January « 2008 « Luis Villa

January, 2008

wesabe ‘data bill of rights’

Wesabe’s Marc Hedlund is speaking at the Princeton Cloud Computing seminar I’m at. Their ‘data bill of rights’:

This Data Bill of Rights is our promise to you.

You can export and/or delete your data from Wesabe whenever you want.

Your data is your data, not ours. Our job is to help you understand and act on your data.

We’ll keep all of your data online and accessible for as long as you have an account. No “archive access” charges.

Any data you want us to keep private, we will.

If a question comes up not covered by these rights, we will answer it remembering that your data belongs to you.

Interesting. My intuition is that this is a really good start in the right direction for web apps; he himself notes, though, that it isn’t legally binding. They are considering doing that- will be very interesting to see that if/when it happens.

forfacebook / misc. — No Comments
12
Jan 08

lent slideshow remote?

I can’t find my beloved slideshow remote. To the best of my recollection, I haven’t used it/seen it since the summer. Did I accidentally lend it to someone and not reclaim it? anyone? anyone? please? :/

law — 8 Comments
10
Jan 08

of oil platforms, performing, and other legal oddities

Thomas: so, I know nothing about French copyright law, so take with a grain of salt. But…

Several years ago now¹ Dave and I were looking at a Novell slide deck which had a copyright slide. The copyright slide said that you couldn’t copy the slide deck. (Duh.) Couldn’t modify the slide deck. (Duh.) Couldn’t… perform the slide deck. Dave and I, at this point, break down laughing, picturing someone on a stage declaiming the deck in a faux-Shakespearean voice, or perhaps as modern dance. Couldn’t for the life of us figure out why someone would be concerned about the deck being performed.

Fast forward to copyright class last spring. Turns out that copyright holders in the US have the exclusive rights to (among other things):

(4) … to perform the copyrighted work publicly;

17 USC 106

So, even though it didn’t strictly make sense when describing a slide deck, the lawyers had wanted to make sure that they kept all their rights- they didn’t want to leave out performance and suggest that ‘well, you can’t copy, but you can perform.’²

I’d bet that French copyright law has a similar clause mentioning oil platforms, perhaps because at some point petrochemical companies were violating copyrights on oil platforms outside of national waters, or something like that… and the lawyers who put together the legalese in your DVD said ‘we want to make sure we cover all the bases’ and… that thing resulted.

at least three.. god, that makes me feel old [↩]
This is not Novell-specific; since Dave pointed this out, I’ve noticed the same language a lot of places. [↩]

misc. — 4 Comments
8
Jan 08

on robert on obama

dude: of course Obama is nuanced like that. If he’d argued any other way at Chicago Law, he’d have woken up in bed next to a bloody copy of some Posner text. If he was lucky. If he was unlucky, he’d wake up in bed next to bloody copies of all the Posner texts.

(Slighly more seriously, someone makes the same point when discussing the supposed Obama ‘waffle’ on Iraq.)

design / software — 10 Comments
7
Jan 08

almost-post-vacation software playing/lazyweb/misc.

I still have one more week of vacation, which means I’ve been starting to play a bit with software to get my brain off law for a while. Some notes:

lazyweb: as previously mentioned, I’ve got a remote control which, to the computer, looks like a keyboard. For an upcoming project I’d like to remap the keys (make the current pgup button ‘n’, pgdown ‘p’, etc.), ideally from a script (so that I can easily turn it off and on) or perhaps from a hotplug event. Still need to figure out how to do that; any pointers welcome.
firefox: for a while I’ve been using Kiwi Cloak to modify my web-surfing habits (Greg, you might want to check it out) I’ve spent a tiny bit of time modifying it; it is now an XPI (so I can activate/deactivate it separately from the rest of greasemonkey) and forwards to my tasklist when I try to enter a verboten site.
Tracks: I installed Tracks trunk on my server. I’ve been using the last stable release since some time before law school, and like it a lot. Trunk is more of the same goodness, now with a tickler, which is spectacularly awesome. (Reminder: if you’re working on an alternative file manager, you should really read Getting Things Done and build something that works like that.)
opensearch: spent a couple hours (during the Clemson-UNC game) yesterday figuring out how to add opensearch to altlaw.org. Still not very discoverable, even in FFox 3, but hopefully will be a nice touch for altlaw when it goes live.
apple: I went to apple store yesterday to buy a new computer for my mom. The store was packed. It is mindblowing how good their industrial hardware design is- the new keyboard will probably end up following other Ives work into MOMA’s design collection. How is it that no other PC manufacturer has figured out that people want good design and are willing to pay a premium for it? Are they really all that margin obssessed that they can’t figure out that there is a luxury business out there waiting to be seized? (Leopard was unimpressive, other than Time Machine; have already had to hard reboot once in less than a day’s use.)

Back to law a week from today, after (with?) a one-day stop at the Princeton Cloud Computing Workshop. Schedule for the semester looks to be Corporations, E-Commerce, Privacy, Advanced Copyrights, and Telecommunications, but I may tweak it.

Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.