Group items tagged

President Obama is facing great challenges as he takes office and may have made a hasty decision to close Guantanamo Bay without addressing all of the repercussions, Sen. John McCain told CNN's Larry King Thursday night."> text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Harvard Medical School is backing off a new student policy that would have restricted interaction with the news media after students complained it would chill their ability to talk about current issues in medicine, school officials said Tuesday.

Google's Public Policy Blog - their views on government, policy and politics

Washington: Oct 21, 2010.This article, written by Eliza Krigman published in the Congress Daily/P.M. Krigman is an education reporter for top political and public policy magazines she is based in the UK. This article discusses how currently rights holders of companies and many government leaders are determined to crack down on Internet piracy through stricter enforcement. Public-interest groups argue that such rules can jeopardize free speech, particularly in countries without the types of safeguard measures found in American law and are angry. The possibility of using copyright law to justify censorship drew attention recently when the New York Times exposed how the Russian government used Microsoft to suppress political dissidents. This issue is very relevant to everyone whether you are a right's holder or user or a copyrighted products. LINK:http://techdailydose.nationaljournal.com/2010/10/ip-enforcement-policies-stir-c.php

"Computer scientists and policy experts say that ... innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person's identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number."

Embedding Youtube videos into your website can be a dangerous thing, as it might not be you that's uploaded a copyright infringing video, but it can be you that accidentally embeds a Youtube clip that is infringing made by someone else, into your website. The law against this is: Any time you incorporate a copyrighted work into a site without the rightsholders' consent, you're potentially liable to be sued. Because people are seeing that on your website, it doesn't matter if it's on Youtube or not, or whether you made it or not, you embedded it somewhere else. It also does not matter whether the person knew it was copyright infringement or not. If an innocent embedder were to be taken to court, they could still be fined up to $30,000. However, because of Youtube's copyright infringement policy, it can remove the copyrighted work from Youtube and the websites it was embedded in. Also, there would be little gain for the rightsholder if the person with the website they sued couldn't afford a lawsuit, which would hardly be worth their time. Also, there are precautions that the embedder should take as well, to ensure that even if they do post copyrighted material, they won't really be potential candidates to be sued.

In between the Dr Pepper, Doritos and Bud Light commercials airing during the Super Bowl on Feb. 7, one first-time advertiser will be pushing God's product line. Focus on the Family will air a 30-second "life- and family-affirming" television spot, featuring University of Florida star quarterback Tim Tebow and his mother, Pam, during the coverage.

"How Robber Barons hijacked the "Victorian Internet" Ars revisits those wild and crazy days when Jay Gould ruled the telegraph and Associated Press reporters helped fix presidential elections. Is government supervision really the worst thing that can happen to a communications network?"