Who owns your thoughts?

Forget 1984 — License agreements are the real thought police

ascribe CONSTRUCT Hackathon, Sept 2015

The Emotiv Insight is a wireless headset that allows you to monitor your brain activity. The Insight is sold as a “quantified self” device to “optimize your brain fitness”, “measure & monitor cognitive well being”, and “create amazing applications”.

Just don’t think you have control over what you’re thinking—not unless you buy an Enterprise developer’s license. That’s what Emotiv told us when we launched an art project called n3uro.com that registered screenshots of Insight output on the blockchain through ascribe.io, then offered “thoughts and dreams” for sale.

Image: n3uro.com screenshot with image by Thomas Schultz, licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.5 [link].

Why n3uro.com?

The Insight is one of a new breed of consumer devices giving people a glimpse into their own minds. There is a lot of potential in letting people track their levels of relaxation, mindfulness, or focus. It’s exciting to imagine later versions being used to type a text just by thinking about it, or to control a robotic prosthetic.

As the technology improves, we will be faced with difficult questions about privacy and control of our innermost selves. Who will have access to recorded thoughts? Will a new creative medium emerge? Who will profit? Will celebrities sell access to their experiences? Will black markets for memories emerge, like in the cult film Strange Days?

Those were the questions on our mind at the ascribe CONSTRUCT Hackathon held September 18–20, 2015 in Berlin.

ascribe CONSTRUCT Hackathon

I partnered with the founder and CTO of ascribe, Trent McConaghy, to build n3uro.com, a store for brainwaves registered on ascribe. The tagline: “We sell thoughts and dreams”.

For content, we had volunteers wear my Insight headset and asked them to think of something exciting. With 30–60 seconds of results displayed in the Insight software, we took a screenshot of the graph and had the volunteers register their graphs on ascribe so they could be sold on the n3uro.com store. For example, here is the headset’s output when Ciaran thought about piloting an airplane during takeoff.

The ascribed images were linked to a Shopify store and finally made available at n3uro.com.

These files don’t actually tell the viewer very much about what is going on in someone’s brain. Re-experiencing someone else’s thoughts is still science fiction. There’s not even a reliable way to distinguish between thoughts of flying or eating a pretzel. We haven’t sold a single image, and we would be surprised if we did (although the pretzel image is a bargain at €10,000!).

But today’s science fiction art project is tomorrow’s commercial reality. We need to start thinking about the implications now.

Discussion with Emotiv

After the hackathon, we thought that Emotiv would like to know about our project. We thought it might even be a neat piece of PR for them. They disagreed. That’s fine. We were disappointed but ready to go on our way.

What we weren’t expecting was their follow-up email:

To: ascribe

From: Emotiv Thank you for the call last week. We humbly decline the opportunity to collaborate on this project. If you would like to continue with project, you will need to purchase the proper Enterprise License. I can extend a 3% Preferred Partner Discount towards the purchase of the Enterprise License. Please contact hello@emotiv.com and a sales associate can assist you with the discounted purchase.

Surely this was just a misunderstanding. I wrote back to the Emotiv rep and explained I was not a developer, but was just really curious about brainwave-reading hardware (I even backed Emotiv’s Kickstarter campaign!) and the social impact of the technology.

After giving a clarified description of the project, I said I couldn’t see why we would need an Enterprise License:

To: Emotiv

From: me […] We set up volunteers with the headset and asked them to think of something stimulating, then took screenshots of the graph displayed on the Safari plugin. We haven’t sold a single image through n3uro.com and we would be surprised if we ever did. Sales weren’t the point. The point was to get people thinking about the implications of hardware and software that is providing an increasingly detailed look into what until now had been a completely private inner world. It’s disappointing you don’t see potential for marketing here, but that’s your prerogative. I understand you may not want people thinking about the privacy implications of Emotiv technology. What confuses me is your suggestion that an enterprise license is required for this project. I am unclear as to how it falls outside the terms of the Individual license. We have installed the software on just one computer (mine) and have not done any of the things prohibited in the License Restrictions. Are you suggesting that Emotiv has intellectual property rights in information about users’ brainwaves? [emphasis added]

At first glance this seems like lawyerly talk about licensing agreements, but that last question is critical. Why should Emotiv have any say in what Julia does with information about what her brain is doing when she’s thinking about sunbathing on an island?

I expected a quick clarification and a definitive “we don’t own your brainwaves”. Not quite:

To: greg@ascribe.io

From: Emotiv Thank you for your support of the Kickstarter project for Insight! The Enterprise License is required for developers who intend to commercialize. If you do not intend to sell, then the Individual license will work for you. Based on the model that was presented, there is a store environment to purchase. Let me know if you have any questions. Cheers!

Wait, what? If I want to use my brainwaves I need a software development license?

To: Emotiv

From: greg@ascribe.io Typically a developer license is required for commercial software development, but not for a commercial use of information generated by hardware. For example I would need a developer license to make commercial software for my iPhone, but not to sell prints of images taken with the iPhone camera. There are some exceptions in the software world that I am aware of — “Student” licenses of Microsoft Office, for example — but these are set out explicitly in license terms. Can you please refer me to the language in the license I have that prohibits what we have done with n3uro.com?

I sent that last email over a week ago now, and Emotiv hasn’t responded. I hope they’ve realized their error, but wouldn’t be surprised to receive a legal nastygram. I’ll give an update if or when we hear back.

Conclusion: who needs thought police?

We are leaving n3uro.com online unless we’re given a good reason to take it down, but whether it stays online isn’t the point. The project was meant to serve as a framework for thinking in a very literal sense about the ownership and commercialization of thoughts and dreams.

Emotiv’s heavy-handed response pushed that discussion further than we could have hoped when we started the project. We don’t have to wait for the thought police of some future dystopia — we already have corporations trying to use licensing agreements to determine what you can and can’t do with your thoughts.