NLP, meet NPE: the curious case of Robert Budzinski

Robert Lucius Budzinski, of 1106 Edgewood Drive, Richardson, TX 75081, patent infringement plaintiff asserting to be the "sole inventor" of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology alleged wrongfully used by a breadth of major tech corporations. He is reported to be suing a number of them, e.g., Nuance, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.

"NLP, meet NPE"

"NPE" is intellectual property legalese for "Non-Practicing Entity."

Otherwise known as a "patent troll." Mr. Budzinski is the owner/"President"/"Director"/"Registered Agent" (and sole "employee") of "Word to Info, Inc.," a private corporation (operating out of his residence) that apparently produces no discernible products or services (a "NPE"). A "company" with no internet presence of any sort -- if you exclude Mr. Budzinski's LinkedIn page:

That's it in its entirety. No employment or education history, no accomplishments or interests, no connections, no nothing. Zip, zilch, nada, nyet.

I did find Plaintiff's Counsel info in one of the lawsuit filings:

Steven R. Daniels
Texas State Bar No. 24025318
FARNEY DANIELS PC
800 South Austin Ave., Suite 200
Georgetown, Texas 78626
Email: sdaniels@farneydaniels.com
Telephone: (512) 582-2828
Fax: (512) 582-2829

James R. Gourley
Texas Bar No. 24050679
CARSTENS & CAHOON, LLP
13760 Noel Road, Suite 900
Dallas, Texas 75240
Email: james@cclaw.com
Telephone: (972) 367-2001
Fax: (972) 367-2002
Attorneys for Plaintiff
Word to Info, Inc.

I routinely search Google news and other internet sources for anything new on "natural language processing" (NLP), looking in particular for stuff relating to the health care space. Recall my prior posts on the topic, here, here, and here.

I ran across this at AppleInsider.com:

Apple's Siri latest target in string of natural language patent lawsuits
By Mikey Campbell

One-man company Word to Info on Friday expanded a string of patent lawsuits over natural language processing technology — active cases involve Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Nuance — to include Apple, taking specific aim at the tech titan's Siri virtual assistant.

Filed in the patent holder-friendly Eastern Texas District Court, Word to Info's suit alleges infringement of seven patents detailing methods of natural language processing. The company asserted the same series of patents against a number of tech industry giants marketing their own voice recognition and virtual assistant solutions.

Specifically, Word to Info is leveraging U.S. Patent Nos. 5,715,468, 6,138,087, 6,609,091, 7,349,840, 7,873,509, 8,326,603 and 8,688,436 in its case against Apple. The IP string covering methods of interpreting natural language input dates back to 1998, when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted the '468 property to inventor and Word to Info director Robert Budzinski...

I did a cursory review of all seven patent filings listed in the article. They total about 2,100 pdf printable pages of dense detail -- most of the content repetitiously redundant.

UPDATE: the most recent (08/18/17) TX court filing -- against Apple -- by this plaintiff here (49 pg pdf). The suit alleges seven "Claims for Action," each of them mapping to the Budzinski patents set forth and linked above.

The "abstracts" from all of the Budzinksi patents, from the oldest to the most recent:

Abstract
A memory system for storing and retrieving experience and knowledge with natural language. The primary components of this memory system include syntactic processes, function word processes, morphology processes, ellipsis processes, concrete and abstract noun word sense number processes, verb word sense number processes, adjective word sense number processes, purpose identification processes, plausibility and expectedness processes, communication processes, context storage processes, and text generation processes. The syntactic processes include word isolation, dictionary look up, and parsing. The function word processes select and evaluate functions associated with function words which are certain: adjectives, nouns, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. Morphology processes replace morphological words with phrases or clauses composed of function words arid state representation words. Certain nouns, verbs, and adjectives are state representation words. Selecting the word sense number of a state representation word selects the state representation of such a word. Experience and knowledge are stored as clause implying word sense numbers organized into paths in a directed graph.

Abstract
A memory system for storing and retrieving experience and knowledge with natural language through methods and apparatus is disclosed. The primary components of this memory system include syntactic processes, function word processes, ellipsis processes, morphology processes, meaning word sense number processes, purpose identification processes, plausibility and expectedness processes, communication processes, context storage processes, and text generation processes. The function word processes select and evaluate functions associated with function words which are certain words in each part of speech. Ellipsis processes replace unstated words. Morphology processes replace morphological words with phrases or clauses composed of function words and word sense numbers. A word sense number is an address to the meaning of a word. Certain nouns, verbs, and adjectives are meaning words. Word sense numbers are selected to be consistent with the context of the clause containing the words, the context, and stored experience and knowledge. Experience and knowledge are stored as nodes with associated clause implying word sense numbers organized into paths in a directed graph. Nodes in the directed graph have access conditions which determine if a node is accessible on a path. A path has an associated purpose relation which is any concept that labels the path. Purpose identification processes select: purpose relations, experience and knowledge, processes for setting a verb's result states or a state value, object classification paths, and activity selection paths. The communication processes coordinate incoming and outgoing natural language text. Text generation processes generate natural language text from word sense numbers.


Abstract
A memory system for storing and retrieving experience and knowledge with natural language through methods and apparatus is disclosed. The primary components of this memory system include syntactic processes, function word processes, ellipsis processes, morphology processes, meaning word sense number processes, purpose identification processes, plausibility and expectedness processes, communication processes, context storage processes, and text generation processes. The function word processes select and evaluate functions associated with function words which are certain words in each part of speech. Ellipsis processes replace unstated words. Morphology processes replace morphological words with phrases or clauses composed of function words and word sense numbers. A word sense number is an address to the meaning of a word. Certain nouns, verbs, and adjectives are meaning words. Word sense numbers are selected to be consistent with the context of the clause containing the words, the context, and stored experience and knowledge. Experience and knowledge are stored as nodes with associated clause implying word sense numbers organized into paths in a directed graph. Nodes in the directed graph have access conditions which determine if a node is accessible on a path. A path has an associated purpose relation which is any concept that labels the path. Purpose identification processes select: purpose relations, experience and knowledge, processes for setting a verb's result states or a state value, object classification paths, and activity selection paths. The communication processes coordinate incoming and outgoing natural language text. Text generation processes generate natural language text from word sense numbers.

Abstract
A memory system for storing and retrieving experience and knowledge with natural language through methods and apparatus is disclosed. The primary components of this memory system include syntactic processes, function word processes, ellipsis processes, morphology processes, meaning word sense number processes, purpose identification processes, plausibility and expectedness processes, communication processes, context storage processes, and text generation processes. The function word processes select and evaluate functions associated with function words which are certain words in each part of speech. Ellipsis processes replace unstated words. Morphology processes replace morphological words with phrases or clauses composed of function words and word sense numbers. A word sense number is an address to the meaning of a word. Certain nouns, verbs, and adjectives are meaning words. Word sense numbers are selected to be consistent with the context of the clause containing the words, the context, and stored experience and knowledge. Experience and knowledge are stored as nodes with associated clause implying word sense numbers organized into paths in a directed graph. Nodes in the directed graph have access conditions which determine if a node is accessible on a path. A path has an associated purpose relation which is any concept that labels the path. Purpose identification processes select: purpose relations, experience and knowledge, processes for setting a verb's result states or a state value, object classification paths, and activity selection paths. The communication processes coordinate incoming and outgoing natural language text. Text generation processes generate natural language text from word sense numbers.

Abstract
A memory system for storing and retrieving experience and knowledge with natural language through methods and apparatus is disclosed. The primary components of this memory system include syntactic processes, function word processes, ellipsis processes, morphology processes, meaning word sense number processes, purpose identification processes, plausibility and expectedness processes, communication processes, context storage processes, and text generation processes. The function word processes select and evaluate functions associated with function words which are certain words in each part of speech. Ellipsis processes replace unstated words. Morphology processes replace morphological words with phrases or clauses composed of function words and word sense numbers. A word sense number is an address to the meaning of a word. Certain nouns, verbs, and adjectives are meaning words. Word sense numbers are selected to be consistent with the context of the clause containing the words, the context, and stored experience and knowledge. Experience and knowledge are stored as nodes with associated clause implying word sense numbers organized into paths in a directed graph. Nodes in the directed graph have access conditions which determine if a node is accessible on a path. A path has an associated purpose relation which is any concept that labels the path. Purpose identification processes select: purpose relations, experience and knowledge, processes for setting a verb's result states or a state value, object classification paths, and activity selection paths. The communication processes coordinate incoming and outgoing natural language text. Text generation processes generate natural language text from word sense numbers.

Abstract
A memory system for storing and retrieving experience and knowledge with natural language through methods and apparatus is disclosed. The primary components of this memory system include syntactic processes, function word processes, ellipsis processes, morphology processes, meaning word sense number processes, purpose identification processes, plausibility and expectedness processes, communication processes, context storage processes, and text generation processes. The function word processes select and evaluate functions associated with function words which are certain words in each part of speech. Ellipsis processes replace unstated words. Morphology processes replace morphological words with phrases or clauses composed of function words and word sense numbers. A word sense number is an address to the meaning of a word. Certain nouns, verbs, and adjectives are meaning words. Word sense numbers are selected to be consistent with the context of the clause containing the words, the context, and stored experience and knowledge. Experience and knowledge are stored as nodes with associated clause implying word sense numbers organized into paths in a directed graph. Nodes in the directed graph have access conditions which determine if a node is accessible on a path. A path has an associated purpose relation which is any concept that labels the path. Purpose identification processes select: purpose relations, experience and knowledge, processes for setting a verb's result states or a state value, object classification paths, and activity selection paths. The communication processes coordinate incoming and outgoing natural language text. Text generation processes generate natural language text from word sense numbers.

Abstract
A memory system for storing and retrieving experience and knowledge with natural language through methods and apparatus is disclosed. The primary components of this memory system include syntactic processes, function word processes, ellipsis processes, morphology processes, meaning word sense number processes, purpose identification processes, plausibility and expectedness processes, communication processes, context storage processes, and text generation processes. The function word processes select and evaluate functions associated with function words. A word sense number is an address to the meaning of a word. Word sense numbers are selected to be consistent with the context and stored experience and knowledge. Experience and knowledge are stored as nodes with access conditions and with associated clause implying word sense numbers organized into paths in a directed graph. A path has an associated purpose relation which is any concept that labels the path. Text generation processes generate natural language text from word sense numbers.

Yeah, gave me MEGO as well. Beneath each abstract are dozens of equally dense enumerated "claims" ostensibly setting forth the putative (and obtuse) "operational details" of the "invention." The old jibe "if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit" comes to mind.

BTW: I just asked Siri on my iPhone 6s (multiple times) "Is Robert L. Budzinski a patent troll?" "She" couldn't accurately process the query. All I got was repeated irrelevant gibberish.

Also of note: I never once encountered in these patent documents the phrase "computational linguistics" (or the word linguistics, for that matter).

Moreover, checking the body text and index of this authoritative reference book I have studied and heretofore cited, no mention of a "Budzinski." You would think that a guy purporting to be the "sole inventor" of a huge chunk of applied AI/NLP (worth potential billions) would have an academic and professional rap sheet a mile long, one that would show up in a boatload in scholarly citations.

Maybe I'm missing something. Not for lack of extensive searching.

UPDATE

You keep digging, using various name/word/phrase combinations and permutations, eventually you find something.

1981. Looks like he worked for T.I. Obviously some kind of microelectronics guy (engineer?). Link to the above paper here. I'd eventually run across an IEEE link citing him as as a co-author on three papers (including the above) around that time (the other two are firewalled in pdf at IEEE).

Still have yet to unearth a C.V. Still smells like "NPE," notwithstanding that his cred has to be up just a notch in my eyes, although technical cred is a separate issue from patent trolling.

There's a ton of reportage on patent trolling, (which has been recently asserted to "cost the economy" $80 billion a year), e.g.,

'THE ULTIMATE PATENT TROLL'
In the words of technology reporters.
MORGAN BASKIN & JACK DENTON

Founded in 2000, Intellectual Ventures "has earned a special brand of hatred in the business world as the ultimate patent troll. It doesn't delay your flight like United, buffer your movie stream like Comcast, or shellac your shrimp with oil like BP. Rather, it hoards ideas." It "goes around to companies and says: 'Hey, you want to protect yourself from lawsuits? We own tons of patents. Make a deal with us. Our patents will not only cover everything you're doing in your business, no one will dare sue you." "It then wields this intellectual-property portfolio—the world's largest—like a weapon. Companies can either pay up or face a lawsuit.”…

__

Back to Budzinski...

"PLAINTIFF DEMANDS A JURY TRIAL"

But of course he would.

In 1991 I took a gig as the Technical Editor (pdf)  for "CSI" ( Computational Systems, Inc., of West Knoxville TN). It was a small recent startup founded by two PhD industrial-electrical engineers who were alumni of a larger competitor (TEC). We designed, built, and marketed digital Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) industrial analyzers. We were staffed up with hardhat assembly and C language programmers writing tight code straight to the chip clocks.

A great, fun job. Heady stuff. Kind of an Appalachian "Silicon Valley" loosey-goosey culture producing then-state of the art portable industrial digital tech (we were just across the pike east of Oak Ridge, where I'd spent the prior five and a half years in a radiation lab writing code). My department was an "artsy" Mac shop, basically an in-house ad agency doing magazine-quality 4-color digital pre-press.

Well, our competitor sued us for patent infringement, based on asserted purloined IP (essentially a de facto "non-compete" "leave your brain at the door" case). We were killing them in sales (owing more to our assiduous customer service and support than to our technologies per se). They retaliated.

And they won. Jury trial. Crippling monetary judgment. Only one juror had beyond a high school education. [Technology For Energy Corporation v. Computational Systems, Inc., et al., (E.D. Tenn., Fed. Cir.) (Patent infringement litigation)]

I survived the ensuing layoffs.

Wasn't a patent troll thing, but I will never forget the turmoil. In July of 1992 I left to move to Las Vegas in the wake of my wife's transfer and promotion to manage QA at the Nevada Test Site nuke cleanup project.

I then took an analyst/LAN manager job with the Nevada Medicare QIO (HealthInsight, then known as Nevada Peer Review). I recall during my first stint (of three) with them a discussion one day concerning an ortho doc who did more than a quarter of all hip jobs in the state. Owing to the relatively high efficacy of his px, he sought to patent his surgical "method."

Lordy. The blowback was pretty severe. I don't think he ever went through with it.

BTW, a good, quick read on intellectual property fundamentals and issues:

"We all create intellectual property. We all use intellectual property. Intellectual property is the most pervasive yet least understood way we regulate expression. Despite its importance to so many aspects of the global economy and daily life, intellectual property policy remains a confusing and arcane subject. This engaging book clarifies both the basic terms and the major conflicts surrounding these fascinating areas of law, offering a layman's introduction to copyright, patents, trademarks, and other forms of knowledge falling under the purview of intellectual property rights..."

I finished this book in short order. Highly recommended survey look into the breadth of sub-topics of IP: patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets, as well as relatively minor tangentially overlapping areas such as fashion design, internet domain names, and celebrity exclusive use of "likeness." Good discussion of the evolved histories and global differences in IP scope and enforcement.

Recent item: General Mills just (rightfully) lost an IP lawsuit wherein they tried to obtain exclusive trademark rights to the color "yellow," on the grounds that market identification of Cheerios was/is inextricably bound up with it in the product's packaging. Consumers might otherwise be "confused."

The jokes just write themselves.

Jokes aside, we might ask, what is the proper scope of intellectual property ownership enforcement in the law?

If there were only one man in the world, he would have a lot of problems, but none of them would be legal ones. Add a second inhabitant, and we have the possibility of conflict. Both of us try to pick the same apple from the same branch. I track the deer I wounded only to find that you have killed it, butchered it, and are in the process of cooking and eating it.

The obvious solution is violence. It is not a very good solution; if we employ it, our little world may shrink back down to one person, or perhaps none. A better solution, one that all known human societies have found, is a system of legal rules explicit or implicit, some reasonably peaceful way of determining, when desires conflict, who gets to do what and what happens if he doesn’t…

Friedman, David D.. Law's Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters (p. 3). Princeton University Press - A. Kindle Edition. 

I have not the slightest doubt that, were I to query Budzinski's patent attorneys, I'd be met with harrumphingly indignant, derisive (albeit utterly self-serving) paternalistic pushback lecturing down to me about the Altruistic Nobility of their tireless work in defense of "the little guy."

A planet populated by more than 7 billion contending people is a complicated place. Our technologies are complicated, ever-moreso. Necessarily, our laws are increasingly complicated. And, among the most complex among them are the laws going to IP. Nonetheless, to the extent that IP filings are woefully obtuse, dense documents riddled with verbose, redundant, vague, ambiguous, often internally inconsistent jargon-language, they seem to principally only serve the lawyers whom they mostly enrich.**

** A similar observation can be made in general about legislation and the regulations they authorize. Overcomplexity and lack of clarity in law inevitably beget legal challenges, where the courts have to try to clean up the messes.

For one thing, perhaps "Loser Pays" IP litigation reform might serve to mitigate the excesses in this area. (Ohhh... the poignant wailing that that notion produces in tortland!) I also have to wonder how IP litigation firms' expenses are covered prior to judgments or settlements? Is this stuff typically done on "spec?" And, are there the equivalent of "VC/investment funds" bankrolling these actions? I seriously doubt that our NLP boy Rob is paying out of pocket by the billable hour.

 THE NPE AT SILICON VALLEY HBO

LOL.

CODA

Pretty interesting read at The New Yorker:

Who Owns the Internet?
What Big Tech’s monopoly powers mean for our culture.
By Elizabeth Kolbert

...Thirty years ago, almost no one used the Internet for anything. Today, just about everybody uses it for everything. Even as the Web has grown, however, it has narrowed. Google now controls nearly ninety per cent of search advertising, Facebook almost eighty per cent of mobile social traffic, and Amazon about seventy-five per cent of e-book sales...

And Rob Budzinski wants him a piece of all that. "Rentier?"

Relatedly,

Google Just Proved That Monopolies Imperil Democracy, Not Just The Economy
Barry Lynn and his team of anti-monopoly researchers were fired by a think tank after criticizing the search giant.

WASHINGTON ― For the past decade, former business journalist Barry Lynn has used his perch at the New America Foundation to warn politicians and the public that a new era of corporate monopolies threatened not only American workers, but also democracy itself.

Lynn was just proven right: New America has fired him as head of its Open Markets program along with his team of about 10 researchers and journalists, after they called for an antitrust investigation of the think tank’s largest longtime donor, Google…

Naked Capitalism is also on the story: "New America Foundation Head Anne-Marie Slaughter Botches Laundering Google’s Money, Fires Anti-Trust Team at Eric Schmidt’s Behest."

OH, AND, ANOTHER THING,

apropos, read this in my AAAS Science Magazine:

Fostering reproducibility in industry-academia research
Science  25 Aug 2017:
Vol. 357, Issue 6353, pp. 759-761
DOI: 10.1126/science.aan4906

Many companies have proprietary resources and/or data that are indispensable for research, and academics provide the creative fuel for much early-stage research that leads to industrial innovation. It is essential to the health of the research enterprise that collaborations between industrial and university researchers flourish. This system of collaboration is under strain. Financial motivations driving product development have led to concerns that industry-sponsored research comes at the expense of transparency (1). Yet many industry researchers distrust quality control in academia (2) and question whether academics value reproducibility as much as rapid publication. Cultural differences between industry and academia can create or increase difficulties in reproducing research findings. We discuss key aspects of this problem that industry-academia collaborations must address and for which other stakeholders, from funding agencies to journals, can provide leadership and support…

Barriers to Sharing
Efforts to promote reproducible research have varied. One widely supported strategy is to increase the availability of data produced in studies, along with computer code written to clean and analyze data. Publishers and funders have instituted policies mandating data deposition or data management plans; however, success has not been uniform.

There are disincentives to open sharing of information. For academic research, rewards come from public presentations and publications that lead to recognition within the community, grants, and tenure. The emphasis on publications to reap academic rewards means that academic researchers can be reluctant to release information or even to fully describe their work. In industry, publishing is typically not a high priority; the goals are the provision of a product (whether goods or services) that will outstrip competitors and provide monetary rewards to investors. The need to obtain patents or maintain trade secrets to protect intellectual property (IP) can provide a strong financial incentive to not disclose or share information. Corporations see relatively little advantage to releasing data for research purposes, so any nonzero risk of consequences (even if only hypothetical) can be sufficient to shut down such efforts…

The Creative Commons license CC0 (which waives all rights of data authors) is attractive as it does not require data sets to have a “provenance” trail and can thus ease automated mining of data. However, lack of provenance tracking in CC0 creates challenges for data evaluation, interpretation of analyses, and accreditation of data generators, thus making CC-BY (in which author attribution is required) attractive. Both continue to be discussed as aspirational goals.

Irreproducible research wastes time, money, and resources. Academic researchers, universities, and other institutions, industry, funding agencies, and editors all have a role to play in raising research standards and creating an environment of trust between communities.

Hmmm... For one thing, I refer you to this book I cited a while back (scroll down):

____________

More to come...

Facts © ™ ®

...So on the one hand, we have the push from the government and insurers to have electronic medical records and health outcomes research (HITECH Act), the Sentinel Initiative for postmarketing surveillance of electronic medical records for adverse events, and Medicare reimbursements linked to “meaningful use” (i.e., providing data) of the EMR. On the other hand, we have the specter of HIPAA and more draconian penalties for breaches of personal privacy...

- Judy Stone, MD, Molecules to Medicine: Pharma Trumps HIPAA?

Which "facts" about you can be "owned" by you or others (or no one at all)? i.e., what data/information can be legitimately considered "property," the "title" to and controlling use of which will be defended and enforced by the society at large?

According to traditional copyright principles, the only copyrightable elements of a factual work are the author’s presentation, selection, and arrangement of facts. The underlying facts themselves cannot be copyrighted. In the past, this approach was sufficient to protect factual works against the most opportunistic forms of copying by competitors. Because facts were usually displayed narratively or in tables, authors generally made enough decisions concerning presentation, selection, and arrangement to protect their factual works against wholesale appropriation.

But the rise of electronic and on-line databases has cast doubt upon the validity of the traditional approach. These databases collect and display facts in a pure form, allowing the user to extract them as she sees fit. By dispensing with conventional modes of presentation, selection, and arrangement, they can easily fail to satisfy traditional standards for copyrightability, leaving them with virtually no legal protection against copying. [Michael Steven Green, PhD, Copyrighting Facts (pdf), Indiana Law Journal Vol 78]

Well, more broadly, it goes to the "value" of the facts to various parties. I have blue eyes. Who cares? I am 5'10" and weigh 173 lbs. With those two metrics you can quickly calculate my BMI (Body Mass Index -- mine is 24.8), which is of some economic interest to health insurors and others. I am typing this post in my study located at geocoordinates N36º 2.4018' W115º 8.5265'. Who might want to know that?

What about my blood pressure, my lipids panel results, my PSA? My DNA?

Data ownership refers to both the possession of and responsibility for information. Ownership implies power as well as control. The control of information includes not just the ability to access, create, modify, package, derive benefit from, sell or remove data, but also the right to assign these access privileges to others (Loshin, 2002).

...Scofield (1998) suggest replacing the term ‘ownership’ with ‘stewardship’, “because it implies a broader responsibility where the user must consider the consequences of making changes over ‘his’ data”.

According to Garner (1999), individuals having intellectual property have rights to control intangible objects that are products of human intellect. The range of these products encompasses the fields of art, industry, and science. Research data is recognized as a form of intellectual property and subject to protection by U.S. law.

Importance of data ownership:

According to Loshin (2002), data has [sic] intrinsic value as well as having added value as a byproduct of information processing, “at the core, the degree of ownership (and by corollary, the degree of responsibility) is driven by the value that each interested party derives from the use of that information”...

Considerations/issues in data ownership

Researchers should have a full understanding of various issues related to data ownership to be able to make better decisions regarding data ownership. These issues include paradigm of ownership, data hoarding, data ownership policies, balance of obligations, and technology. Each of these issues gives rise to a number of considerations that impact decisions concerning data ownership

Paradigm of Ownership – Loshin (2002) alludes to the complexity of ownership issues by identifying the range of possible paradigms used to claim data ownership. These claims are based on the type and degree of contribution involved in the research endeavor. Loshin (2002) identifies a list of parties laying a potential claim to data:

• Creator – The party that creates or generate data
• Consumer – The party that uses the data owns the data
• Compiler - This is the entity that selects and compiles information from different information sources
• Enterprise - All data that enters the enterprise or is created within the enterprise is completely owned by the enterprise
• Funder - the user that commissions the data creation claims ownership
• Decoder - In environments where information is “locked” inside particular encoded formats, the party that can unlock the information becomes an owner of that information
• Packager - the party that collects information for a particular use and adds value through formatting the information for a particular market or set of consumers
• Reader as owner - the value of any data that can be read is subsumed by the reader and, therefore, the reader gains value through adding that information to an information repository
• Subject as owner - the subject of the data claims ownership of that data, mostly in reaction to another party claiming ownership of the same data
• Purchaser/Licenser as Owner – the individual or organization that buys or licenses data may stake a claim to ownership [Data Ownership, Responsible Conduct in Data Management]
  

It all gets rather complex rather quickly. And, nowhere as complex as with respect to personal health information.

Some recent thoughts on this:

...While banks tend to keep information internally, health care data is handled by many more organizations, said Tom Srail, Cleveland-based senior vp with Willis North America Inc. “The nature of the health care business requires the sharing of that same information,” he said.

Patrick Moylan, New York-based senior associate with Dubraski & Associates Insurance Services L.L.C., said health care institutions are increasing their Internet activity with partners that include physicians, health plans and pharmacies.

Having “more people in the line of that chain that have the potential to handle sensitive data simply increases the risk that data will be accessed by accident, or by a third party,” with the potential that it could be used fraudulently, he said.

The sheer breadth of personal information that health care institutions hold complicates the issue.

“More than any other industry, the health care industry really has all of a complete set of information security and privacy exposures to contend with,” said Mr. Economidis.

Mr. Srail said retailers may have credit card numbers and financial institutions may have Social Security numbers, but health care entities “have all that as well as protected health care information,” so “it really can be problematic for those organizations when that data is lost and troublesome to its customers.”

“There's so many ways that the information gets compromised” and “just when you think you've got it figured out, you've got a twist in it,” said Lynn Sessions, counsel at law firm Baker & Hostetler L.L.P. and a former risk manager at Texas Children's Hospital, both in Houston.

Robert Parisi, senior vp at Marsh Inc.'s FINPRO practice in New York, said, “hospitals tend to be less secure than banks, and you've got a situation that obviously can be fairly risky and financially troubling to any medical center.”

Meanwhile, a black market for stolen medical identities has developed among people who are underinsured or have no insurance, observers say.

By some estimates, medical information is twice as valuable as more traditional identity information, said Mr. Silvestri. “That becomes a motivation for the criminal element to actually target that so they can sell it to the black market,” he said...

"Twice as valuable"? I'd never thought of it that way. Makes sense upon reflection, though. No one can really profit from the fact that I have blue eyes. But, other information about me can indeed have commercial value to others (particularly if they are of the sort not directly observable but instead only explicable via intermediary measurement/assay -- ranging from the simple arithmetic of BMI to the complex methods of DNA analytics).

Continuing:

...Federal law pulls health care institutions in opposite directions, said Mr. Srail. On one hand, it “wants health care to be open and portable and interactive” and to facilitate the process so the patient has choices in his health care with accessible medical information. On the other hand, however, “everything has to be kept secret” with no privacy breaches.

In addition, state laws, while similar, also differ from each other and federal law. HIPAA, for example, requires notification of data breaches within 60 days, while several states have a 45-day notification period, said Ms. Sessions.

Another complication is that hospitals must abide by the laws of the jurisdiction where their patient is a resident, even if it is in another state. Because the patients' resident state is the determining factor, Texas Children's Hospital, for instance, which has patients from all 50 states and foreign countries, must comply with all these jurisdictions' statutes, said Ms. Sessions...

My Nevada HIE Privacy and Security Task Force attorneys are gonna love that last paragraph.

Yeah, they'll probably love this too. On Dec 7th 2011 the California Office of Health Information Integrity (CalOHII) issued a patient consent/privacy report entitled "Research and Background For Patient Consent Policy Recommendation White Paper," (large PDF) wherein across pp 154-157 is a table of various states' PHI/HIE privacy policies to date. On page 156 is the reference to Nevada:


Click to enlarge. In the "Education" cell on the right is a link to my July 12th, 2011 blog post, in which I voiced concerns regarding some of our facile assumptions made regarding Nevada HIE privacy policy.

Interesting. Nice to know that someone is reading my stuff.
___

Dec 15th O/T UPDATE

Yet another interesting blog to read.

Dear friends and colleagues,

This is a watershed moment for the U.S. healthcare system. Costs continue to climb, tens of millions of Americans lack insurance, and there is unacceptable variation in quality. Politicians from across the ideological spectrum are proposing potentially far reaching policy changes. Some of the proposals are promising; too many others seem fraught with danger. After 25 years as a researcher, teacher, and policy analyst, I continue to be disappointed by the lack of basic understanding of health economics among those who are most vocal about effecting change. No one has done more to shape my thinking about the links between economics and policy than my friend and colleague, William White, who is the director of the Sloan Program in Health Administration at Cornell University’s School of Human Ecology. Over the past two decades, we have had long conversations about virtually every aspect of our healthcare system, from the rise of HMOs in the 1980s to current trends in consumer driven healthcare.

Will and I have decided to put our conversations into a blog and share them with our friends at Kellogg and Human Ecology. We have even asked some of the nation’s top economists to take a look. We will respond to the best of your comments as time allows. We promise not to grade them!

There is a lot at stake in the upcoming years. We hope that this free exchange of ideas can help bring about positive change in our healthcare system.

Sincerely,

David Dranove
Walter McNerney Distinguished Professor of Health Industry Management
Kellogg School of Management

I've read Dr. Dranove's stuff for a while now (mostly at The Health Care Blog), but had never seen this blog. Lots of great new material to read, I would guess.
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More to come...

"Tax-exempt hedge funds that conduct classes"

What?

 

 

Yeah. Basically, an eloquent expose of the cumulative consequences of neoliberal kleptocracy—uhhh..."public/private partnerships"—run amok in the academic space.

 

I got onto this book via an interview with the author the other day on PBS Amanpour & Co. Topically relevant in what I've come to regard as priority overlapping exigencies brought to the fore by the Covid-19 pandemic: ECON disruption, Academic turmoil, racial/social justice upheavals, climate change mitigation, pollution, and threats to Democracy.

 Grateful for having run into this heads-up. An excellent read. I'm now in the Epilogue. Stay tuned.

UPDATE

 

Finished. Nice. Very nice. Written in the consistently engaging style of a fine piece of "investigative journalism." I hope it gets wide airing—all the way up to the Biden White House. 

 

Core takeaway: Blatant abuse of 501(c)(3) non-profit status by elite postsecondary schools (mostly private) is a foundational tactic for their engaging in lucrative (often eminent domain-assisted) commercial gentrification real estate businesses and intellectual property / patent endeavors, all to the detriment of students, lower-echelon staffs, and local residents—replete with armed, largely unaccountable private "campus" police forces exceeding their legitimate briefs, beyond campus borders into adjacent, usually at-risk sociodemographic neighborhoods. Not to mention property tax payers in general.

 

A few Kindle edition snips **:

 

** These come from a new Kindle reader platform feature contained in the version downloaded to my new iPad. Pretty cool. You can easily share stuff straight to Twitter, Facebook, email, etc, or save to file.

Quite the revealing tour of colleges and universities, including Yale, Columbia, NYU, Johns Hopkins, UChicago, ASU, and Trinity College. A salient excerpt:

Yale University often gets credit for “saving” the once beat-down city of New Haven, making it safer while attracting new industry and development. But the truth is much more complicated. In March 2016, New Haven was struggling to balance its shrinking budget. And then-mayor Toni Harp joined local politicians and labor unions to set their sights on Yale. They called for a state senate bill to help fine-tune the university’s property tax-exempt status, an area where the school’s prosperity was directly tied to the city’s despair. Universities and their medical centers are registered with the Internal Revenue Service as 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofits.

Because of the public services that higher education institutions ostensibly provide to surrounding communities, their property holdings are exempt from taxation in all fifty states. But New Haven officials said Yale’s multimillion-dollar tax exemption actually contributed to the budget deficit of the city. The Connecticut bill, SB 414, would have allowed the state to tax university properties that generate $6,000 or more in annual income.

At a city hall press conference, Harp immediately acknowledged the need to uphold the tax protections for nonprofit organizations, including Yale. She celebrated the university’s undeniable role “in the city’s transformation.” Over the past forty years, Yale had become the single largest commercial power in New Haven. But Harp also warned that although cities rely “more and more on eds and meds,” New Haven leaders must “be clear… about the fiscal impact of this transition.” The mayor reminded listeners that “we still have to run a city.” Yale offered, as a compromise, an annual $8 million “payment in lieu of taxes,” or PILOT. By 2019, that payment jumped to more than $12 million. These contributions are voluntary, however, and are a fraction of the taxes Yale would pay based on the assessed value of its properties. But Yale didn’t have to worry; SB 414 did not pass, and the city of New Haven still struggles while its largest local economic entity remains exempt from property taxes.

Yale’s financial dominance in New Haven is tied to the meteoric ascendancy of the knowledge economy. Here, academic research is used to create profitable, commercial goods or patents in a range of fields, from the pharmaceutical industries and software products to military defense weaponry. Yale, in particular, has cultivated relationships with a number of biotech firms to produce new jobs and draw commercial revenue to the university and its host city. But this partnership between private industry and academic research has also created a property-tax “gray area” where profitable research produced for private companies is conducted in educational buildings that are not on the tax rolls.

Yale’s revenues from patent licenses grew from just more than $5 million in 1996 to more than $45 million in 2000.4 And it has also been difficult for New Haven to attract investors to this unlevel playing field. New businesses must pay taxes, and they struggle to coexist with competitors in the same market that are affiliated with the tax-exempt behemoth of Yale. Local politicians such as Harp simply wanted the university to contribute its fair share to the broader community.

But Yale’s financial position in New Haven is the result of more than just biotech. The school also oversees a lucrative portfolio of commercial and residential assets managed by its University Properties. Both students and alumni marvel at the transformation of the area from what was once dingy and even a bit dangerous. Now, when walking through the blocks surrounding the campus, they enjoy a new range of restaurants, shops, and housing options. By 2014, Yale’s more than four hundred downtown properties totaled roughly $2.44 billion in value…

Baldwin, Davarian L. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower (pp. 17-19). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition.

Similar stories are recounted from a number of cities around the nation. Several were of particular personal interest to me: My late younger daughter Danielle did her Master's in Religion at UChicago's Meadeville Seminary. I'm hip to the South Side. Second, I now live "in the shadow" of the Baltimore quasi-autonomous "Vatican City" of Johns Hopkins. And, I lived in Las Vegas for 21 years (where I got my Master's at UNLV in 1998). I'm no stranger to Phoenix, which is a quite similar socioeconomic, cultural, and desert environment.

Dr. Balwin's accounts of the NYU and Columbia U machinations were also acutely illuminating.

Erratum: Among the phrases that cause my hand to slide reflexively over my wallet are [1] "Gaussian Distribution" (where it goes to non-physical phenomena), and [2] "Public-Private Partnerships." The latter too often comprise havens for economically rapacious scoundrels.

For now, just let me observe that we are lucky to have the likes of Dr. Davarian L. Baldwin. Heartily recommend his new book.

 

Cool photo.

SOME RELATED READING

IVY-COVERED CASTE SYSTEM
We like to position education as the great leveler. But in fact it has become a caste system, a means of passing privilege on to the next generation. Sure, we let in a few freakishly remarkable kids from the masses so we can pretend to be a meritocracy, but between legacy admissions, high school inequality, and straight up pay-to-play arrangements, the wealthy are wildly overrepresented in our colleges. Wealthy kids today are over twice as likely to go to college as poor kids, and over five times as likely to attend an elite school.8 At 38 of the top 100 colleges in America, including 5 of the Ivies, there are more students from the top 1% of income than there are from the bottom 60%.9 You could argue that at this point, the Ivy League undergraduate programs are not colleges, but hedge funds that educate the children of their investors…

Galloway, Scott. Post Corona (pp. 130-131). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

DESPERATE
Why would college presidents put their students, employees, and neighbors at risk like this? The ugly truth is that many believe they have no choice. College is an expensive operation with a relatively inflexible cost structure. Tenure and union contracts render the largest cost (faculty and administrator salaries) near-immovable objects. The bulk of the teaching is done by adjuncts and assistants, who receive anemic compensation (and grad students, who work for nearly nothing), while the aristocracy of higher ed, the full professors, have their high salaries protected by tenure. In addition, universities have let their non-teaching staff costs bloat obscenely—growing head count is always easier than shrinking it. After working in higher ed for two decades, I believe nearly every decision is made with one goal in mind: how to increase the compensation and decrease the accountability of tenured faculty and administrators.

Government support for education has also been on the decline for generations. The result is that while some universities enjoy revenue streams from technology transfer, hospitals, returns on multibillion-dollar endowments, and public funding, the bulk of colleges have become tuition dependent. If students don’t return in any given semester, many colleges will have to take drastic action that could have serious long-term impacts on their ability to fulfill their missions… (ibid, pp. 138-139).

See also

 

These books add some useful broader context to Dr. Baldwin's eye-opening work.

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Will this SCOTUS strike down or materially modify CDA Section 230?

SECTION 230, COMMUNICATIONS DECENCY ACT: 47.USC.230

§ 230. Protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material

(a) Findings
The Congress finds the following:

(1) The rapidly developing array of Internet and other interactive computer services available to individual Americans represent an extraordinary advance in the availability of educational and informational resources to our citizens.

(2) These services offer users a great degree of control over the information that they receive, as well as the potential for even greater control in the future as technology develops.

(3) The Internet and other interactive computer services offer a forum for a true diversity of political discourse, unique opportunities for cultural development, and myriad avenues for intellectual activity.

(4) The Internet and other interactive computer services have flourished, to the benefit of all Americans, with a minimum of government regulation.

(5) Increasingly Americans are relying on interactive media for a variety of political, educational, cultural, and entertainment services.

(b) Policy
It is the policy of the United States—

(1) to promote the continued development of the Internet and other interactive computer services and other interactive media;

(2) to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the
Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation;

(3) to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over
what information is received by individuals, families, and schools who use the Internet and other interactive computer services;

(4) to remove disincentives for the development and utilization of blocking and filtering technologies that empower parents to restrict their children’s access to objectionable or inappropriate online material; and

(5) to ensure vigorous enforcement of Federal criminal laws to deter and punish trafficking in obscenity, stalking, and harassment by means of computer.

(c) Protection for ‘‘Good Samaritan’’ blocking and screening of offensive material

(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher
or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

(2) Civil liability

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account
of—

(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or

(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).1

(d) Obligations of interactive computer service

A provider of interactive computer service shall, at the time of entering an agreement with a customer for the provision of interactive computer service and in a manner deemed appropriate by the provider, notify such customer that parental control protections (such as computer hardware, software, or filtering services) are commercially available that may assist the customer in limiting access to material that is harmful to minors. Such notice shall identify, or provide the customer with access to information identifying, current providers of such protections.

(e) Effect on other laws

(1) No effect on criminal law

Nothing in this section shall be construed to impair the enforcement of section 223 or 231 of this title, chapter 71 (relating to obscenity) or 110 (relating to sexual exploitation of children) of title 18, or any other Federal criminal statute.

(2) No effect on intellectual property law

Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit or expand any law pertaining to intellectual property.

(3) State law

Nothing in this section shall be construed to prevent any State from enforcing any State
law that is consistent with this section. No cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section.

(4) No effect on communications privacy law

Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit the application of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 or any of the amendments made by such Act, or any similar State law.

(f) Definitions

As used in this section:

(1) Internet

The term ‘‘Internet’’ means the international computer network of both Federal and non-Federal interoperable packet switched data networks.

(2) Interactive computer service

The term ‘‘interactive computer service’’ means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet and such systems operated or services offered by libraries or educational institutions.

(3) Information content provider

The term ‘‘information content provider’’ means any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through the Internet or any other interactive computer service.

(4) Access software provider

The term ‘‘access software provider’’ means a provider of software (including client or
server software), or enabling tools that do any one or more of the following:

(A) filter, screen, allow, or disallow content;
(B) pick, choose, analyze, or digest content; or
(C) transmit, receive, display, forward, cache, search, subset, organize, reorganize, or translate content.

__________

(June 19, 1934, ch. 652, title II, § 230, as added Pub. L. 104–104, title V, § 509, Feb. 8, 1996, 110 Stat. 137; amended Pub. L. 105–277, div. C, title XIV, § 1404(a), Oct. 21, 1998, 112 Stat. 2681–739.)

REFERENCES IN TEXT
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, referred to in subsec. (e)(4), is Pub. L. 99–508, Oct. 21, 1986, 100 Stat. 1848, as amended. For complete classification of this Act to the Code, see Short Title of 1986 Amendment note set out under section 2510 of Title 18, Crimes and Criminal Procedure, and Tables.

CODIFICATION
Section 509 of Pub. L. 104–104, which directed amendment of title II of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 201 et seq.) by adding section 230 at end, was executed by adding the section at end of part I of title II of the Act to reflect the probable intent of Congress and amendments by sections 101(a), (b), and 151(a) of Pub. L. 104–104 designating §§ 201 to 229 as part I and adding parts II (§ 251 et seq.) and III (§ 271 et seq.) to title II of the Act.

AMENDMENTS
1998—Subsec. (d). Pub. L. 105–277, § 1404(a)(3), added subsec. (d). Former subsec. (d) redesignated (e). Subsec. (d)(1). Pub. L. 105–277, § 1404(a)(1), inserted ‘‘or 231’’ after ‘‘section 223’’. Subsecs. (e), (f). Pub. L. 105–277, § 1404(a)(2), redesignatedsubsecs. (d) and (e) as (e) and (f), respectively.

EFFECTIVE DATE OF 1998 AMENDMENT
Amendment by Pub. L. 105–277 effective 30 days after Oct. 21, 1998, see section 1406 of Pub. L. 105–277, set out as a note under section 223 of this title.

 

ORALS COMMENCE AT SCOTUS FEB 21ST ON TWO CASES

 

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google/YouTube, Tumblr, Pinterest, GETTR, Telegram, & Truth Social, etc—none of them are currently considered "publishers" subject to content liability litigation and remedies. That may well change this year. There's a lot at stake.

 

Stay tuned...

2-22 UPDATE

[CNN]  After back-to-back oral arguments this week, the Supreme Court appears reluctant to hand down the kind of sweeping ruling about liability for terrorist content on social media that some feared would upend the internet.

On Wednesday, the justices struggled with claims that Twitter contributed to a 2017 ISIS attack in Istanbul by hosting content unrelated to the specific incident. Arguments in that case, Twitter v. Taamneh, came a day after the court considered whether YouTube can be sued for recommending videos created by ISIS to its users.

What's at stake: The closely watched cases carry significant stakes for the wider internet. An expansion of apps and websites’ legal risk for hosting or promoting content could lead to major changes at sites including Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube, to name a few.

For nearly three hours of oral argument, the justices asked attorneys for Twitter, the US government and the family of Nawras Alassaf – a Jordanian citizen killed in the 2017 attack – how to weigh several factors that might determine Twitter’s level of legal responsibility, if any. But while the justices quickly identified what the relevant factors were, they seemed divided on how to analyze them…

May portend a relatively narrow, non-"groundbreaking" set of rulings. Or no new rulings (kick it over to Congress). We won't know until June or July.

__________

 

Just Science

AAAS Editorial

Science should save all, not just some

Discussions around global equity and justice in science typically emphasize the lack of diversity in the editorial boards of scientific journals, inequities in authorship, “parachute research,” dominance of the English language, or scientific awards garnered predominantly by Global North scientists. These inequities are pervasive and must be redressed. But there is a bigger problem. The legacy of colonialism in scientific research includes an intellectual property system that favors Global North countries and the big corporations they support. This unfairness shows up in who gets access to the fruits of science and raises the question of who science is designed to serve or save.

Consider the COVID-19 pandemic, which gave already known mRNA vaccine technology a global platform. But even as the world celebrated this achievement with a Nobel Prize, the stunning fact remains that COVID-19 vaccines failed to reach millions of people in the Global South in a timely manner, despite the public investments into making these technologies. Global North governments hoarded vaccines and were lobbied by pharmaceutical companies to block a patent waiver that could have enabled Global South countries to make their own mRNA vaccines as a short-term solution during a period of acute need. The commitment to capitalist exploitation that powered much of European colonization persists in science and continues to cost lives. If vaccines had reached the Global South in an equitable and timely manner, half the deaths that occurred might have been averted. Although efforts are being made to bring the technology to Africa, the mRNA platform is largely controlled by the Global North and Big Pharma, undermining vaccine development against a variety of diseases. These same power dynamics and actors also derailed the pandemic accord, which aims to ensure equity…

Scientists must collectively advocate for reforms to how science is funded, who is funded, how governments define intellectual property regimes, and how scientists are incentivized. Funding agencies such as the US Agency for International Development, Wellcome Trust, and Fogarty International Center are starting to directly support Global South partners and affected communities. All funders must do this. And scientists everywhere must be trained to see equity, access, and justice as key values in their work. This is starting to happen in global health and medical research, but must become universal.

Our friends at The Heritage Foundation will not be amused. Heritage President Kevin Roberts in particular.

 

apropos, a prior AAAS editorial. Also, Heritage peeps want to ban the word "Diversity" from public life (no, I'm not kidding).

 

For the record, "I am not a Scientist."

 

UPDATE

 

Also saw this book reviewed in Science Magazine.

 

 

Just getting started. I am never gonna get caught up. Hmmm... Brandon's book triggered this prior post memory:

Click here

"SENTIENCE?"

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