Costas Recursos’ Blog

Someone using the nick “light” popped into the WMR chatroom the other day and asked if he could sue a forum owner for violating his copyright by refusing to remove a post containing his work. After playing a game of 50 questions to ascertain exactly what the issue is and is not, the answer to light’s question is a pretty firm “No”.

The Sitch…

Light voluntarily joined a forum and, by doing so, agreed to the Terms of Service of that site. Then he voluntarily wrote a post and put it up on the forum. Now for some reason, that post is causing him some level of grief (for reasons he refused to share), and he wants the post removed from the forum. He contacted the forum owner and requested to have the post deleted and the forum owner declined. Light then drafted his own Cease and Desist letter and emailed it to the forum owner. The forum owner then banned him. So now, Light is planning to sue the forum owner for copyright infringement.

The Analysis…

There is no copyright infringement here. Read the Terms of Service or Terms of Use on most forums or services where users contribute content and you’ll see that the forum owners tend to like to have the right to re-use, edit, re-purpose, etc. things that gets posted to their site. “But I have automatic copyright protection!” Yes, but only until you agree to give up some of your rights by clicking on the “I have read and agree to the terms….” button. This is why it’s important to READ things before agreeing to them or signing anything.

Example Terms Of Service from a Forum

From WebProWorld’s Legal Notice…
User Submissions Not Privileged
Any material, information or other communication you transmit or post to this website (”Submissions”) will be considered non-confidential and non proprietary. iEntry shall have no obligations with respect to your Submissions. iEntry and its designees will be free to copy, disclose, distribute, incorporate and otherwise use your Submissions and all data, images, sounds, text and other things embodied therein for any and all commercial or non-commercial purposes. You are prohibited from posting or transmitting to or from this website any unlawful, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic or other material that would violate any applicable law.

I suspect the homemade Cease & Desist Demand didn’t win Light any points with the forum owner either. In general, you don’t email C&D letters. Additionally, (unless you are a lawyer or you’re using a professionally written boilerplate) you don’t write your own C&D letters. A poorly written C&D may as well be scrawled in cheap wax crayon on the back of a sheet torn from a spiral notebook and signed, “Rabid, Litigation-Happy Nut Who Is Too Cheap To Pay An Attorney”.

Remember, C&Ds generally don’t have any teeth anyway. Unless they look and feel like they came from a large, serious company with the means and desire to actually follow through with threats of legal action, Cease & Desist letters aren’t worth the paper upon which they are written. If they’re sent solely electronically they are worth even less.

Finally, Light’s situation should serve as a reminder to everyone to not post things online that they might regret later. On the Internets, things have a way of not ever going away.

Silicon Prairie Social 2, the TechCocktail of the burbs, is slated for Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at the same place it was held back in September (Mullen’s in Lisle). While the last social was jam packed, this one should be a little thinner due to the ban on active job seekers, recruiters and staffing agency types.

Initially, when I read that part of the announcement, I thought, “that is a great idea!” mostly because I end up getting talked to by recruiters all night long instead of talking to other people who have job-jobs. Apparently, Ron May said something in one of his copious newsletters about how awful the disenfranchisement of those groups is, but I didn’t really read it so I’m not going to attempt to craft a truly well written response. I’m sure if Ron shows up to this event I’ll end up hearing about it anyway.

My guess is the goal of the ban is to encourage more actual tech discussion, and also to limit the number of people who RSVP because the venue is not huge to begin with, and now that it’s winter and we can’t avail ourselves of the outdoor seating, the space will be even more limited than before. Also, the food ran out rather quickly last time and I’m going to attribute that to hungry job seekers as well.

At any rate, I’m looking forward to attending on the 24th to see how the new rules affect the atmosphere, crowd levels and overall utility of the event.

I want to say it was close to a year ago I posted a list of Firefox Plugins I couldn’t live without because our IT department was being mean about what I could and could not install on my machine and I needed to identify what I absolutely HAD to have versus things that are just nice to have.

Now that I’m in the process of setting up my new laptop, I’m availing myself of the opportunity to examine what I have installed on my desktop and deciding if the plugins and various programs I have are useful enough (or just plain used enough) to bother installing on the laptop. (Note to self: Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to go through the closet and do the same thing with clothes and shoes… seriously, when *was* the last time I even looked at that purple tweedy houndstooth suit?)

What Plugins Do I Have?
Here is what’s currently on the desktop. The desktop is the machine on which I am prone to installing all kinds of various crap, so the odds are I am stuff installed that I can’t even remember why I downloaded it. The plugins listed in bold not only made the cut and are being installed on the new baby, but would also make my list of “cannot live without”.

1. Colorzilla: I love this tool. When I’m working with picky designers who just MUST have a color exactly so, it completely takes the guess work out of finding the exact hex code.
2. DT Whois: Eh, I tend to use other tools or sites. This isn’t a bad plugin, I just don’t seem to ever use it.
3. Facebook Toolbar: I’m still on FB, just not as much lately — bitten by one too many werewolf-zombie-ninjas, you know?
4. Google Toolbar: There’s nothing this tells me that some of the other plugins don’t tell me.
5. Header Spy: Displays header info right at the bottom of the browser window as you’re meandering about the web. Very handy.
6. Live HTTP Headers: This is really helpful for seeing redirect codes.
7. Search Status: This one pops a little PageRank bar, an Alexa bar and a Compete bar onto the bottom of the browser window and automatically checks the domain/page you’re viewing. It’s cute. I like it.
8. SEO for Firefox: I feel lost and confused when I’m using machines that don’t have this installed. It highlights nofollowed links, collects all sorts of useful info about each SERP and displays it underneath the result right on the page. I could go on and on. Just go get it.
9. SEOpen: Similar to the SEO Book Plugin, so there is some redundancy, but I still like it and it’s going on the laptop.
10. Stumbleupon Toolbar: Makes my life easier. It stays.
11. Twitbin: I don’t even know why I installed this. I don’t think I ever used it.
12. Twitterfox: Keeps the busy-bodies at the office from noticing (and commenting about) how often I check Twitter
13. ViewRenderedSource: This is pretty neat if you like to view the source code. I don’t think words can do it justice, so go take a peek. It pretties up the code and just generally makes it easier to read.

If anyone has any other SEO or web development related plugins they can’t live without, please leave a comment and share!

Chris Avenir who is a student at Ryerson University is on the chopping block and facing expulsion for running an on line study group via Facebook. While it is not uncommon for students to be using technology that instructors do not know or understand, this is the first time that a Facebook study group has been put together where the leader of the group is looking at getting kicked out of school.

Yet students argue Facebook groups are simply the new study hall for the wired generation. Source: The Star

What looks like will actually get Chris expelled though is the wording used on the invitation and study group description.

But Neale admitted the invitation to the Facebook group may have been what landed them in trouble. It read: “If you request to join, please use the forms to discuss/post solutions to the chemistry assignments. Please input your solutions if they are not already posted.” Source: The Star

This is not the first time that wording has hung someone out to dry. One of the key reasons that the Kazza P2P system was found “infringing” was because of internal e-mails that showed in their marketing programs that they were pushing the infringement idea as marketing. There are other companies that have worked on the same concept in the P2P world that are also DOA because of the “inducement to infringe” issue.

While this might have worked out great if they stayed off line, no one would know or care, and it would have been more traditional, everyone on their own in a study hall, the school should be looking at what was actually posted in the room. Schools go to great lengths to prevent cheating, even down to altering the questions and making sure that everyone gets an individualized test at the onset of the testing.

Facebook study groups though turn the idea of a traditional study hall on their head and shakes out the establishment a bit. There probably was nothing wrong with the Facebook study hall at all, it was how it was marketed and approached. Schools are interesting, and while they have struggled to deal with the P2P generation, how they deal with the Internet MySpace Facebook Bebo generation should prove to be equally disruptive.

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Georg Holzer whips out the camcorder at Mixx08 to catch Steve Ballmer yelling “Web Developers” in parody of his famous “developers” rant on stage at Microsoft. This simple act, caught on camcorder and available to watch here might be signaling not just a new direction for Microsoft, it also signals new direction for Microsoft in an increasingly Internet driven cloud computing environment.

There will always be a need for an operating system at the local level, on the individuals PC or on the server. We don’t literally “boot to the Internet” yet (although that is probably coming). We still need to run local applications to bring up our window on the world. All copies of web browsers are still local, meaning they rely on some interface between the hardware and the browser. While that is slowly changing in favor of mixed desktop web applications, we are still not there yet.

While the Internet has changed the world in often surprising and unexpected ways, we are still working with the computing interface that was developed back in the 1970’s at Xerox PARC park. With the interface well over 30 years old now (which is ancient in computing years) the focus on “Web Developers” by Steve Ballmer is a significant change in culture let alone attitude.

Famously starting with “The Internet will never go anywhere” from Bill Gates, through to the rant yesterday for “Web Developers” maybe that message has finally sunk into the Microsoft management hierarchy. The Internet has turned into more than a fad, it has turned into a way of life, a way of communications that transcends barriers like the “Great Firewall of China” or the recent debacle with Wikileaks.

Companies are quickly becoming if they are not already geographically diverse companies where teams seldom meet in person, where key players can be half way around the world. Startups can happen with a weekend of coding and 12,000 dollars max. Small startups thrive on the ecologies that social networking sites provide, audio and video delivery have been so transformed that the older rooted in physical products companies are falling apart and desperately trying to stay alive.

Microsoft needs to get this message not just at the top but all the way down to the lowest life form inhabiting a cube somewhere on campus. The Internet is where it is at today. While this does not mean that it will not be the same tomorrow, Microsoft needs to start leading the pack and moving well beyond the idea of “web developers”, they need to be working on what is next, and start screaming.

“Mobile Developers” and “Internet booting computing” and their fantastic table top computing system that is on the “we want one now please” list. Frankly, they need a leapfrog of innovation here, but that means shedding decades of culture, thousands of management positions, and as Mini-Microsoft states “Let’s slim down Microsoft into a lean, mean, efficient customer pleasing profit making machine!”.

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Google finds itself in a row with the pentagon over “street view” where “by accident” Google street view went around fort Sam Huston taking street level pictures. This is not the first time that street view has been in trouble, but this is the first time that the pentagon has gotten involved. Like they need more problems after the puppy marines video that has disgusted a large segment of the population.

View Larger Map

This picture is what will get everyone in trouble. The interesting part to all this, is like all attempts at shutting down information on the Internet, this one is going to be discussed, make the news, and drive yet more traffic and more notice on the idea that someone for whatever reason is trying to censor information on the Internet.

What is laughable on this one is that the Pentagon provides their own PDF map of Fort Sam Huston right here.

Controversy seems to dog Google Street view, with sites like Mashable showing off the top 15 Google street view easter egg’s.

Thank you to the Register for providing irony and background information on this article.

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Earth to Google, I am not a virus or spyware. I’ve been using your services for years, I have deleted all of my Google cookies and answered your captcha several times in the last few days, yet you still insist on not processing my search requests. Since most of my searches are done from the search field in Firefox it is very easy for me to switch to another search engine. Which I’ve now done.

I realize that I’m just one lone user in a sea of millions, so my switch to using Yahoo for search is unlikely to make a dent for you. For me though this is a big deal. I’ve relied on your services for years and hate the idea that I won’t be able to continue to use them for years to come. You better not screw up Gmail or Gcal, exporting all that data to another service would not be fun.

At some point in the future I’ll be checking back, hopefully by then you’ll have gotten over your “Joseph is a virus” obsession. Because I’m sure there are lots of spyware applications out there looking for city boundary maps of the city of Sandy, Utah.

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I managed to break this blog for awhile this evening, I was moving things around on the server. Everything should be back to normal now.

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