{"id":9380,"date":"2011-05-16T12:48:27","date_gmt":"2011-05-16T16:48:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=9380"},"modified":"2011-05-16T11:53:24","modified_gmt":"2011-05-16T15:53:24","slug":"a-disturbing-possible-future-nanolaw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/05\/16\/a-disturbing-possible-future-nanolaw\/","title":{"rendered":"A disturbing possible future: nanolaw"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ftrain.com\/nanolaw.html\" target=\"_blank\">Paul Ford<\/a> writes about a morning in the near future:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>My daughter was first sued in the womb. It was all very new then. I&#8217;d posted ultrasound scans online for friends and family. I didn&#8217;t know the scans had steganographic thumbprints. A giant electronics company that made ultrasound machines acquired a speculative law firm for many tens of millions of dollars. The new legal division cut a deal with all five Big Socials to dig out contact information for anyone who&#8217;d posted pictures of their babies in-utero. It turns out the ultrasounds had no clear rights story; I didn&#8217;t actually own mine. It sounds stupid now but we didn&#8217;t know. The first backsuits named millions of people, and the Big Socials just <em>caved<\/em>, ripped up their privacy policies in exchange for a cut. So five months after I posted the ultrasounds, one month before my daughter was born, we received a letter (back then a paper letter) naming myself, my wife, and one or more unidentified fetal defendants in a suit. We faced, I learned, unspecified penalties for copyright violation and theft of trade secrets, and risked, it was implied, that my daughter would be born bankrupt.<\/p>\n<p>But for $50.00 and processing fees the ultrasound shots I&#8217;d posted (copies attached) were mine forever, as long as I didn&#8217;t republish without permission. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>H\/T to <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/kevinmarks\/status\/70062463755894785\" target=\"_blank\">Kevin Marks, retweeted by Cory Doctorow<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Paul Ford writes about a morning in the near future: My daughter was first sued in the womb. It was all very new then. I&#8217;d posted ultrasound scans online for friends and family. I didn&#8217;t know the scans had steganographic thumbprints. A giant electronics company that made ultrasound machines acquired a speculative law firm for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,9,28,15],"tags":[135,85],"class_list":["post-9380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-law","category-media","category-technology","tag-copyright","tag-sf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2ri","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9380"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9382,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9380\/revisions\/9382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}