Tag Archive for 'rights'

News of the Weird – but true

Published on April 3, 2009 in Muse. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

The odd thing about all these news articles from today is that they’re all true. These are strange days we live in.

WhiteHouse.Gov uses CC-By-3.0

Published on January 23, 2009 in Geekery. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Or rather, their copyright policy notes that third party contributions are CC-By-3.0 – although they don’t actually link to the CC site yet.
Just surprised it hadn’t surfaced on planetapache yet. And yes, Virginia, it is important.

John Stewart Mill, of his own free will…

Published on October 30, 2007 in Muse. 0 Comments Tags: .

Excellent song; an even more excellent (and short) analysis of the piece can be found by Ben Laurie across the pond.

If you want to take it one step further, and be extra nice, you can also follow Bill & Ted’s excellent advice:

Be excellent to each other!

Yes, you may say “cheezy claptrap” about the movie, but still an excellent modernization of a very old idea. Let’s hope we do a better job with both of them in the next decade.

How can CreativeCommons help combat splogs?

Published on July 5, 2007 in Geekery. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Perhaps a naive question, but I was thinking about legal and social ways to combat splogs and blog scraping (since even with my limited scope, I’ve been scraped at least twice). In particular, I was wondering: do CreativeCommons NC licenses prevent blog scraping?
There are a number of detailed questions I haven’t investigated, but I figured I’d post this now to see if anyone comments. Personally, I chose the CC BY-NC-SA license because the human-readable version seems to be closest to what I want my philosophy to be for much of my content. That is:

  • BY – By attribution. This means anyone who uses the license must attribute the work to me. It’s the least to ask that if you’re going to use something I create, that you let the world know I created it first.
  • NC – Non Commercial. It’s my work; I’m certainly not going to give it to you for free if you’re making money off of it. If there’s money to be made in what I create, it’s mine!
  • SA – Share Alike. Although I am not a Free Software type (a’la FSF) for code myself, for personal writings like my website and blog, I want to ensure that others who re-use my content will allow their versions of my works to be shared alike.

My question to my legal and geek readers is: can CC NC licenses help combat splogs? Splogs being original-content-free sites that simply copy other people’s feeds, and have lots of AdSense or other advertising links on them. The more content they steal, the more search hits and therefore ad revenue they make from the site.
Either on legal theory, or technical issues, does the CC NC license prohibit this use? Have any of the CC licenses been tested in court? And where is the current legal line on commercial use? The whole fact that splogs are original-content-free would point a reasonable person to say it’s purely for selfish commercial use, but I’m sure that some tricky splogger has an argument about how their feed search terms constitute something original or such bull that it would take a number of cases to have anything effective.

Yes, I realize this is all very theoretical. For practical solutions I should download a WordPress plugin that poisons my default feeds with copyright notices or faux content. But with the relative popularity of CreativeCommons I was wondering if they’ve been thinking about this specific issue – of the EFF or some of the other great online legal sites out there.

Who ever thought of privacy policies on maps?

Published on June 7, 2007 in Geekery. 3 Comments Tags: , .

Or, as Charles Bandes, a local photog questions:

Who watches the watchmen?

He’s walking down the street with his camera, he spots a car driving slowly along – with a wide-angle multi-camera rig on the roof, filming everything as it drives on.  Ah-ha!  Modern mapping technology has come so far, that not only can we get a satellite picture of you in your backyard (admittedly still grainy for the civillian uses), but we also have immersive photo maps of your front yard from drive-by internet companies.  Where can you go for privacy these days?

The interesting thing I found was in the comments to the posting – Kasia claims it was her in the car, and she’s not working for Google, but another immersive photo mapping vendor called EveryScape.com!  I suppose it’s a fairly obvious idea, and technology has been ready for this kind of image processing for a while now.  The key was always the business model, and the logistics of having humans (robot cars not being legal in most populated areas yet) actually drive around everywhere to capture the data close-up.

What’s my point?  Several fold:

  • Where’s the privacy policy?  Sure, legally public streets and all that, but still, they’re running a business that relies on eyeballs on their site; how do they update rights management and complaints processing?
  • Who the heck ever thought of a privacy policy on a map?  (Actually, I’m sure some people have besides the gov’t's blurring of satellite data, but still.)
  • Excellent post title, Charles, although I admit I haven’t read that graphic novel in far too long.

Now for some self-promotion (or self-delusion): let’s start a new meme.  EveryScape – howabout EveryScrape?  Makes sense to most geeks: you’re screen-scraping my neighborhood, dude!  CityScrape?  All of the other obvious spelling mistakes like EvryScape?  Who’s going to be the first to steal some of these other great domain names to make some parasitic profit off of this newcomer? 
Please tell me it’s going to be someone fun, who does a worthwhile parody site and/or community driven site, and not one of those evil domain master owners who just pump their AdSense income from their automated spelling-mistake-catching domain registry tools.  Ugh.

The Good and the Bad of Human Behavior

Published on January 25, 2007 in Muse. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Two diametric links about proper (or improper) human behavior I stumbled upon today I thought I would share.

Xiphias writes about fundamental rights, human behavior, and what our Constitution and Governments have to do with them – very little, in his eloquent and positively thought-provoking words. I just wish I could make trackbacks out of Livejournal.

“…things I think everyone should know”
- Xiphias

Which reminds me of an interesting phrase I copied when writing some acceptable use guidelines for a work-hosted discussion database. Not something I enjoyed having to include, but important when your forum is actually owned by someone else (i.e. not a public street, etc.):

Correctly interpreted, the First Amendment does not prohibit all restrictions on speech. It doesn’t prohibit private restrictions at all. Our constitution is a series of constraints on government, not on individuals or even powerful corporations.
Wired, 4.03

On the other hand, we have The Prince re-imagined as The Little Prince, so to speak. A novel graphical view of Machiavelli, as wryly translated for children.

“A Child’s Machiavelli”
- Claudia Hart

Definitely something you don’t want your youngsters reading until they’ve found their own moral center (hopefully, one you approve of).

Are you watching the speech now?

Published on January 23, 2007 in Muse. 0 Comments Tags: , .

I’m sure not.  State Of The Union, forsooth.  State of his… well, I’m not going to finish that thought since I don’t plan to do politics on this blog.  Ug.

Although I must admit it’s pretty odd forming an opinion about the details of a speech that hasn’t been given yet.  But if you were surfing news sites the hours before the speech was to begin, apparently the text has already been officially given out by the press people.  Wierd.

Do you know who’s using your pictures online?

Published on January 18, 2007 in Muse. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Or rather, did you realize what rights you’re giving up when you print your digital pictures?

It’s been a while since I got hardcopies (always useful for frames on the wall, wallets, and grandparents) of some Roxanne pictures, so I looked at local places I can get 1 hour prints (I’m impatient once I start).  I thought I wanted to find the cheapest major printer that I can get to easily – the two obvious choices here are CVS and Ritz.  CVS was a little cheaper (19cents with no restrictions), so I started signing up.  Fill in your email and password and get yet another darn account…  CVS outsources the photo site to a place called pnimedia.com to do all the work, just leaving the CVS banner there.  Then I read the TOS (Terms Of Service).

Of course by default, the TOS pops up in a separate window that’s much too small to read, without a scrollbar.  And it’s an onClick link, not an href, so you have to look in the page source to see where the terms really live (hint: http://cvs.pnimedia.com/disclaimers/terms.aspx).  Plenty of the usual legalese about their lack of responsibility for anything, which is fine.  Then I read on to this section:

You grant to the Web Site and its service providers and licensees a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, unrestricted, world-wide right and license to access, use, copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, display, perform, communicate to the public, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, and otherwise use such Materials (in whole or in part) in connection with the Service, using any form, media or technology now known or later developed, without providing compensation to you…
…
You also grant to the Web Site and its service providers the right to use your name in connection with the Materials.

So my non-lawyerly reading of that means that any photos you upload to their site, they can then use as they wish, for any purpose ever, and even use your name.  Don’t hold your breath, but you might someday be featured in one of their ad campaigns for photo printing in the future.  Including your name, Mr/s. Blog Reader.  Sound fun?

Not liking the sound of that, I surfed over to ritzpix.com.  The TOS there at least comes up in a normal window, and has a normal URL of http://www.ritzpix.com/common/RitzTerms.cfm which states:

As a condition to your Membership, you hereby grant RitzPix.com and the RitzPix.com Site Host (LifePics, Inc. Based out of Boulder Colorado d/b/a/ LifePics) a perpetual, universal, non-exclusive, royalty-free right to copy, display, modify, transmit, make derivative works of and distribute your Content, solely for the purpose of providing the Service.

Here, you give up the same basic rights, but “solely for the purpose of providing the Service”, which sounds almost reasonable to me.  Obviously if they outsource bits, or display your stored pictures, they want to CYA with the basic rights there.

Contrast this all with other sites, like what flickr uses, which is qoop.com for photo printing nowadays, TOS at http://www.qoop.com/about/terms_of_service.php

You hereby grant to QOOP a worldwide, transferable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, right and license to use such Content, in all media existing now or created in the future, as QOOP feels appropriate in its sole discretion, to allow you to deploy the QOOP Services to create, manufacture and purchase Products for so long as you maintain a Content QOOP LINQ to QOOP Services, house your Content in the QOOP Content database, or remain a member of QOOP. QOOP may sublicense the rights granted to it in this Section to a third party subcontractor where QOOP deems it necessary or advisable to facilitate QOOP Services. We reserve the right to excerpt your Content and make minor modifications to the Content for technical reasons and for marketing and sales materials.

Ooops, they explicitly say they can use your stuff for marketing materials.  Oh, well, I guess there aren’t many safe places anymore.

Is it just me, or does anyone else think about this stuff for licensing in their daily life?