the seller of the app may be using the presence of these news feeds in the app to sell the app
No, they're only using the presence of links to news feeds in the app to sell the app, not the feeds themselves. While the feed content is copyrighted, the links themselves are not copyrighted or otherwise subject to terms of use.
You misunderstand the proposed law. The 14 day period is the notice-and-take-down for the ISP, not the original poster of the libelous message. That person is still liable for damages, regardless of what the ISP does.
The point of a more liberal notice-and-take-down statute is to give intermediaries like the ISP more time to decide whether or not a message they DID NOT originally create is in fact libelous.
By way of analogy, suppose someone publishes a possibly libelous book. You then go into a bookstore owned by someone else and say, "That book is libel! Burn it right now!" The bookstore owner then says, "Hold on here. I have no idea who you are or if your claim of libel is true. Please give me 14 days to verify this." Is that so wrong? You can quibble about whether 14 days is too long in "Internet time", but the basic principle is the same.
I really don't see why ISPs have to do any automatic takedown at all. If someone wants something taken down, they should have to go to a court and get an injunction. It's not always obvious what's libel, and if you have to wait 14 days, then you might as well use that time to have the judiciary at least take a preliminary look.
When you pay someone to do something, the underlying message is "doing this sucks so much that we have to pay you to do it." That may or may not be true, but people think it.
I remember hearing about experiments where blood donors were paid. It actually resulted in a net loss of blood donations, because the money wasn't worth the lost time for many folks and donors lost the warm fuzzy feeling they got from donating something for free. I might be off on that as I can't find the study anywhere though -- would love to get some confirmation on that.
Fair enough. I guess I meant Josh Bernoff's assumption. He say "Forrester's own quick poll shows that few are leaving" to support his claim that people on Facebook don't care about privacy.
Also, another side effect is that their JS sometimes has some odd bugs. I had an issue on the TechCrunch site the other day where it was preventing me from copying text that I had typed inside the comment box. If I'm copying and pasting my own text, there's no conceivable reason why you'd want to muck with that.
I mentioned this on Twitter briefly and the Tynt person said they were working on it. Still, very annoying at times.
The incorrect assumption you're making is that the only way for users to respond to Facebook's privacy mis-steps is to leave the service. That's incorrect. They can also reduce the amount of information they make available on Facebook.
Case in point: Last weekend, my friends and I coded up a Facebook game that needed to know (1) the gender of your friends and (2) a school or company that they are or were a part of. That's not a lot of information and hardly the thing most people care about keeping private. However, when I ran the game, only 33% of my friends actually made that information available to me.
This is a very small sample, but it confirms what I've observed anecdotally: the quantity and quality of the information available on Facebook, even to trusted "friends", is not what it used to be. People are deleting things (or in some cases, just not exerting any effort to update). That hurts Facebook. It makes their platform less attractive to app developers and less valuable to advertisers.
So yeah, privacy does matter. It's just that the market often acts subtly.
I'm more concerned about how they're going to prove someone looked at Street View. Now prosecutors have an incentive to supoena Google everytime a burglary occurs.
(1) Largely depends on the field. I know law students would love it.
(2) So do subscriptions instead of an upfront. Actually, it'd probably make sense to do this as a hybrid -- e.g. pay a large price for the first year and a small recurring fee for every year after that. This would allow you to better segment your market -- students who only need the book for the one year they're taking a course pay only the first larger fee, while people who want to keep the text as a reference guide pay a recurring fee to have it update.
(3) Rights might be an issue, but so long as any edits you make are confined to your students and not otherwise distributed, I doubt there'd be a problem. As for creationists modifying the science textbooks, you can use a wiki-like history feature to distinguish between what the author initially wrote and what your professor wrote. Also, I'm really thinking of this more for college and grad professors.
Alternatively, you could implement this in the same way as (1) -- e.g. the teacher might annotate something in her copy of the book and push that change to other student copies.
Digital textbooks actually offer the opportunity to add a whole lot of value beyond just being cheaper / lighter replicas of the paper copies. It's unfortunate that textbook makers aren't tapping into this.
Some simple examples:
(1) Any margin notes and highlighting you make on the text can be shared online. And aggregated somehow. When it's time to review for finals, it'd be amazing to see what my class as a whole thought was important in the book and what wasn't. And for the professor or book author, reviewing the notes and highlighting could provide useful data for future editions (e.g. "huh, no one seems to understand Chapter 7. We should rewrite that").
(2) For that matter, get rid of editions! I keep around some of my old textbooks for reference purposes, and I'd pay more upfront (or even pay a small subscription fee) to have them automatically update based on new technologies or development.
(3) Let the professor rewrite parts of the book. Sometimes a professor will assign a textbook because 95% of it does a great job of dealing with the material, but feel that the remaining 5% gets it wrong. Letting the professor edit, reorder, emphasize, and otherwise customize a textbook for his class would be a great value-add. Also, the publisher and the original author are getting great feedback about how the textbook is actually being used.
And so on. There's a lot of potential in digital textbooks, but people have to stop thinking of them as digital copies of books and as ... I dunno: services, tools, communities, something -- but definitely not a book in the traditional sense.
Well, you can think of a few things that might be "embarrassing" to a company but aren't trade secrets. For example, suppose the documents show that 75% of AT&T employees use Verizon phones because AT&T's coverage sucks. That's not a trade secret but it's also embarrassing for AT&T and completely unrelated to why the documents were requested in the first place.
So the way the FOIA personal privacy exemption works, I think, is that the government agency has to balance the public interest in seeing the information released vs. the privacy interest of the person who's information is released.
The Third Circuit's decision (582 F.3d 490) did NOT say that AT&T's right to privacy was greater than the public's interest in seeing the information released. All it said was that the FCC has to actually do the balancing test, rather than assume, as a matter of law, that companies automatically have no right to personal privacy under FOIA.
That's not super crazy. First, the FCC can still release the documents. It just has to say "after thinking about this a while, we think the public's interest in knowing this outweighs AT&T's interest." Second, you can think of hypotheticals where there might be some embarrassing information not related to the investigation that AT&T might not want leaking out -- e.g. 80% of its middle managements looks at porn on company computers during lunch breaks. Stuff like that.
On the post: NY Times Confused About Its Own RSS Feed; Orders Takedown Of iPad RSS Reader
Re: Re: Re:
the seller of the app may be using the presence of these news feeds in the app to sell the app
No, they're only using the presence of links to news feeds in the app to sell the app, not the feeds themselves. While the feed content is copyrighted, the links themselves are not copyrighted or otherwise subject to terms of use.
On the post: Court Smacks Down Copyright Lawyer For Bad Faith Pursuit Of Copyright Infringement
Well, actually, if a lawyer aggressively pursues any bogus claim, shit can happen. See the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 11. http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/Rule11.htm
On the post: New Libel Law Proposed In The UK; Gives ISPs Two Weeks To Respond
Re:
The point of a more liberal notice-and-take-down statute is to give intermediaries like the ISP more time to decide whether or not a message they DID NOT originally create is in fact libelous.
By way of analogy, suppose someone publishes a possibly libelous book. You then go into a bookstore owned by someone else and say, "That book is libel! Burn it right now!" The bookstore owner then says, "Hold on here. I have no idea who you are or if your claim of libel is true. Please give me 14 days to verify this." Is that so wrong? You can quibble about whether 14 days is too long in "Internet time", but the basic principle is the same.
On the post: New Libel Law Proposed In The UK; Gives ISPs Two Weeks To Respond
Injunctions
On the post: Scott Adams: Ideas vs. Execution
Re: Re:
On the post: Microsoft Discovers That Bribing People To Use Its Search Engine Didn't Work
Subtle messaging
I remember hearing about experiments where blood donors were paid. It actually resulted in a net loss of blood donations, because the money wasn't worth the lost time for many folks and donors lost the warm fuzzy feeling they got from donating something for free. I might be off on that as I can't find the study anywhere though -- would love to get some confirmation on that.
On the post: How Much Do Most People Really Care About Privacy?
Re: Re: Gradations
On the post: Messing With Copy/Paste Could Present Security Issues
Opt-out
Also, another side effect is that their JS sometimes has some odd bugs. I had an issue on the TechCrunch site the other day where it was preventing me from copying text that I had typed inside the comment box. If I'm copying and pasting my own text, there's no conceivable reason why you'd want to muck with that.
I mentioned this on Twitter briefly and the Tynt person said they were working on it. Still, very annoying at times.
On the post: How Much Do Most People Really Care About Privacy?
Gradations
Case in point: Last weekend, my friends and I coded up a Facebook game that needed to know (1) the gender of your friends and (2) a school or company that they are or were a part of. That's not a lot of information and hardly the thing most people care about keeping private. However, when I ran the game, only 33% of my friends actually made that information available to me.
This is a very small sample, but it confirms what I've observed anecdotally: the quantity and quality of the information available on Facebook, even to trusted "friends", is not what it used to be. People are deleting things (or in some cases, just not exerting any effort to update). That hurts Facebook. It makes their platform less attractive to app developers and less valuable to advertisers.
So yeah, privacy does matter. It's just that the market often acts subtly.
On the post: Using An Online Map As Part Of Your Criminal Activity Gets You A Longer Sentence In Louisiana
Proof?
On the post: Google WiFi Data Caught In Legal Limbo
Re: Re:
On the post: University Sues GM For Using Einstein In An Ad Without Paying Up
Copyright?
On the post: Guy Who Encouraged People To Commit Suicide Online Banned From The Internet
Jail?
On the post: Students Overwhelmingly Don't Like Kindle As A Textbook Replacement Option
Re: Re: Add Value
(2) So do subscriptions instead of an upfront. Actually, it'd probably make sense to do this as a hybrid -- e.g. pay a large price for the first year and a small recurring fee for every year after that. This would allow you to better segment your market -- students who only need the book for the one year they're taking a course pay only the first larger fee, while people who want to keep the text as a reference guide pay a recurring fee to have it update.
(3) Rights might be an issue, but so long as any edits you make are confined to your students and not otherwise distributed, I doubt there'd be a problem. As for creationists modifying the science textbooks, you can use a wiki-like history feature to distinguish between what the author initially wrote and what your professor wrote. Also, I'm really thinking of this more for college and grad professors.
Alternatively, you could implement this in the same way as (1) -- e.g. the teacher might annotate something in her copy of the book and push that change to other student copies.
On the post: Students Overwhelmingly Don't Like Kindle As A Textbook Replacement Option
Add Value
Some simple examples:
(1) Any margin notes and highlighting you make on the text can be shared online. And aggregated somehow. When it's time to review for finals, it'd be amazing to see what my class as a whole thought was important in the book and what wasn't. And for the professor or book author, reviewing the notes and highlighting could provide useful data for future editions (e.g. "huh, no one seems to understand Chapter 7. We should rewrite that").
(2) For that matter, get rid of editions! I keep around some of my old textbooks for reference purposes, and I'd pay more upfront (or even pay a small subscription fee) to have them automatically update based on new technologies or development.
(3) Let the professor rewrite parts of the book. Sometimes a professor will assign a textbook because 95% of it does a great job of dealing with the material, but feel that the remaining 5% gets it wrong. Letting the professor edit, reorder, emphasize, and otherwise customize a textbook for his class would be a great value-add. Also, the publisher and the original author are getting great feedback about how the textbook is actually being used.
And so on. There's a lot of potential in digital textbooks, but people have to stop thinking of them as digital copies of books and as ... I dunno: services, tools, communities, something -- but definitely not a book in the traditional sense.
For that matter, they could get rid of editions!
On the post: Should Companies Have A 'Privacy' Right To Shield The Release Of Damaging Info?
Re: Re: Sky won't fall
On the post: Should Companies Have A 'Privacy' Right To Shield The Release Of Damaging Info?
Re: Re:
On the post: Should Companies Have A 'Privacy' Right To Shield The Release Of Damaging Info?
Sky won't fall
So the way the FOIA personal privacy exemption works, I think, is that the government agency has to balance the public interest in seeing the information released vs. the privacy interest of the person who's information is released.
The Third Circuit's decision (582 F.3d 490) did NOT say that AT&T's right to privacy was greater than the public's interest in seeing the information released. All it said was that the FCC has to actually do the balancing test, rather than assume, as a matter of law, that companies automatically have no right to personal privacy under FOIA.
That's not super crazy. First, the FCC can still release the documents. It just has to say "after thinking about this a while, we think the public's interest in knowing this outweighs AT&T's interest." Second, you can think of hypotheticals where there might be some embarrassing information not related to the investigation that AT&T might not want leaking out -- e.g. 80% of its middle managements looks at porn on company computers during lunch breaks. Stuff like that.
On the post: Yet Another Person Sues, Claiming James Cameron Copied The Idea For Avatar
Re: Question...
Answer probably lies somewhere in how the law treats derivative works and transformative uses.
On the post: Louisiana Wants To Put You In Jail If You Embarrass Anyone Under 17 Years Old Online
Re: Re: Re: Proposed laws
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