Are Food Labels Reliable?

When 0 trans fats doesn't mean zero ....

Portability, Traceability and Data Ownership - Part I

DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

Introduction

In early January, 2008, Ed Felten, a Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs at Princeton, posted Scoble/Facebook Incident: It’s Not About Data Ownership on Freedom to Tinker.

“Last week Facebook canceled, and then reinstated, Robert Scoble’s account because he was using an automated script to export information about his Facebook friends to another service. The incident triggered a vigorous debate about who was in the right. Should Scoble be allowed to export this data from Facebook in the way he did? Should Facebook be allowed to control how the data is presented and used? What about the interests of Scoble’s friends?

An interesting [idea] kept popping up in this debate: the idea that somebody owns the data.

Where did we get this idea that facts about the world must be owned by somebody? Stop and consider that question for a minute, and you’ll see that ownership is a lousy way to think about this issue.”

I agree with Professor Felten that legal ownership is not the best way to think about data ownership.

Fred Von Lehmann, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, responded to Felten’s posting by helpfully distinguishing legal ownership from technological ownership.

“Speaking as [a patent] attorney, Felten got this exactly right — there is no “ownership” of the facts in question.

But even if there were, it wouldn’t answer these questions. Consider sites like Flickr. Unlike the facts in Facebook, the photos on Flickr are plainly copyrighted works. But that doesn’t tell you anything about whether the copyright owner is entitled to access Flickr’s servers to make copies of the photos.

Your ownership in an intangible (copyright or patent) does not come with any right to access particular copies of it that reside elsewhere. Flickr can delete all of your photos, and if you failed to make back-ups, nothing in copyright law would provide you recourse.”

Another commenter, only identifying himself or herself as Spudz, made a sage comment about the natural fear factors that keep information from being shared.

“One thing worth adding here is that Facebook has no need to police potential abuse of shared information. There’s a natural mechanism to deal with that: people won’t share information (on Facebook or elsewhere) with people they don’t trust, and people that abuse trust stop being trusted. These are ancient social mechanisms that work adequately on any site where a user gets to choose to expose information only to specific other users. Mechanisms tens of thousands of years old, if not older.”

I’m guessing that Spudz is either a political scientist, sociologist or anthropologist.

Anyway, what Scoble did was to engineer an automatic means for the porting of the names and e-mail addresses of his Facebook friends out of Facebook's database and into to the database of a Facebook competitor. On the one hand, this isn't a new news item. But it remains an everyday, omnipresent issue in that Facebook, Flickr and all other dominant social networking sites will need to solve this dilemma. They will need to solve it to survive the ever increasing expectations of their users and subscribers for information portability that are bound to come with an emerging Semantic Web.

And why not? Arguably, one of the essential purposes of the emerging Semantic Web is to empower people and businesses with the choice of more and more technological control over their information that they may aptly call ‘data ownership’ for short. Their expectations for an emerging Semantic Web have no doubt been raised from the online banking of their money, and the online purchase of products and services.

To echo what Spudz said above, what we at Pardalis have noticed is that as supply chains lengthen and fragment, the ownership and control of product information deemed confidential by each supply chain participant becomes rapidly affected by fear factors. And what we have further noticed is that the 'frayed ends and laterals' of complex product supply chains appear to look and behave a lot like social networks.

So here is the essential question of this multi-part journal entry:

Where social networks and supply chains overlap, what opportunities are there to find technological data ownership solutions that address the fear factors working against both portability (between social network websites) and information traceability (along complex product supply chains)?

[continued in Part II]

Update on Monday, June 2, 2008 at 12:42PM by Steve Holcombe

In the space of a few short months the DataPortability project claims to have "attracted a huge wave of support from vendors, standards ninjas and people like you."

Here's their latest promotional video clip -

DataPortability - Join The Conversation from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

EPCglobal & Prescription Drug Tracking

Andrew Pollack authored an article in the New York Times on March 26, 2008 entitled California Delays Plan to Track Prescription Drugs.

"In a reprieve for the pharmaceutical industry, California regulators agreed on Tuesday to delay by two years a requirement that all prescription drugs be electronically tracked as a means of thwarting counterfeiting.....

The California plan would require that drugs be tracked electronically from the manufacturer through the wholesaler to the pharmacy. Each bottle of pills sold to a pharmacy would have to have a unique serial number, encoded in a bar code or a radio-frequency identification tag.....

Pharmaceutical manufacturers [said that] putting a unique serial number on each container would require changing their packaging lines, which would cost millions of dollars and take years. […] Pharmacies and wholesalers, meanwhile, said they could not install the software and the equipment needed to read the serial numbers until they knew what systems the drug manufacturers would use."

Though not directly identified in Pollack's article, EPCglobal is a leader in establishing standards in the area of drug tracking. EPCglobal is a private, standards setting consortium governed by very large organizations like Cisco Systems, Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, DHL, Dow Chemical Company, Lockheed Martin, Novartis Pharma AG, Johnson & Johnson, Sony Corporation and Proctor & Gamble. EPCglobal is architecting essential, core services for tracking physical products identified by unique electronic product codes (including RFID tags) across and within enterprise systems controlled by large organizations.

I submitted a comment to EPCglobal on January 22, 2008 about EPCglobal's Architecture Framework. You will see that the comment is addressed to Mark Frey who courteously and immediately responded that he had forwarded it to EPCglobal's Architectural Review Committee.

This is a 10 page comment (including exhibits) about broader data ownership issues than just those relating to electronic pedigree documentation for use by pharmaceutical supply chain. But see the first full paragraph on page 5 where I said:

“[W]hile EPCglobal has begun establishing forward-looking standards relative to electronic pedigree documentation for use by pharmaceutical supply chain participants [see EPCglobal Pedigree Ratified Standard Version 1.0 as of January 5, 2007], it has yet to include these standards within the EPCglobal Architecture Diagram.

With this comment I am proposing, by way of an illustrative example, that the methods developed by Pardalis within its IP may be used to derive essential specifications for connecting the current EPCglobal (EPCIS) Architecture with its ePedigree standards for the pharmaceutical industry."

The illustrative example referred to above is a mock Common Point Authoring (CPA) informational object. This illustrative example has a reference point beginning with a granular EPCglobal ePedigree document. The represented CPA informational object is the EPCglobal ePedgiree document that has been further granularized with mock XML tagging containing unique identifiers pointing to a CPA registered data element database.

My point is that EPCglobal has yet to develop standards for ePedigree document exchange that may be efficiently, flexibly and cost-effectively applied to the pharmaceutical supply chains for helping to reduce counterfeiting. Given the players who comprise EPCglobal, it is reasonable to presume that California regulators have essentially backed off enforcing their anti-counterfeiting regulations because EPCglobal has yet to catch up to the California plan. The plan was to take effect January 1, 2009. Now it has been pushed back to 2011.

Update on Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 1:54PM by Steve Holcombe

From the Economist's Economic & Financial Indicators section:

"Custom seizures of counterfeit goods rose by 17% in the EU last year, according the European Commission."

Source: The Economist crediting European Commission

"The number of cases has grown rapidly since 2003, but fewer fake articles were confiscated last year than in 2006—perhaps because internet sales have boosted the number of small consignments. Indeed, 70% of cases involved air-express courier or mail. Cigarettes and clothing accounted for more than half the sham gear seized. China was the source of almost 60% of dodgy goods. Switzerland and India account for three-quarters of the trade in fake drugs, which rose by 51% last year. Treatments for erectile dysfunction—phoney Viagra pills—were the most common counterfeit medicines." [emphasis added]

Update on Sunday, April 4, 2010 at 9:07PM by Steve Holcombe

"Discovery services" (See the EPCGlobal Standards Overview at http://www.epcglobalinc.org/standards) has been gray in color for the two years since I published this blog entry. And I am informed by a knowledgeable source that it will probably be another two years before they arrive at any definitive standards (if then).