Leo Martins’s Comments

• Jan 18th, 2010 @ 2:38pm

  DNA databases

  on Oxford University Bans Spotify, Apparently Prefers Students To Get Music Secretly, Rather Than Legally
  If I didn't know any better, I would say that people at Oxford aren't doing a lot of genomics recently: biotorrents, for instance, is a torrent service for sharing genomic datasets (such a dataset was published recently on Nature).
• Dec 28th, 2009 @ 4:56pm

  If you don't like google, try bing, yahoo...

  on Why Is The NY Times Running A Ridiculous, Conflicted Op-Ed Against Google?
  And this is not even new: I found this article ("Foundem vs Google: a case study in SEO fail") from August saying that The Guardian also fell prey of this "google undervalues me" sad story.
  
  If google starts skewing the rank of my precious-though-unknown site I have to 1) live with that; 2) advertize a better search engine; or the best 3) improve my site so that more people find it useful. If a lot of people find it useful despite google's skewed results, these (lots of) people will discredit google's results.
  
  So if the NYT, The Guardian, or Techdirt "disappear" from google, the impact of this on google's credibility will be proportional to the people angry with the disappearance. The credibility is google's to loose.
• Nov 15th, 2009 @ 7:49am

  The law is most welcome, but I still can't see the openness

  on Good News/Bad News In Brazil: Effort To Legalize Mashups... But Google Liable For User Actions
  As for the bad news, we also have the cases where religious leaders and politicians go after social networks and newspapers (links in pt_BR).
  As for the good news, the devil is in the details. The passage from the original article (pt_BR)

  O MinC admite que a oficialização da cópia privada prevê uma remuneração compensatória aos detentores do direito autoral, que ainda deverá ser discutida e instituída por meio de uma lei específica.

  can be roughly translated as

  The Ministry of Culture admits that the officialization of the private copy entails a compensatory remuneration to the copyright holders, which should be discussed and implemented through a specific Act.

  which is not impressive since it's common for the Brazilian laws to postpone the details to further laws. Notice that they first mentioned "decriminalization" of the private copy, which means that even having a copy of legally bought material is still illegal, before this "officialization" law comes into effect.
  And it seems to me (I'm not a lawyer) that the "artistic mashups" are just the implementation of a fair use clause. My general impression is that this law, even if fully implemented, do not present any innovation but simply keeps up with international laws. To cover the ridiculous flaws of the current one.
• Oct 16th, 2009 @ 5:01pm

  attention span needed to understand conflicts of interest

  on IAB Takes On FTC Over Silly Blogger Disclosure Rules
  The twitter feed example points to the attention span problem that Larry Lessig referred to in his article about transparency. We may see patterns using transparency data in the same way as we tend to see a conflict of interest when presented to full disclosure information - though spurious.
  
  Anyway, my point is that the "naked transparency" Lessig pointed to seems to be equivalent to a "full disclosure" of bloggers. And despite I'm up for transparency and against this level of disclosure I don't know how to conciliate them.