The rise and fall of the independent developer – Craig Hockenberry, furbo.org, July 2011
Either by patent or copyright infringement, developers are finding this new cost of litigation to be onerous. The scary part is that these infringements can happen with any part of our products or websites: things that you’d never imagine being a violation of someone else’s intellectual property. It feels like coding in a mine field. From our experience, it’s entirely possible that all the revenue for a product can be eaten up by legal fees.
And, of course, only large companies and publishers can bear these costs. My fear is that It’s only a matter of time before developers find the risks and expenses prohibitive and retreat to the safety of a larger organization. We’ll be going back to square one.
Legally speaking, think before you blog – David Ardia, O’Reilly Radar, May 2011
Online, people bring sets of conversational norms that you might apply when you’re sitting across the table from someone and drinking a beer with them. This speech is not ephemeral, it’s not constrained — it reaches to all corners of the world, and it is for the most part permanent. It means you have to make sure that what you’re writing or saying is what you mean to say, and that you have support for what you’re saying if it relates to factual information. (Be clear of the difference between statements of opinion and statements of fact)
…in the context of this blog, the use of those terms in combination with other reporting on the blog made some of the statements seem like statements of fact. The court refused to dismiss the case outright on that basis. So, context really matters.
The Officer Who Posted Too Much on MySpace – NYTimes, Mar 2009
“You have your Internet persona, and you have what you actually do on the street,” Officer Ettienne said on Tuesday. “What you say on the Internet is all bravado talk, like what you say in a locker room.” …Officer Ettienne said he is now being careful to mask his identity on the Web and that he has curbed his tongue because of the acquittal. “I feel it’s partially my fault,” he said. “It paints a picture of a person who could be overly aggressive. You put that together, it’s reasonable doubt in anybody’s mind.”
Warping court memories with subtle suggestions – Mind Hacks, May 2008
some people were asked how fast the cars were travelling when they “smashed” into each other, others how fast when they “bumped” into each other, others how fast when they “contacted” with each other, and so on. (The answers ranged from 31.8 – 40.8 miles per hour)
Guantánamo makes us all less safe – George Monbiot, Guardian News, May 08
All evidence obtained in Guantánamo, and in the CIA’s other detention centres and secret prisons, is by definition unreliable, because it is extracted with the help of coercion and torture. Torture is notorious for producing false confessions, as people will say anything to make it stop. The other possibility is that the men who became involved in armed conflict after their release had not in fact been involved in any prior fighting, but were radicalised by their detention. The accounts of people released from Guantánamo describe treatment that would radicalise almost anyone. As a senior official at the US Defense Intelligence Agency says, “maybe the guy who goes into Guantánamo was a farmer who got swept along and did very little. He’s going to come out a fully fledged jihadist.”
In reading the histories of Guantánamo, and of the kidnappings, extrajudicial detention and torture the US government (helped by the United Kingdom) has pursued around the world, two things become clear. The first is that these practices do not supplement effective investigation and prosecution; they replace them. The second is that far from protecting innocent lives, this process is likely to deliver further atrocities. Even if you put the ethics of such treatment to one side, it is surely evident that it makes the world more dangerous.
Gilberto Gil, Minister of Culture for Brazil – talking at Google Zeitgeist, May 2008
The 21st century technologies represent a huge challenge to regulations. The revolution generated by the convergence of digital technologies obliges us to reinvent the way we do almost everything. I believe that anybody with public responsibility should look into the digital distribution of Intellectual Property as the most direct and powerful way of democratizing knowledge in the history of mankind. But instead we see almost every formal institution insisting on bluntly calling the digital distribution “Piracy”.
Links
- Introduction to copyright law – MIT OpenCourseWare
