#209—Who owns public data?

And the time Greg Kidd got sued for $13 trillion.

Apr 25, 2022

Welcome to Yaka Stuff, our weekly newsletter that covers news, industry perspectives, and updates from the Hard Yaka ecosystem. Check out last week’s report here.

This week:

Who owns public data?
The fight for our data isn’t over
When the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act lands you in prison
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to own the metaverse
Chart of the week—crypto unicorns
Tweet of the week—gamer edition
Ecosystem updates
This week in policy
Stuff happens

1. Who owns public data?

Apparently the term web3 has been around since 2006. Photo: Enrique Dans

Let’s say someone posts something publicly online.

Who owns that data?

Is it the platform where that data lives—say, Facebook or Twitter or Linkedin? Does Facebook now own that data and get to decide who can use or access it?

Or is that public data now a public good? And if it’s a public good, does that mean that anyone should have open access and free use of that public data?

That’s the central question a landmark case that went to the Supreme Court has been trying to answer—LinkedIn v. HiQ.

And after the Supreme Court sent that case back to the Ninth Circuit, the original appeals court ruled (again) this week that public data is indeed a public good.

Here’s TechCrunch:

In its second ruling on Monday, the Ninth Circuit reaffirmed its original decision and found that scraping data that is publicly accessible on the internet is not a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA, which governs what constitutes computer hacking under U.S. law.
The Ninth Circuit’s decision is a major win for archivists, academics, researchers and journalists who use tools to mass collect, or scrape, information that is publicly accessible on the internet. Without a ruling in place, long-running projects to archive websites no longer online and using publicly accessible data for academic and research studies have been left in legal limbo.

And here’s /gregkidd:

Huge victory for self-sovereignty, access rights. Public data is public property!

Now for some story time.

This is a fight that Greg (and Hard Yaka) have been battling for a decade. Before GlobaliD, Greg founded a company called 3taps, which was leveraging public data for its platform.

Craigslist didn’t appreciate that.

But I’ll let /erik tell the story:

We’ve had a number of crazy adventures together. Another one of the companies we worked on, 3Taps, was sued by Craigslist for the nice sum of $13 trillion — an insane, arbitrary number.
[3Taps was an exchange company dedicated to keeping public facts publicly accessible — which included Craigslist listings.]
Greg was steadfast — he believed that public information should be free. If the information is freely available, it should be available to everybody. You can’t make it available to some people and not to others.
[Greg was an executive producer of and contributor to the Aaron Schwartz documentary — The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz.]
He fought the case, which went on for several years. It got pretty ugly and I wondered if we’d lose everything. Eventually, they reached a settlement, which Greg saw as a victory. He agreed to pay out $1 million — except to the charity of his choice, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

For Greg, this wasn’t about money. It was the principle of the matter. Money wise, Greg apparently spent 80% of his net worth in the fight and almost went bankrupt, which ultimately led to settlement. That conclusion obviously wasn’t the most satisfying as it signaled a return to the status quo.

The next opportunity would arise in 2019 when “LinkedIn served hiQ with a cease-and-desist, demanding that hiQ cease its activity of accessing and copying data from LinkedIn's server.” (Wikipedia)

That’s when Greg and Hard Yaka entered the chat. Again, this was a fight over principle. (HiQ’s business was already wrecked as a result.)

Hard Yaka took a 10% stake in HiQ and funded their legal fight against LinkedIn. Having learned from their Craigslist tribulations, HiQ’s legal team went on the offensive with a preemptive attack:

hiQ filed suit against LinkedIn, seeking both injunctive relief under California law and a declaratory judgment to prevent LinkedIn from lawfully invoking the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), California Penal Code § 502(c), or the common law of trespass against hiQ. (Wikipedia)

All of which brings us to this week.

With this latest ruling—and barring a wildly unexpected aboutface—we now have a concrete answer to that fundamental question.

Who owns public data?

Not LinkedIn.

Not Facebook.

Not Twitter—whoever owns it.

We do.

Relevant:

2. The fight for our data isn’t over

Here’s /gregkidd:

This week's legal victory provides great clarity on the first issue, but there's still a fight on the second. Facebook still thinks they own your data and that they can prevent you sharing access with whomever you so choose. So the fight is ongoing.

3. When the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act lands you in prison

This is about the specific details as they relate to the case. This isn’t about Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer as a person.

But here’s the story of weev, courtesy of the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Here's the back story. In 2010, Weev's co-defendant Daniel Spitler discovered AT&T configured its website to automatically publish an iPad user's e-mail address when the server was queried with a URL containing the number that matched an iPad's SIM card ID. In other words, if anyone typed in the correct URL with a correct ID number, the e-mail address associated with that account would automatically appear in the login prompt. Spitler wrote a script that attempted to emulate the IDs by entering random numbers into the URL and, as a result, ultimately collected approximately 114,000 e-mail addresses. Auernheimer sent a list of the e-mail addresses to several journalists to prove the security problem, and Gawker published a story about the vulnerability.
Although Auernheimer's actions helped motivate AT&T to fix the hole, he was rewarded with a federal indictment instead of a bounty. Federal prosecutors in New Jersey claimed that Weev and Spitler accessed data—the e-mail addresses—without authorization under the CFAA despite the fact AT&T made the information publicly available over the Internet.

Source:

Weev's Case Flawed From Beginning to End

4. Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to own the metaverse

Here’s This Morning On Chain:

In November 2021 post, Zuck said:
“As we build for the metaverse, we're focused on unlocking opportunities for creators to make money from their work. The 30% fees that Apple takes on transactions make it harder to do that, so we're updating our Subscriptions product so now creators can earn more.”
It turns out Zuck decided that fee was just right, because 30% is exactly how much the platform fee is for sales on Meta Quest, the VR system previously called the Oculus Quest. On top of the platform fee, Meta charges an additional 25% sales fee (on the remaining 70%) for every sale made in the virtual world, Horizon Worlds, which Meta operates. That means for each sale made on a Meta Quest machine, running in Horizon Worlds, the creator will be paying Meta 47.5% of the sale price.

Source:

Meta's fees for Metaverse sales blow away Apple's app store

Elsewhere in Big Tech:

5. Chart of the week—crypto unicorns

Axios:

6. Tweet of the week—gamer edition

db @tier10k

7. Ecosystem updates

Here’s The Block:

LimeWire has raised $10.4 million in a private token sale led by Kraken Ventures, Arrington Capital and GSR as it builds its platform for music-focused NFTs. It plans to use the money to grow its team, extend partnerships and continue to onboard musicians onto its new platform.
…
Investors in the round also included Crypto.com Capital, CMCC Global; Hivemind; Hard Yaka; Red Beard Ventures; FiveT Fintech; DeepTech Ventures; SwissBorg Ventures; 720Mau5 – the fund behind Canadian music producer Deadmau5; as well as DAO Jones – a group of investors from the music industry, including electronic music artist Steve Aoki.

Source:

Via /calvinburrows—LimeWire raises $10 million in private token sale to grow music-linked NFT platform

USBC

Discussion about this post

USBC

#209—Who owns public data?

And the time Greg Kidd got sued for $13 trillion.

1. Who owns public data?

2. The fight for our data isn’t over

3. When the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act lands you in prison

4. Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to own the metaverse

5. Chart of the week—crypto unicorns

6. Tweet of the week—gamer edition

7. Ecosystem updates

8. This week in policy

9. Stuff happens

Discussion about this post