Hi, and welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we update you on the Supreme Court decision in the copyright case we covered in June involving pirate ships, and then review a story regarding how some teens have taken privacy law into their own hands when it comes to Instagram's tracking software.
Although oral arguments and some court proceedings at the Supreme Court and other federal courts are on pause due to coronavirus, the justices are continuing to process opinions in previous cases like the pirate ship case we discussed back in June. A current geek reddit contributor Velktrin noted this decision, which deals with that redditor's home state of North Carolina and whether the state could be sued under the 1990 Copyright Remedy Clarification Act for alleged copyright infringement related to video footage of a sunken pirate ship off the coast of that state, specifically the flagship of famed pirate Blackbeard. States are generally immune from suits in federal court due to sovereign immunity under the 11th Amendment to the Constitution.
As expected when we covered this in June, the Supreme Court unanimously found that allowing states to be sued for copyright infringement is unconstitutional and directly contrary to the 11th Amendment. To this end, the Constitution trumps the 1990 federal law trying to make an exception to the constitution. Thus, the copyright holder will not be able to pursue North Carolina anymore for this alleged copyright infringement, and this part of the 1990 CRCA law is officially dead in the water.
Our main story for this week is an interesting news story from last month, dealing with how a group of Maryland high schoolers developed a way to defeat or confuse Instagram's tracking mechanisms. The group created a way to share credentials so that multiple people were using multiple accounts, which they all accessed from multiple devices. This cluttered the tracking data Instagram collects so much that the social media platform could no longer properly target the teens with ads and posts the platform thinks they are interested in. Essentially, the teens figured out how to hide in a group, digitally.
Of course, this method to maintain privacy online and circumvent trackers is a lot of work, and not something average users of social media platforms will bother to do. However, the fact that a small group of dedicated users can develop a methodology for defeating the effectiveness of such trackers means that options are likely available to be developed for the general public to also defeat such privacy invasions in the future, or at least have the right to opt-in and opt-out of such targeted advertising. If nothing else, it's another story illustrating the many ways individuals are tracked online and how sophisticated those privacy law invasions have become in the past decade.
As expected when we covered this in June, the Supreme Court unanimously found that allowing states to be sued for copyright infringement is unconstitutional and directly contrary to the 11th Amendment. To this end, the Constitution trumps the 1990 federal law trying to make an exception to the constitution. Thus, the copyright holder will not be able to pursue North Carolina anymore for this alleged copyright infringement, and this part of the 1990 CRCA law is officially dead in the water.
Our main story for this week is an interesting news story from last month, dealing with how a group of Maryland high schoolers developed a way to defeat or confuse Instagram's tracking mechanisms. The group created a way to share credentials so that multiple people were using multiple accounts, which they all accessed from multiple devices. This cluttered the tracking data Instagram collects so much that the social media platform could no longer properly target the teens with ads and posts the platform thinks they are interested in. Essentially, the teens figured out how to hide in a group, digitally.
Of course, this method to maintain privacy online and circumvent trackers is a lot of work, and not something average users of social media platforms will bother to do. However, the fact that a small group of dedicated users can develop a methodology for defeating the effectiveness of such trackers means that options are likely available to be developed for the general public to also defeat such privacy invasions in the future, or at least have the right to opt-in and opt-out of such targeted advertising. If nothing else, it's another story illustrating the many ways individuals are tracked online and how sophisticated those privacy law invasions have become in the past decade.
The Bottom Line is: with regard to pirate ships and state's rights, not even Blackbeard himself can overcome the U.S. Constitution. But the Constitution does not explicitly protect privacy law rights, which is why that rapidly-developing legal field has struggled to come up with reasonable ways to protect consumers and individuals as our technology improves. Especially as the world relies even more heavily on the Internet during the current coronavirus pandemic, it's a legal field that becomes more important each day, and we will continue to cover those interesting developments as they come in.
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