
>> Great. We are out of time. I'm just going to go to the third session now. I'm going to governmental and private control over information and personal data. There is three questions and three panelists. The three questions are (Off Microphone) comments on what is the status (Off Microphone) we have three speakers. We have Susan Morgan from the Global Network Initiative and Cornelia from Microsoft. I will have Susan Morgan to start off with and then go to Eev and Cornelia to finish off.
>> SUSAN MORGAN: I will do two things in my remarks first of all we will talk about the friends we are seeing from a GNI perspective and secondly I will offer some thoughts on what the implications are. So if we look at the trends to start off with, it's increasingly that internet communication technologies are increasingly central to commerce, speech, information, media and personal identity. There is also a question of scale in that the number of internet users rising hugely around the world, and web 2.0 applications are creating ever greater connectedness and interconnectivity. I think the other thing that's been mentioned briefly is around the impact of the mobile internet which will be huge particularly in emerging markets. So with all of those things as a background, I think it's clear that ICT has potentially huge opportunity to provide positive impact to access to information and access to knowledge. However, these things don't exist in a vacuum. And I think there are three trends that we would highlight. The first one is one of speed, in that law and policy really struggle to keep up with technology developments, how technology is used so innovation from consumers, and then the companies themselves as new business models emerge. And the second issue is really around complexity in that there is so many different regulatory approaches and legislative efforts in many jurisdictions and that creates real challenge. (Off Microphone) and then I think another area in complexity is around increasingly sophisticated censorship and surveillance techniques being used.
And I think all of that raises a series of dilemmas which is the third area I would highlight. We have talks about two of those today. Very much around how do you balance freedom of expression and privacy with real issues of national security and how do we get that debate happening? And then the second that we have talked about in terms of how do you balance the needs to respond to legitimate commercial interests, again, with responsibility to respect human rights.
So I think this is a really sort of complex set of issues that particularly companies are facing around the world. And the implication for that is that there is an increasing pressure from governments on companies around the world to comply with domestic laws that may potentially impact on human rights and freedom of expression privacy. So in response to that, the question is really what does that mean for companies and the role of companies. Clearly there is a responsibility for companies to respect and protect the freedom of expression of privacy rights of their users, and the Global Network Initiative would suggest four things, the first is that companies need to understand and address the human rights risks of their business.
So that would be mean having some kind of process in place to be able to quantify the risks for the products and services that they sell, the technology that they develop, and the markets that they operate in. Secondly, I think there is a question around what do companies do when they are facing a government demand or request for information. From a GNI perspective, we would talk very much about interpreting that request narrowly, seeking clarification and in writing, and having policies in place at a company level, of how the company will respond when governments fail to adhere to domestic procedure. The third perspective is very much around the importance of communicating with users. So it's important that companies are able to disclose the policies and procedures they have in place for responding to government demands, that they give prominent, timely notice to users when content is being removed or blocked, and that a commitment to transparency and accountability will hopefully build trust.
The final point I would make is about the importance of participating in collaborative action. I think these issues are complex, they are sensitive and they are fast moving and there is clearly strength to be found in working together with different constituencies, be it that companies investors, academics and civil society. The GNI seeks to do that by providing a framework for companies to operate in, by providing an accountability process, by engaging in policy work, and also providing opportunities for shared learning. Thank you.
>> Thank you. Evo?
>> Well, there have been miscommunication between me and the organizers, totally my fault, I admit. I had prepared to talk on the second point, but I will do a mix between the second and third points now. So a quick note on access to knowledge. Access to knowledge as you all know and have already discussed it is actually a wild challenge. It goes from access to infrastructure, capacity so people can effectively participate and express themselves to the ability of use and (Off Microphone) to the knowledge. So, therefore, in a world, we are talking a set of human rights that are just being translated in internet grammar. So it's important or business approach to copyright is not enough for this discussion, but I totally agree with what Marilia said before, there is not a case of a position between copyright on one side and access to knowledge on the other side. I think it's much more of a matter of incorporating the human rights in perspective of copyrights. So just to answer the basic question that Robert did in the beginning of the second discussion, I think that looking for what happened in the last years, we should be concerned. We don't have in reasons to celebrate. I think that first a fair amount of more (Off Microphone) copyright legislative proposals have popped up internationally and have even watched a case of resistance and WIPO was the forum to all of the exceptions to copyright like exceptions for people with secondly, Anja has mentioned the different cases of laws that have been around the world and moreover I think that's important to highlight here. A the different trends that have been seen a safe harbors for internet liability like the first proposals of the text of Acta and my only country specifically in Brazil, all of the struggling we have been facing to set a clear liability rule in our not to be pessimistic, of course we have some good news, especially I would like to highlight some of the good winds, the exciting winds blowing from the south, with the copyright reform in Chile, that is clearly aimed and access to knowledge, and now the new proposal of copyright reform in Brazil that my vision is quite balanced between copyright preservation and other human rights.
So just to add to the discussion we had before, I think on one hand we have we need that government take other human rights into account when elaborating when formulating copyright legislation, and on the other hand, I might be wrong, but I think one thing we miss here is that GNI type initiative for access to knowledge, a broad coalition between serious society, private sectors, academic that can at least set standards of this discussion and hopefully try to centrize some of this provisions around the world. So this is for access to knowledge.
>> You have one minute remaining.
>> So one minute on the question of personal data. I would focus on government control of internet users in Brazil. Brazil is a very unique case, I think, in the world, because Brazil is probably one of the few places in the world where governments and law enforcement are pressuring the private sector to keep more data and for a longer period than we do right now, just for it to have a sense of what's happening and this has been discussed for a couple of years now.
Internet private companies should keep, for instance, access logs for two years, three years or even five years, so it's completely different from what we are watching in Europe or even in the U.S. As we lack a strong organisation on privacy or even on consumers' rights in Brazil, Google has been very active in defending this kind of at least funny from EFF, for instance, we have been one of the most active organizations resisting to this kind of requests from the government. On the other hand, the way we have found to deal with it and to give more publicity and open up public discussion is to give transparency to this kind of initiative. So as probably most of you know, we have developed Google.com/govern requests which is a very simple will place where people can consult what kind of government requests for data or content removal Google has been receiving and if you visit the web site, you will see that Brazil, not by coincidence, is the leader both in content removal requests and on data requests. So I'm sure that I have already reached my time. So I just want to give these words and then I will discuss a little bit more the implications of this.
>> They will have questions for you in the Q and A. I will speak to Cornelia. You have five minutes.
>> CORNELIA KUTTERER: Thank you, and thank you for inviting me to speak., I would like to make a couple of points trying to address the questions you have phrased. First of all, it is clear that freedom of expression is a human right and a guarantee of human dignity and there is both a role and responsibility for companies as well as governments to adhere to these principles, such as the international covenant and civil and political rights, which also clarifies in which case, in which occasions freedom of narrowly interpreted freedom of expression can be restricted. We adhere to, and are consistent with the concept of law enforcement service provider guidelines of 2008, and we, Microsoft, are a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, and hence we are committed to respecting and protecting the freedom of expression privacy rights of our users. Those GNI principles have a number of operational commitments to which Microsoft adheres, and I would just like to list them for clarification. So we have committed to employ human rights impact assessment to identify circumstances when freedom of expression privacy may be jeopardized or advanced. We have committed to train employees on procedures to protect freedom of expression privacy when faced with government demands and restrictions, and we have committed to address the government's established it domestic process when we seek to restrict the problem of expression. Considering challenging governments in courts or other forms when faced with restrictions that appear inconsistent with domestic law or international human rights law in standards and freedom of expression privacy, and we have committed to establish a high level of transparency of users when required by governments to remove content or limit access to information and ideas. And the circumstances where they might be required to close personal information, I would like to mention that at this current moment, we are undertaking this impact assessment, and I think the audit has to be reported to the GNI very soon. I would also like to mention that these issues around freedom of expression and attention to other rights can be obviously more important in the light of cloud computing where jurisdictions and borders are even less of an issue in the internet where data is stored in different countries. And access to that data becomes more pressing as Susan has already mentioned. So with the GNI, we hope that these standards also become a global standard to which all companies in active in the ICT board adhere to, and we hope that within the policy debate the GNI becomes more prominent as such a standard. As it stands now, at least in the European policy discussion, we have a number of issues which are combined to freedom of expression, such as draft recommendations to take down illegal content, in some areas like the draft directive to fight sexual child abuse, and some questions in there. And we need a higher level of discussion on freedom of expression. I hope that with the GNI we can get there.
I would I would also like to say that internally privacy respect obviously is an important guarantor for freedom of expression, and within Microsoft we have certain processes in place, like the security development life cycle which is a process to insure that each software we produce takes necessary steps to insure that respect.
I would like to mention two other points. First of all, I would like to let you know about a project Microsoft is participating which is funded by the European Commission, it is called trust in digital life. The web site is trust in digital life.com, and this is a consortium over two years where different companies and other stakeholders participate in order to understand and see how in the context of all sorts of ICT stakeholders being hardware, software, infrastructure, we insure the rule of law in the development of those technologies, privacy and security and human rights can be respected, and it really gives a platform to discuss how future research within each information society has to develop. And we see this also as one part of our engagement in that discussion. My last point since it was raised in this forum is I would like to refer you to the blog which has been posted today by our general counsel, Brad Smith, on the incident in Russia, and seizure of equipment of an NGO under the disguise of intellectual property enforcement of Microsoft.
We have, yes, basically the whole day spent to understand what actually happened. We are in a situation where we think this obviously extremely unfortunate to read something like that in the press and have immediately taken necessary steps to help that situation go away. And I really ask you to go to the blog, Microsoft, on the issues blog, and read the exact steps we have taken. I think that should give you a full set of answers to that, to that incident, including legal assistance and licensing of copyright so that the eventual an eventual litigation has no merits, just as one of the issues.
>> I just want to, before we get to questions, I just wanted to, pulling up the blog entry, just make some comments at the bottom of the blog where Microsoft says that this should not create a pretext for inappropriate pursuits of NGO's, newspapers or other participants in civil society, and they don't want to contribute to the effort even inadvertently, so it's a quick response, and it shows that companies that recognize the issue of human rights will respond quickly and take a look at the situation and that's encouraging to see. So getting back to if there is any questions or comments from the attendees, we have half an hour left, so if you have a comment, please.
>> Thank you very much, and thank you for the interventions. I think it's quite clear from all of the presenters here that human rights is increasingly growing in importance when it comes to all matters of internet governance and related areas. I think that is actually a step in the right direction compared to previous years of the IGF. So I think I would just start by making that comment, and I think that's important. Secondly, we are, of course, very interested in learning more about the GNI, it's experience from the setup, and process you are going through, both the GNI and your partners. I was interested to learn more about, I mean, GNI essentially is an American initiative, American companies. We are lacking a similar response or a similar initiative in the European context. With your experience, what were the main hurdles for not including the Europeans, and what do you think would be needed to create similar, similar setups in other parts of the world. Because as I commented and several others, we need a more cross regional approach to this, to integrate human rights in the internet governance and not just be having it be seen as a western initiative. So if you could elaborate on that, that would be good. Thank you.
>> Thanks very much for your question. So I have to set the context in the time I have been executive director of GNI for three months just so my comments would be based on the sort of early observations. So GNI as on organisation that's formally incorporated and operating is relatively new and as I say I'm the first executive director, however, a number of people have been involved in terms of developing the principles and the framework and the guidelines that has formed sort of the basis of GNI and they were developed over a number of years, I think over a two year period. During that time, there was actually active negotiations and involvement with a number of European companies. I think from my perspective, the, in terms of my role and my focus and my priorities going forward, it seems to me that one of the most critical things I must do is to internationalize the GNI. So I think you are right in that there has been an early emphasis from the U.S., but I think that a key part of my role going forward is looking at how do we expand and engage all constituencies, so companies, academics, investors and civil society, both within Europe and beyond are not something that I'm already working on and I welcome a conversation with you about it.
>> Any other questions, please?
>> Hi, I'm speaking about encouragement from companies, GNI or Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, whatever, I mean, outside the U.S., say, for example, in Thailand it's actually three of these companies, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are three of the top web sites, web services in Thailand. And, okay, that's one thing, right, that try to engage the local service provider, right, to take part of GNI. That's one thing. I think it would be a role of GNI as well. It's possible to promote that, okay, we go for these kinds of standards and like let the people in, say, local market recognize that, okay, this is the things that GNI members recognize, and let the consumers in that market choose, okay, if they value, say, for example, their own personal data, maybe they opt to use the services of GNI member, I think that could be a role of GNI member that's they can play in local markets as well.
>> I think that's absolutely right and I think the emphasis that GNI has on the importance ever communicating with users is exactly addressing that point so that people will be able to see what the policies and practices are of companies as members of GNI, absolutely.
>> Any other questions?
>> Just a follow up question. I would also like to say as a company, say, for example, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo as well not Yahoo, at least Google and Microsoft has the branch in Thailand. In this case, I'm not sure, I mean, how it's going to be, like, whether that's subject to the, say, local law or whatever. I mean, what's the policy of GNI regarding if there is a conflict between the local or whatever.
>> I think when I talked about GNI being about accountability and about policy engagement at a government level I think that's very much about the second point. I might ask Evo or Cornelia to talk about sort of company approach when there is a conflict between local law and international law, but I think the central point from a GNI perspective is that it's providing a mechanism to show accountability for companies and what companies are doing, but also I think there is a real from GNI collectively to be engaging in policy work to work with governments exactly around those conflicts, but I will hand over to either Evo or Cornelia.
>> I just would like to add to your comment that when I bring the example of Brazil and other discussion about government request and data and the different policies for keeping data for two years, three years or five years. The interesting thing is the one you mentioned. I mean, in international platforms like the internet, a different, so different policies, different is cause a lot of trouble not only to people but accountability of what's happening with their data. Especially because it doesn't make any sense to keep the data from the users in Thailand only in Thailand or Brazilians user only in Brazil.
I think that's an opportunity for IGF so try to advance in this discussion, you know, how we can set more international centers on this kind of thing. I'm not a specialist in security, but I don't know exactly why an investigation in Brazil should require five years of data. And then other countries it should require less than this. I think that's a very, very privilege space kind of thing.
>> Maybe make one question, to the other panelists as well, you were mentioning in regards to data retention in Brazil. I would like to raise something that was mentioned, I think, at other IGF's and probably this one as well is data retention initiatives don't spring up by themselves, they spring up by precedence in other country. The data retention in the U.S. and the European Union Data Retention Directive as well cause precedence that shift around the world and the democratic mechanisms and due process that exist in Europe don't. So the issues of, you know, how much do you think the Brazilian data retention directive was something that came from Brazil or whether it's something that came from discussions that were being made, maybe with Europeans or others. So I'm just curious to hear that. I would like to maybe ask Johan as well, in regards to in terms of we are talking about government initiatives so what are thing that's governments could do to help protect personal data, not only of what's held by the government, but also the data that corporations hold to what extent can governments play a role as well. So I like to hear maybe your response and yours as well. Thank you.
>> Well, I might be wrong, and if anyone has any other information, please direct me, but I think it's totally a Brazilian thing, and I will explain why. The discussion in Brazil started or got more attention when we got this proposal on cyber crimes in the Congress, and the cyber crimes bill was basically based on the Budapest convention, but except for that retention provisions. So we got a lot of provisions from the Budapest convention, and when we got to retention it was completely different, completely Brazilian and original. So I don't see any proposal like that that reached that for three or five years. I know two years, so I think it's a Brazilian thing, and honestly, I can't explain what's the difference, what's the difference security or the difference in investigation that could justify this kind of extension.
>> From a purely European perspective, we are in process at the moment at a very interesting time to discuss these issues because we do have three relevant processes concurrently on the table which doesn't happen often, first of all obviously the provision of the data protection framework which includes privacy in law enforcement locations, the decision on privacy in law enforcement has to beery advised due to the Lisbon treaty. We also will see an implementation report of the data retention directive, and as a side note, our services are currently not considered to be part of that data retention directive. And we also have a proposal on the table which is fascinating from an institutional point of view and our representative from Sweden might agree to that because it is actually not a proposal put forward by the commission, but by the council, and I think Sweden is one of the participating members in forming that coalition, which is the draft proposal for European investigation order, which will replace the European evidence warrant and mutual legal assistance agreements that are the basis for law enforcement access to data in and this unique setting gives us the chance to at least on a European basis to be more coherent in law enforcement access to data, which will help both governments, but also, of course, companies to adhere to human rights aspects and if we, if we take that serious and see these three things coming together, we can achieve something which will then also have global impact.
>> Thank you. That was interesting to learn more about that, actually, not something I work with on a daily basis, but I'm happy to hear. We did discuss in our initiative in our expert meeting in June on the issue of data retention from a human rights perspective and wide agreement that it should be kept at a minimum, of course. It was also argued by many that more direct user control over personal data is used and is needed. This is purely from a human rights perspective then. But I think that's as a national entity or a government, the most important thing is probably transparency and clarity regarding policies and laws, and also that the public is having effective access to these regulations, but then, of course, collaboration at European level and other levels are, of course, much more important, but, again, coming back to this, seeing all of the issue from a human rights perspective, that's basically the main challenge that we face. Thanks.
>> We have still time for questions, Anja?
>> ANJA KOVACS: Thank you. I think Susan mentioned something very important earlier, which is that technology is moving much faster than any of us, and I think that's not just true of companies or governments. It's also true of civil society. We are struggling to catch up with all of these evolutions. Now, yesterday we had an internet and human rights meeting before the IGF, and one of the things, a concern that came out very strongly in that meeting was actually about the role of companies in this new situation. And it had to do with the fact that things change so fast. And so that effectively also companies are changing the way we live, and the example was given of say, for example, Facebook, to name a company that's not here. How it restructures the way we communicate, et cetera, and that in ten years' time we will see certain results coming out of that. I fuse the example of Facebook because they have also been under attack over privacy policies, et cetera, and a lot of what we have discussed here is very much about how can we make sure that we comply to lies, to norms that have already agreed, have already been agreed to. But in this new situation, there is also challenges thrown up that those old laws have not necessarily addressed.
So in that context, if that is the situation, and we are not effectively able to keep up, I wonder then what is the responsibility that companies have in this new situation, and how can we deal with that? And I know it's a very general question. I know there won't be any easy answers, but I would be interested in hearing from some of you and even from U.N. as a government representative on what kind of ideas you have and say within the context of GNI is it just about responding when complaints come and taking existing laws into account or are you also trying to creatively think about how can we be more pro active in dealing with these things so issues don't arise in the first place.
>> From a GNI perspective, part of our framework is about what to do exactly as you said when responding to a government request, but I think there is another part of the framework, which is looking at the importance of companies understanding the human rights risks that they face in the business that they are in.
So, and I think that relates to the markets they operate in around the world, the products and services that they sell, and the technology that they develop. So I think that over time there is a clear, from GNI perspective, there is a clear requirement for companies to develop the capacity to understand those human rights impacts, and to understand how to address those as well. So I think that's but I don't know whether Cornelia or Evo.
>> Yes, I think the establishment of the forum where certain issues that are either in the press or are otherwise reported have been there has been an established discussion from once only with members of the GNI, but sometimes also including other companies who have an interest in this debate, and I think this reflection within the group actually also helps to understand and take positions from other stakeholders into account so to come back also on this incident in Russia, so that it is easier for companies confronted with specific situations, and as you can see in the press, there is almost no company which hasn't been in the press for one or the other reason lately in that context so look at NGO's, for example, and ask them to help and consider what steps need to be taken and the GNI has proven to be a wonderful platform to discuss this delicate issues in a sort of a protected environment where you can where you are able to speak freer potentially than even in that room, which is a good discussion forum as well, but I think that is a major benefit to GNI for companies at least, if I speak at least for Microsoft certainly.
>> Just maybe want to make one comment linking back to your comments about research in motion, Blackberry in India. I think just hearing what was said, I think, my surprise, I guess in research in motion is that they basically said trust us. And I think the broader implications of first knowing the infrastructure that they set up, and that they are these laws that they have to adhere to and sooner or later they are going to have to be accountable to governments and then when a situation came up that they didn't seem to be prepared in dealing with the actors as they should have, is an issue. So I think engagement of everyone. I just want to get back. We still have time for one question, but I want to do a quick summary. I hope we had thanks to the organizers a lot to cover in the time we have had together and talked about it in different ways, talking about civic empowerment where we heard really much in terms of different perspectives, in terms of what I would say is an enabling environment from a rights perspective that's really needed. Some the issues that threaten and hamper such as intermediary liable and elsewhere. The issue of copyright came up. In terms of access to knowledge, I would say access to knowledge, copyright and freedom of expression came up. And in terms of government and private control over personal data we spent more time talking about the GNI and in terms of issues of Facebook, Google and many others and the issues that have come up over the last weeks and months maybe didn't necessarily come up in the questions I would have hoped would have come up from the panelists in regards to the issue that there is a lot of privacy advocates out there that have a lot of questions and having a very civil discourse with everyone here was good, but I do want to encourage there, is a lot more people in the room that have not asked questions so I want to give this maybe one last opportunity to people that may have come later who may have heard some of the discussion to just briefly comment or question so we still have five minutes remaining. Any last questions or comments from the floor? So, again, I want to thank all of you for attending this great session that was organized by Anja and Marilia. It's brought together very different points of views, and at the very first session of the IGF so a great way to get started. We have been able to do something that the IGF is all about, bringing together different stakeholders, civil society, the business sector and governments and talking together and I appreciate that. And I look forward to seeing all of you in the days to come here at the IGF and that it may be a very productive session and from my civil society hat that I hope the issue of civil rights and freedom of expression stays strong throughout this IGF. Thank you.
(Concluded at 1300)
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