Ethics: September 2008 Archive Page

Via Crooked Timber and BoingBoing:

Thomson Reuters demands $10 million and an injunction to stop George Mason University from distributing its new Web browser application, Zotero software, an open-source format that allows users to convert Reuters' EndNote Software. Reuters claims George Mason is violating its license agreement and destroying the EndNote customer base. (Courthouse News)

So, putting this into context... if I, through the sweat of my own brow, manually enter hundreds of bibliographical citations into EndNote, the owners of EndNote are telling me that I can't use a third-party tool in order to convert that information (that I, myself, entered) into a different format.

Kotaku reports:

Is it finally game over for Florida lawyer and violent video game opponent Jack Thompson? Judgment has been entered in the case that started last year and came to a head when Judge Dava Tunis recommended permanent disbarment for the bombastic, showboating law man. The court has approved the report and has ordered that JT is officially disbarred as of 30 days from today.

The technical term is "deep packet inspection," a process by which universities can examine the contents of electronic files that pass back and forth on their networks to see if they contain copyrighted material like the latest M.I.A. single or an episode of Gossip Girl. It's the equivalent of requiring institutions to steam open and read every letter that passes through the campus mail. It's also expensive, slows down the entire network, and won't actually work, because the small number of students who are responsible for the most egregious piracy also tend to be the students with the technical know-how needed to stay three steps ahead of whatever new filtering mechanisms the university might devise.

The entertainment industry insists that it doesn't necessarily want to go this way, but that's obviously a lie. Earlier this year, it supported legislation in Illinois and Tennessee that would have required colleges to implement "technology-based deterrents" to piracy if they received more than a certain number of infringement notices. Around the same time, colleges across the country began seeing a 20-fold increase in the number of infringement notices they received.. When colleges protested the new burden, the RIAA said their past voluntary cooperation meant they were legally obligated to comply in the future. (Inside Higher Ed)

Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's private Yahoo e-mail account was hacked, and some of its contents posted on the internet Wednesday. (Wired)

Was Palin's personal account fair game because she has been accused of using her personal account to conduct public business? If there really is damning evidence in that account, and a judge delivers a search warrant, I'm sure that Yahoo can pull the whole thing from a backup tape, even if Palin has deleted the account.

Seton Hill's e-mail servers go down every night from 2 to about 5:30, and I'm sorry to say that I'm often up that late, so I often use my Yahoo account when I am contacting other professors for research projects.  For along time my Yahoo account was much better at blocking spam than my university account, so I always use my Yahoo account to sign up for subscription-only content. 

I'm generally reluctant to use any e-mail account to give out grades or adjudicate disputes between student editors, and there's a boilerplate legalistic disclaimer that we're supposed to append to all our messages.  (I tack on that message where I explicitly say something about a grade or a student's performance; I don't add it to routine replies such as "Thanks for telling me how much you enjoyed my website.")

I'm looking for a current event that will be of interest to my "Writing for the Internet" students, and I wonder if this will fit the bill. But it might be a little too early in the course... we've had a brief unit on e-mail and we're talking about smileys now, but we're mostly focusing on hand-coding HTML.  Today we spent a whole class period on basic file management, since most of these point-and-clickers had never heard terms like "subdirectory," and I notice that once I start asking students to post their online work in directories ("JoeStudent/project1: and "JoeStudent/project2") there's often a bit of backsliding in the confidence level and an uptick in the tension level.

Well, I'll see how the media machine treats this story.

Thanks, Karissa, for sending this collection of reasons why it makes sense to be careful when you post photos online..

5. Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum

What do you do with a drunken pirate? Throw her in the brig--or, if you're Millersville University, deny her a teaching degree. That's what happened to Stacey Snyder, a then-27-year-old student teacher who posted a self portrait to her MySpace page under the caption "drunk pirate," even though it was not clear from the photo exactly what liquid was in her plastic cup. The Pennsylvania-based university decided the picture was "unprofessional" enough to rescind Snyder's degree, just days before it was to be awarded in May 2006. Snyder sued the university in federal court, claiming it violated her First Amendment rights (not to mention, of course, her Right to Paaaaar-tay). As of publication date of this story, that suit is still active.

Karissa also sends a story that notes YouTube is relying on its users to police its site for inappropriate videos. Every 5 mintes, 13 new hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube.

Groklaw has a good analysis of the recent Harry Potter Lexicon smackdown. Fair use good, too much verbatim copying bad.

The fact is, Rowling and her editor led the defendant on with praise of his website work, such that there was a suggestion by him that he might be the editor of the official encyclopedia, a suggestion that was turned down. Her prior praise of his fan site weighed against her. But she did tell him he had no role as her editor, and he went ahead with his own book anyway, with some marketing that the judge found misleading. So the question was, is it fair use? It certainly could have been, since a copyright owner can't control transformative derivative works totally, but where the defendant failed was in the how of it, how he went about it.

The impression I get from the Order is that if he'd been less of a fan and copied less and written more of his own words instead, it would have worked out better for him. The court, despite finding against fair use, found the defendant at the time had a reasonable belief that it was fair, and that shows me how close the call was, but in analyzing the four factors courts use for fair use determinations case by case, this judge decided it didn't pass ultimately.

But he managed to do so without, in my view, damaging the field for transformative fair use works. Let me show you what I mean. You'll see how carefully the judge annotates his ruling with prior case law, and if you wish to understand his decision, you really would have to read all the citations, because that is where the judge tells you why he decided each element.

This article should be required reading for all aspiring writers and professionals -- not just women.

I have spent too much time being rattled by terse e-mail from editors, agents who have told me that I'd never get a book deal, and bosses who have berated me as not being "detail-oriented." I think that in order to break through any kind of glass ceiling, or simply to get through the day, you have to become impervious to the daily gruffness that's a part of any job.

I used to think that perfection was the pathway to success. Not so, according to women I have interviewed who have reached the apex of their professions. Rather, it can lead to paralysis. Women, I have found, can let perfectionism stop them from speaking up or taking risks. For men, especially if they are thick-skinned, the thought of someone telling them "no" tends not to be viewed as earth-shattering.

One tactic I've found useful in getting over the perfectionist tendency is a shock therapy called soliciting feedback. Not only does it demystify what your boss thinks about you, but it also gives you the data to become a more valuable employee.

The other dose of shock therapy I've undergone is reprogramming my brain to think that, yes, girls do brag. I've indoctrinated myself with the idea that my job is a two-part process. One part is actually doing the work and the second part is talking about it, preferably in bottom-line terms. --Hannah Seligson