Internet Archive Legal Faces Woes

Kate Knibbs explains the Internet Archive's legal troubles .

-DD

Removing Photos From Online Real Estate Sites

David Neild explains how to delete your home photos from online real estate sites like Zillow.

-DD











Random Home

Lesson Sharing Sites and Intellectual Property

Stephen Sawchuk reviews the legal rights teachers can surrender by posting to lesson-sharing sites . Sawchuk provides exerpts from various site licenses, some of which transfer the right of sale to hosting site.

Sawchuk notes that it is still unclear who ownes a teacher's lesson:

The 1909 [copyright] law establishing U.S. copyright policy made employers the owner of employee work products and carved out a special exemption for teachers. But in what some suspect might have been a drafting error, Congress deleted that exemption when it rewrote the law in 1976. (Section "Who Owns A Lesson?" para. 5)

To quote Sawchuk's conclusion: "In other words, dull and uninspiring though it is: Read the fine print."

-DD

Brand Development

Bradford Shellhammer provides insights into creating a company name and logo for a startup.

-DD

Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement and the Freedom of Information

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted a video on the Trans Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement (TPP).

-DD

 

Intellectual Property

John Villasenor makes a plea for Intellectual Property law to be an element of university curricula. If students are going to be taught to develop new innovations, they should also be taught how to benefit from these new technologies and artistic works.

-DD

Intellectual Property

Stacey Hollenbeck raises the question of who owns the intellectual property created by student work. This question was raised when the Prince George County Board of Education considered claiming ownership of all student and faculty generated intellectual property. An energetic comment stream results to Hollenbeck's post.

-DD

The Case Against Patents

Boldrin and Levine are economists who have summarized the Case Against Patents.

-DD

Google Removes Over One Million Pages Per Month

ComputerWorld reporter Jaikumar Vijayan reports that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is complaining that "Google Piracy Policies Are Lacking." Quoting Vijayan:

• According to Google, Microsoft or its representatives have asked Google to remove more than 2.5 million URLs, or a median of 48,700 URLs per week, from its search engine results since July 2011.
• The next highest requester was NBC Universal, which asked Google to remove about 1 million URLs over the same period.
• The RIAA requested that some 416,000 URLs be blocked during that time.
• In all, a total of about 2,400 copyright owners have put in URL removal requests covering about more than 24,300 domains since last July.
• Google noted than it complied with 97% of takedown requests at an average response time of 10 hours or less.

Vijayan notes that the RIAA uses statistics from Google's Tranparency Report listing copyright removal requests. The report lists the major requesting agencies and offending Web domains.

Google also maintains reports on governmental requests for user data, which includes statistics on Google's compliance rate for each nation, and statistics on the number and timing of Google traffic from each major nation.

-DD