Digilife »
David Barker is a child psychologist. A United States defense software contractor commissions him to help with one of their programs, the first true digital consciousness. The program has taken hostages in the company’s underground lab and the company sends David into the lab with a handpicked team of specialists: a mathematician, a computer engineer, a cultural anthropologist, and representatives from the military. Their task is to regain control over this new being and convince her to let her hostages go. But from the moment they set foot in the underground lab, David realizes that the company’s claims of control over this digital being have been flights of fancy and their mission to reason with the first digital consciousness becomes a struggle to survive.

Echelon »
Payton "Doc" Connor is an investigator at the Center for UFO Studies in Chicago, a real-life private agency that investigates the paranormal. He has a reputation for dissecting reports the agency receives and proving them to be hoaxes. Shortly before the agency sends him on a routine investigation to New Mexico, the Agency assigns him as mentor to a new investigator, Chanel Falasco. During the trip to the desert, they are contacted by a contemporary "Deep Throat", who confesses his part in a national conspiracy that includes Freemasonry, the Illuminati, and a cult born of Nazis that escaped the Nuremburg Trials with the help of wealthy industrialists. The confessor wants to use them and CUFOS to expose the group he works for before their ultimate goals are realized through an illegal surveillance network referred to only as Echelon.

Midwasteland »
It is the near future in a post-apocalyptic Chicago and Anton Donovan is an anomaly. That is, though he appears to be human in every respect, he is actually a mutated version of a human. There are several differences between anomalies and humans, but the most compelling of these is the anomaly’s ability to manipulate radiation that has been left behind by a long ago waged nuclear war. The humans fear this power and they have instituted a testing process to find and euthanize anomaly children in their cities. The result of this is that anomalies only live in freedom outside of human civilization. Because of a series of personal tragedies suffered at the hands of one of these anomaly enclaves, Anton joins the human military. They think that he is going to help them hunt down his own kind, but instead he is going to use his unique situation to push both sides towards a peace, even as both humans and enclaves alike prepare to wage a worldwide war.

Over at Lifehacker, Adam Dachis spoke to law professer Derek Bambauer and used their conversation as the basis for a piece of speculative fiction from the point of view of someone who falls victim to CISPA abuse. It's a well-executed concept that steers clear of sensationalism and presents a realistic example of how CISPA would grant the government new powers in areas far beyond cybersecurity, and how innocents might get swept up by those powers. The fictional narrator, who struggles through an ethically challenging college assignment on child pornography laws, has his name dragged through the mud after the school turned its computer logs over to the feds as part of a hacking investigation and his search history landed him under scrutiny. This nicely demonstrates one of the big problems with CISPA: the affirmative search permissions it would grant, which allow the government to dig through cybersecurity data for evidence of other crimes.

The story's message can't really be conveyed in snippets, but here's a brief excerpt:

As I continued my research I found more and more instances of laws with vaguely-defined terms that were designed to be tough on crime. No one bothered to oppose them in fear of being painted weak, or as a lover of terrorism and sexual deviancy. As a result, innocent people ended up in jail as collateral damage. The law had chosen to try and assuage our fears by sacrificing our freedoms as payment. But even worse, it didn't seem to be working. When you cast a wide net, you not only catch too many fish but so many that you can't find the fish you're actually looking for. People who broke the law weren't getting caught because the resources previously utilized to catch them were diverted to finding offenders before they actually offended. It's a nice thought to think we can preemptively prevent a crime, but it just doesn't work.

Whether it's Chinese hackers or child pornography, it's vital that hot-button panics don't override evidence and common sense in crafting legislation. Even more importantly, people should only allow the government to bypass their rights under extremely limited circumstances, if at all. There's a famous quote about liberty and security, but I don't want to Google it lest I end up on a watch-list somewhere...

Fox and The Simpsons' creator, Matt Groening, developed the idea for the fictional brand, Duff. Therefore, when a real-world manufacturer puts out a product by the same name, one might think that it has stolen Fox's idea and that, as a matter of equity, intellectual property law ought to furnish a remedy. But intellectual property law does not protect ideas in the abstract. While a real-world Duff manufacturer may have taken more than just an idea, it is difficult to articulate how much more. Part of the reason it is so difficult to conceptualize the injury Fox suffers when another producer introduces a Duff Beer to the marketplace stems from the fact that Duff Beer is a fictional product sold in a fictional universe under a fictional brand name. Fox's injury looks very different when we suspend our disbelief and plunge into the fictional world of Springfield, accepting the fictional reality as our own and when we pull back, remind ourselves that The Simpsons is nothing more than a cartoon and view Duff Beer as one element of a vividly imagined work of animated fiction. As a consequence of this puzzle of perspective, Fox suffers a different intellectual property injury depending on our vantage point.

An analogy to Internet law helps explicate the puzzle. Writing on the problem of perspective in this area of the law, Professor Orin Kerr posits that "whenever we apply law to the Internet, we must first decide whether to apply the law to the facts as seen from the viewpoint of physical reality or virtual reality." Kerr terms the perspective from inside virtual reality the "'internal perspective' of the Internet" and the point of view of an "outsider concerned with the functioning of the network in the physical world rather than the perceptions of a user" the "external perspective." In attempting to apply law to the Internet, our perception of who is doing what to whom is not a mere cognitive tool for conceptualizing difficult problems, Kerr contends. Instead, our selection of perspective is itself outcome determinative, because "[b]y choosing the perspective, we choose the reality; by choosing the reality, we choose the facts; and by choosing the facts, we choose the law." While Kerr suggests that courts may dismiss this problem of perspective as "a minor skirmish in the 'battle of analogies,'" he notes that courts "already choose perspectives when they apply law to the Internet" without realizing it.

According to the complaint, before [screenwriter] Boal was embedded with the military, he and Playboy agreed to "ground rules" set by the Department of Defense. One of the rules was that reporters would be restricted in the type of personal information they could report on a service member. Reporters were limited to releasing a member's name and hometown only, and only on the condition the service member had provided consent.

Was this agreement sufficient to give Sarver a stake in the story and film? He says so. Another claim in the lawsuit is for breach of contract. Another is violation of privacy.