Cory Doctorow argued against using copyright law as a substitute for privacy law or labor law [1], and I argue the same for location privacy. Copyright law already gets abused enough in contexts that indisputably involve copying of creative work. I do not want to stretch copyright law into location/movement privacy, where nonconsensual recording of location/movement does not necessarily copy something created by the person whose location was tracked. At least in the US, copyright comes into existence when creative expression is recorded in a tangible medium (such as your device's RAM, because outside of my beloved meme world you cannot download more RAM), and the copyright belongs to whoever did the recording. If an app on your phone records your location, was it you who recorded it? Was it the phone maker who recorded it? Was it the app maker who recorded it? Keep in mind, maybe you didn't install the app, or maybe you weren't aware that the app would track your location when you first installed it.
The lesson of this story is to avoid making more DMCA-like opportunities for legal abuse:
> This is why those of us who spend our time in the weeds of internet law won’t shut up about how legal liability systems are structured. The DMCA’s notice-and-takedown framework already gives bad actors a weapon to suppress speech. You don’t need a legitimate copyright claim. You don’t even need a coherent one. You just need to file the paperwork and wait for an automated system to do its thing.
> And every time someone proposes weakening Section 230, or creating new obligations for platforms to proactively police third-party content, or imposing liability for hosting material that someone claims is harmful — they are, whether they realize it or not, proposing to hand bad actors this same kind of weapon in a dozen new calibers. The DMCA is the version of this we already have, and we can see plainly how it gets abused. We should be fixing the current system, and punishing the widespread abuses, rather than spreading that same broken incentive structure to every other area of online speech.
> Cryptocurrency industry is on track to surpass 2024 spending on Texas midterm races
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