You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2014.
In the series “algorithm regulation”, we discuss the implications of the growing importance of technological algorithms as a means of regulation in the digital realm.
For a few hours today, Uber users could view their passenger rating thanks to a how-to posted by Aaron Landy. Uber gives both passengers and drivers ratings, probably by averaging the post-ride ratings each gets, and they affect whether riders can get picked up and whether drivers keep their jobs.
Passenger ratings like these raise two kinds of concerns: first, that opaque and inaccessible metrics don’t allow for recourse or even explanation; and second that driver ratings aren’t very consistent or reliable raw material for those metrics.
You hear stories from people who missed a pickup because of buggy notifications, for example, and those people all of a sudden just can’t catch a cab. Any kind of technical error can skew the ratings, but because they’re invisible they’re also treated as infallible.
This week the EU Commission published its report (PDF) on responses to the public consultation on EU copyright held earlier this year. The consultation had drawn a comparably high number of responses with a total of about 11,000 messages, not least due to initiatives such as fixcopyright.eu (targeting end users) and creatorsforeurope.eu (targeting authors and performers). While over at IPKat copyright buffs are already delving into the details of the report, I tried to have a look at the bigger picture here: what do we learn about the state of copyright at large? And what overall direction should copyright reform take? With regard to both questions the report is quite instructive because of its clear and straightforward structure.
The report is structured along the 80 questions of the consultation, which are distributed across 24 issue sections. Within each of these issue sections, the report distinguishes between the different stakeholder groups that took part in the consultation (see chart below).
governancexborders.com 