2nd Cir. Affirms That Creation of Full-Text Searchable Database of Works Is Fair Use | ... - 0 views
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The fair use doctrine permits the unauthorized digitization of copyrighted works in order to create a full-text searchable database, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled June 10.Affirming summary judgment in favor of a consortium of university libraries, the court also ruled that the fair use doctrine permits the unauthorized conversion of those works into accessible formats for use by persons with disabilities, such as the blind.
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The dispute is connected to the long-running conflict between Google Inc. and various authors of books that Google included in a mass digitization program. In 2004, Google began soliciting the participation of publishers in its Google Print for Publishers service, part of what was then called the Google Print project, aimed at making information available for free over the Internet.Subsequently, Google announced a new project, Google Print for Libraries. In 2005, Google Print was renamed Google Book Search and it is now known simply as Google Books. Under this program, Google made arrangements with several of the world's largest libraries to digitize the entire contents of their collections to create an online full-text searchable database.The announcement of this program triggered a copyright infringement action by the Authors Guild that continues to this day.
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Turning to the fair use question, the court first concluded that the full-text search function of the Hathitrust Digital Library was a “quintessentially transformative use,” and thus constituted fair use. The court said:the result of a word search is different in purpose, character, expression, meaning, and message from the page (and the book) from which it is drawn. Indeed, we can discern little or no resemblance between the original text and the results of the HDL full-text search.There is no evidence that the Authors write with the purpose of enabling text searches of their books. Consequently, the full-text search function does not “supersede[ ] the objects [or purposes] of the original creation.”Turning to the fourth fair use factor—whether the use functions as a substitute for the original work—the court rejected the argument that such use represents lost sales to the extent that it prevents the future development of a market for licensing copies of works to be used in full-text searches.However, the court emphasized that the search function “does not serve as a substitute for the books that are being searched.”
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Beyond jQuery: JavaScript tools for the HTML5 generation | HTML5 - InfoWorld - 0 views
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Good article covering lots of JavaScript Libraries and their specific uses. excerpt: Over drinks, one person proclaimed, "No one programs in JavaScript, they just string together jQuery calls." This statement is certainly not true, but like a hand grenade, it gets close enough to make its point. jQuery sure seems to be everywhere, and with good reason: Its creators took all of the neat ideas from libraries like Prototype, Dojo, and Yahoo's YUI, then turned them into something that was just a tad easier to use. When jQuery nurtured fertile plug-in culture, the library became irreplaceable. One seemingly random estimate claimed that at least 70 percent of JavaScript is jQuery. While there is probably no scientific way to make such a blanket statement, the fact that someone would try is good enough.
Apple, Microsoft Challenged By Streaming Software Plan - Cloud - 0 views
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Very interesting the way JavaScript Libraries are continuing to challenge Native Code for Web Application dominance. excerpt: "The code library, ORBX.js, can be thought of as a cloud-based alternative to Google's Native Client technology. It permits Linux, OS X and Windows applications to run on remote servers and to be presented in a Web browser." "With ORBX.js, native code and legacy applications can be hosted in the cloud (e.g. Amazon EC2), and stream interactive graphics, 3D rendering or low latency video to a standard HTML5 page without using plugins or native code, or even the video tag (which, like Google NaCL,is vendor specific - ORBX.js works on all five major browsers)," explained Otoy founder and CEO Jules Urbach in an email. "The video codec created for ORBX.js can decode 1080p60 at a quality on par with H.264, using only JavaScript." "With ORBX.js and a cloud service provider, you could conceivably run Value's PC Steam client on an Apple iMac or Google Chromebook. You could run Autodesk 3DS Max 2014 on an Android Nexus 7 tablet. You could run a big budget, graphically demanding game title like Left 4 Dead 2 in a Web browser, without any plugins, Flash, Java, NaCL or other supporting technology."
Overview of apps for Office 2013 - 0 views
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MSOffice is now "Web ready". The Office apps are capable of running HTML5-JavaScript apps based on a simple Web page model. Think of this as the Office apps being fitted with a browser, and developers writing extensions to run in that browser using HTML5 and JavaScript. Microsoft provides an Office.js library and, a developer "Web App/Page Creator" Visual Basic toolset called "Napa" Office 365 Development Tools. Lots of project templates. Key MSOffice apps are Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Develop for Office or SharePoint. Apps can be hosted on any Web Server. excerpt: Microsoft Office 2013 Developer Environment with HTML5, XML and JavaScript. Office.js library. "his documentation is preliminary and is subject to change. Published: July 16, 2012 Learn how to use apps for Office to extend your Office 2013 Preview applications. This new Office solution type, apps for Office, built on web technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, REST, OData, and OAuth. It provides new experiences within Office applications by surfacing web technologies and cloud services right within Office documents, email messages, meeting requests, and appointments. Applies to: Excel Web App Preview | Exchange 2013 Preview | Outlook 2013 Preview | Outlook Web App Preview | Project Professional 2013 Preview | Word 2013 Preview | Excel 2013 Preview In this article What is an app for Office? Anatomy of an app for Office Types of apps for Office What can an app for Office do? Understanding the runtime Development basics Create your first app for Office Publishing basics Scenarios Components of an app for Office solution Software requirements"
PATRIOT Act spying programs on death watch - Seung Min Kim and Kate Tummarello - POLITICO - 0 views
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With only days left to act and Rand Paul threatening a filibuster, Senate Republicans remain deeply divided over the future of the PATRIOT Act and have no clear path to keep key government spying authorities from expiring at the end of the month. Crucial parts of the PATRIOT Act, including a provision authorizing the government’s controversial bulk collection of American phone records, first revealed by Edward Snowden, are due to lapse May 31. That means Congress has barely a week to figure out a fix before before lawmakers leave town for Memorial Day recess at the end of the next week. Story Continued Below The prospects of a deal look grim: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Thursday night proposed just a two-month extension of expiring PATRIOT Act provisions to give the two sides more time to negotiate, but even that was immediately dismissed by critics of the program.
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A must-read. The major danger is that the the Senate could pass the USA Freedom Act, which has already been passed by the House. Passage of that Act, despite its name, would be bad news for civil liberties. Now is the time to let your Congress critters know that you want them to fight to the Patriot Act provisions expire on May 31, without any replacement legislation. Keep in mind that Section 502 does not apply just to telephone metadata. It authorizes the FBI to gather without notice to their victims "any tangible thing", specifically including as examples "library circulation records, library patron lists, book sales records, book customer lists, firearms sales records, tax return records, educational records, or medical records containing information that would identify a person." The breadth of the section is illustrated by telephone metadata not even being mentioned in the section. NSA going after your medical records souand far fetched? Former NSA technical director William Binney says they're already doing it: "Binney alludes to even more extreme intelligence practices that are not yet public knowledge, including the collection of Americans' medical data, the collection and use of client-attorney conversations, and law enforcement agencies' "direct access," without oversight, to NSA databases." https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/05/seeing-the-stasi-through-nsa-eyes/ So please, contact your Congress critters right now and tell them to sunset the Patriot Act NOW. This will be decided in the next few days so the sooner you contact them the better.
InfoQ: ECMAScript 5 released - 0 views
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ECMAScript 5 was released this week (pdf), generally known as JavaScript™, bringing advances to the basic libraries whilst introducing stricter runtime modes to aid with identifying and removing common coding errors.
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The additions of a standard JSON parsing mechanism and strict mode will be of great benefit to developers, with the potential to translate into smaller libraries for Prototype and other extension libraries required. Parsing ISO dates from a JSON stream now becomes much more portable than before, and looks likely to be the de facto standard for representing dates in the future. Lastly, since this is backwardly compatible and takes cues from existing libraries like Prototype, it is likely that developers and web browsers alike will take to the new features of JavaScript in the near future.
Modernizr: A JavaScript Library for Open Web HTML5-CSS3 technologies - 1 views
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Modernizr is a small and simple JavaScript library that helps you take advantage of emerging web technologies (CSS3, HTML 5) while still maintaining a fine level of control over older browsers that may not yet support these new technologies. Modernizr uses feature detection to test the current browser against upcoming features like rgba(), border-radius, CSS Transitions and many more. These are currently being implemented across browsers and with Modernizr you can start using them right now, with an easy way to control the fallbacks for browsers that don't yet support them. Additionally, Modernizr creates a self-titled global JavaScript object which contains properties for each feature; if a browser supports it, the property will evaluate true and if not, it will be false. Lastly, Modernizr also adds support for styling and printing HTML5 elements. This allows you to use more semantic, forward-looking elements such as , and without having to worry about them not working in Internet Explorer. Another great catch by Marbux! He's on fire today.
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[Blush.] Should be mentioned that Modernizr comes with an MIT-BSD dual license. So compatible with both GPL and proprietary apps.
Why a JavaScript hater thinks everyone needs to learn JavaScript in the next year - O'R... - 1 views
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some extremely important game-changers: jQuery, JSON, Node.js, and HTML5.
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.js has the potential to revolutionize web development. It is a framework for building high performance web applications: applications that can respond very quickly and efficiently to a high volume of incoming requests.
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Google has started a revolution in JavaScript performance.
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OK, this article gets my vote as the most important read of the year. We all know that the the Web is the future of both computing and communications/connectivity. But wha tis the future of the Web? Uber coder Mike Loukides says it's JavaScript, and what a compelling case he builds. This is a must read. Key concepts are diigo highlighted :) excerpt: JavaScript has "grown up." I'm sure there are many JavaScript developers who would take issue with that judgement, and argue that JavaScript has been a capable, mature, and under-appreciated language all along. They may be right, though you can write any program in any complete programming language, including awful things like BASIC. What makes a language useful is some combination of the language's expressiveness and the libraries and tools available. JavaScript clearly passed the expressiveness barrier a long time ago, even if the ceremony required for creating objects is distasteful. But recently, we've seen some extremely important game-changers: jQuery, JSON, Node.js, and HTML5. JavaScript may have been a perfectly adequate language in the past, but these changes (and a few others that I'll point out) have made JavaScript a language that is essential for every developer to know. If there's one language you need to learn in the next year, it's JavaScript. Insightful comment: HTML5 is a JavaScript API, introducing new elements but significantly redefining ALL elements as objects or classes. Elements can be expressed with tags. Or, you can use DOM JavaScripting to create elements.
Thunderclap: Free Information from Space - 0 views
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Right now, only 40% of humanity can connect to the Internet. Even less than that have access to truly free, uncensored Internet. What this represents is an enormous gap in access to information. While the Internet is an amazing communication tool, it is also the largest library ever constructed. It grants access to anything from books, videos, courseware, news, and weather, to open source farm equipment or instructions on how to treat infection or prevent HIV from spreading. #ImagineIf everyone could have that information for free?On August 11, 2014, Outernet will make that library available from space for free for the first time. Help us tell the world.#ImagineIf everyone had any information they wanted - what would that world look like? What new inventions would be created or diseases cured? What would people read about if their governments no longer deprived them of their right to free information? Soon, we won't have to imagine.
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Right now, only 40% of humanity can connect to the Internet. Even less than that have access to truly free, uncensored Internet. What this represents is an enormous gap in access to information. While the Internet is an amazing communication tool, it is also the largest library ever constructed. It grants access to anything from books, videos, courseware, news, and weather, to open source farm equipment or instructions on how to treat infection or prevent HIV from spreading. #ImagineIf everyone could have that information for free?On August 11, 2014, Outernet will make that library available from space for free for the first time. Help us tell the world.#ImagineIf everyone had any information they wanted - what would that world look like? What new inventions would be created or diseases cured? What would people read about if their governments no longer deprived them of their right to free information?
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INFORMATION FOR THE WORLD FROM OUTER SPACE Unrestricted, globally accessible, broadcast data. Quality content from all over the Internet. Available to all of humanity. For free. Through satellite data broadcasting, Outernet is able to bypass censorship, ensure privacy, and offer a universally-accessible information service at no cost to global citizens. It's the modern version of shortwave radio, or BitTorrent from space.
Tell Congress: My Phone Calls are My Business. Reform the NSA. | EFF Action Center - 0 views
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The USA PATRIOT Act granted the government powerful new spying capabilities that have grown out of control—but the provision that the FBI and NSA have been using to collect the phone records of millions of innocent people expires on June 1. Tell Congress: it’s time to rethink out-of-control spying. A vote to reauthorize Section 215 is a vote against the Constitution.
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On June 5, 2013, the Guardian published a secret court order showing that the NSA has interpreted Section 215 to mean that, with the help of the FBI, it can collect the private calling records of millions of innocent people. The government could even try to use Section 215 for bulk collection of financial records. The NSA’s defenders argue that invading our privacy is the only way to keep us safe. But the White House itself, along with the President’s Review Board has said that the government can accomplish its goals without bulk telephone records collection. And the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board said, “We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which [bulk collection under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act] made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation.” Since June of 2013, we’ve continued to learn more about how out of control the NSA is. But what has not happened since June is legislative reform of the NSA. There have been myriad bipartisan proposals in Congress—some authentic and some not—but lawmakers didn’t pass anything. We need comprehensive reform that addresses all the ways the NSA has overstepped its authority and provides the NSA with appropriate and constitutional tools to keep America safe. In the meantime, tell Congress to take a stand. A vote against reauthorization of Section 215 is a vote for the Constitution.
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EFF has launched an email campagin to press members of Congress not to renew sectiion 215 of the Patriot Act when it expires on June 1, 2015. Sectjon 215 authorizes FBI officials to "make an application for an order requiring the production of *any tangible things* (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States person or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution." http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1861 The section has been abused to obtain bulk collecdtion of all telephone records for the NSA's storage and processing.But the section goes farther and lists as specific examples of records that can be obtained under section 215's authority, "library circulation records, library patron lists, book sales records, book customer lists, firearms sales records, tax return records, educational records, or medical records." Think of the NSA's voracious appetite for new "haystacks" it can store and search in its gigantic new data center in Utah. Then ask yourself, "do I want the NSA to obtain all of my personal data, store it, and search it at will?" If your anser is "no," you might consider visiting this page to send your Congress critters an email urging them to vote against renewal of section 215 and to vote for other NSA reforms listed in the EFF sample email text. Please do not procrastinate. Do it now, before you forget. Every voice counts.
Tech firms and privacy groups press for curbs on NSA surveillance powers - The Washingt... - 0 views
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The nation’s top technology firms and a coalition of privacy groups are urging Congress to place curbs on government surveillance in the face of a fast-approaching deadline for legislative action. A set of key Patriot Act surveillance authorities expire June 1, but the effective date is May 21 — the last day before Congress breaks for a Memorial Day recess. In a letter to be sent Wednesday to the Obama administration and senior lawmakers, the coalition vowed to oppose any legislation that, among other things, does not ban the “bulk collection” of Americans’ phone records and other data.
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We know that there are some in Congress who think that they can get away with reauthorizing the expiring provisions of the Patriot Act without any reforms at all,” said Kevin Bankston, policy director of New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, a privacy group that organized the effort. “This letter draws a line in the sand that makes clear that the privacy community and the Internet industry do not intend to let that happen without a fight.” At issue is the bulk collection of Americans’ data by intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency. The NSA’s daily gathering of millions of records logging phone call times, lengths and other “metadata” stirred controversy when it was revealed in June 2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The records are placed in a database that can, with a judge’s permission, be searched for links to foreign terrorists.They do not include the content of conversations.
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That program, placed under federal surveillance court oversight in 2006, was authorized by the court in secret under Section 215 of the Patriot Act — one of the expiring provisions. The public outcry that ensued after the program was disclosed forced President Obama in January 2014 to call for an end to the NSA’s storage of the data. He also appealed to Congress to find a way to preserve the agency’s access to the data for counterterrorism information.
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I omitted some stuff about opposition to sunsetting the provisions. They seem to forget, as does Obama, that the proponents of the FISA Court's expansive reading of section 215 have not yet come up with a single instance where 215-derived data caught a single terrorist or prevented a single act of terrorism. Which means that if that data is of some use, it ain't in fighting terrorism, the purpose of the section. Patriot Act § 215 is codified as 50 USCS § 1861, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1861 That section authorizes the FBI to obtain an iorder from the FISA Court "requiring the production of *any tangible things* (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items)." Specific examples (a non-exclusive list) include: the production of library circulation records, library patron lists, book sales records, book customer lists, firearms sales records, tax return records, educational records, or medical records containing information that would identify a person." The Court can order that the recipient of the order tell no one of its receipt of the order or its response to it. In other words, this is about way more than your telephone metadata. Do you trust the NSA with your medical records?
Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship | Berkman Center - 0 views
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On 7 November 2008, the directors of the law libraries at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Duke University, Georgetown University, Harvard University, New York University, Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, the University of Texas, and Yale University met in Durham, North Carolina at the Duke Law School. That meeting resulted in the "Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship," which calls for all law schools to stop publishing their journals in print format and to rely instead on electronic publication coupled with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in stable, open, digital formats.
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Particularly now, with growing financial pressures on law school budgets, ending print publication of law journals deserves serious consideration. Very few law journals receive enough in subscription income and royalties to cover their costs of operation. The Statement anticipates both that the costs for printing and mailing can be eliminated, and that law libraries can reduce their costs for subscribing to, processing, and preserving print journals. There are additional benefits in improving access to journals that are not now published in open access formats and in reducing paper consumption.
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Call to Action: We therefore urge every U.S. law school to commit to ending print publication of its journals and to making definitive versions of journals and other scholarship produced at the school immediately available upon publication in stable, open, digital formats, rather than in print. We also urge every law school to commit to keeping a repository of the scholarship published at the school in a stable, open, digital format. Some law schools may choose to use a shared regional online repository or to offer their own repositories as places for other law schools to archive the scholarship published at their school. Repositories should rely upon open standards for the archiving of works, as well as on redundant formats, such as PDF copies. We also urge law schools and law libraries to agree to and use a standard set of metadata to catalog each article to ensure easy online public indexing of legal scholarship. As a measure of redundancy, we also urge faculty members to reserve their copyrights to ensure that they too can make their own scholarship available in stable, open, digital formats. All law journals should rely upon the AALS model publishing agreement as a default and should respect author requests to retain copyrights in their scholarship.
Bulk Collection Under Section 215 Has Ended… What's Next? | Just Security - 0 views
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The first (and thus far only) roll-back of post-9/11 surveillance authorities was implemented over the weekend: The National Security Agency shuttered its program for collecting and holding the metadata of Americans’ phone calls under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. While bulk collection under Section 215 has ended, the government can obtain access to this information under the procedures specified in the USA Freedom Act. Indeed, some experts have argued that the Agency likely has access to more metadata because its earlier dragnet didn’t cover cell phones or Internet calling. In addition, the metadata of calls made by an individual in the United States to someone overseas and vice versa can still be collected in bulk — this takes place abroad under Executive Order 12333. No doubt the NSA wishes that this was the end of the surveillance reform story and the Paris attacks initially gave them an opening. John Brennan, the Director of the CIA, implied that the attacks were somehow related to “hand wringing” about spying and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) introduced a bill to delay the shut down of the 215 program. Opponents of encryption were quick to say: “I told you so.”
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But the facts that have emerged thus far tell a different story. It appears that much of the planning took place IRL (that’s “in real life” for those of you who don’t have teenagers). The attackers, several of whom were on law enforcement’s radar, communicated openly over the Internet. If France ever has a 9/11 Commission-type inquiry, it could well conclude that the Paris attacks were a failure of the intelligence agencies rather than a failure of intelligence authorities. Despite the passage of the USA Freedom Act, US surveillance authorities have remained largely intact. Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act — which is the basis of programs like PRISM and the NSA’s Upstream collection of information from Internet cables — sunsets in the summer of 2017. While it’s difficult to predict the political environment that far out, meaningful reform of Section 702 faces significant obstacles. Unlike the Section 215 program, which was clearly aimed at Americans, Section 702 is supposedly targeted at foreigners and only picks up information about Americans “incidentally.” The NSA has refused to provide an estimate of how many Americans’ information it collects under Section 702, despite repeated requests from lawmakers and most recently a large cohort of advocates. The Section 215 program was held illegal by two federal courts (here and here), but civil attempts to challenge Section 702 have run into standing barriers. Finally, while two review panels concluded that the Section 215 program provided little counterterrorism benefit (here and here), they found that the Section 702 program had been useful.
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There is, nonetheless, some pressure to narrow the reach of Section 702. The recent decision by the European Court of Justice in the safe harbor case suggests that data flows between Europe and the US may be restricted unless the PRISM program is modified to protect the information of Europeans (see here, here, and here for discussion of the decision and reform options). Pressure from Internet companies whose business is suffering — estimates run to the tune of $35 to 180 billion — as a result of disclosures about NSA spying may also nudge lawmakers towards reform. One of the courts currently considering criminal cases which rely on evidence derived from Section 702 surveillance may hold the program unconstitutional either on the basis of the Fourth Amendment or Article III for the reasons set out in this Brennan Center report. A federal district court in Colorado recently rejected such a challenge, although as explained in Steve’s post, the decision did not seriously explore the issues. Further litigation in the European courts too could have an impact on the debate.
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Google book-scanning project legal, says U.S. appeals court | Reuters - 0 views
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A U.S. appeals court ruled on Friday that Google's massive effort to scan millions of books for an online library does not violate copyright law, rejecting claims from a group of authors that the project illegally deprives them of revenue.The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York rejected infringement claims from the Authors Guild and several individual writers, and found that the project provides a public service without violating intellectual property law.
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Google argued that the effort would actually boost book sales by making it easier for readers to find works, while introducing them to books they might not otherwise have seen.A lawyer for the authors did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Google had said it could face billions of dollars in potential damages if the authors prevailed. Circuit Judge Denny Chin, who oversaw the case at the lower court level, dismissed the litigation in 2013, prompting the authors' appeal.Chin found Google's scanning of tens of millions of books and posting "snippets" online constituted "fair use" under U.S. copyright law.A unanimous three-judge appeals panel said the case "tests the boundaries of fair use," but found Google's practices were ultimately allowed under the law. "Google’s division of the page into tiny snippets is designed to show the searcher just enough context surrounding the searched term to help her evaluate whether the book falls within the scope of her interest (without revealing so much as to threaten the author’s copyright interests)," Circuit Judge Pierre Leval wrote for the court.
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The 2nd Circuit had previously rejected a similar lawsuit from the Authors Guild in June 2014 against a consortium of universities and research libraries that built a searchable online database of millions of scanned works.The case is Authors Guild v. Google Inc, 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 13-4829.
Open Source, Android Push Evolution of Mobile Cloud Apps | Linux.com - 0 views
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Nice OpenMobster graphic! Good explanation of the Android notification advantage over iOS and Windows 7 too. Note the exception that iOS-5 finally introduces support for JSON. excerpt: Why Android Rocks the Cloud Most open source mobile-cloud projects are still in the early stages. These include the fledgling cloud-to-mobile push notifications app, SimplePush , and the pre-alpha Mirage "cloud operating system" which enables the creation of secure network applications across any Xen-ready cloud platform. The 2cloud Project , meanwhile, has the more ambitious goal of enabling complete mobile cloud platforms. All of the above apps support Android, and many support iOS. Among mobile OSes, Android is best equipped to support cloud applications, said Shah. Android supports sockets to help connect to remote services, and supplies a capable SQlite-based local database. It also offers a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) interchange stack to help parse incoming cloud data -- something missing in iOS. Unlike iOS and Windows Phone 7, Android provides background processing, which is useful for building a robust push infrastructure, said Shah. Without it, he added, users need to configure the app to work with a third-party push service. Most importantly, Android is the only major mobile OS to support inter-application communications. "Mobile apps are focused, and tend to do one thing only," said Shah. "When they cannot communicate with each other, you lose innovation." Comment from Sohil Shah, CEO OpenMobster: "I spoke too soon. iOS 5 now supports JSON out of the box. I am still working with a third party library which was needed in iOS 4 and earlier, and to stay backward compatible with those versions. Anyways, it should have been supported a lot earlier considering the fact that AFAIK, Android has had it since the very beginning. "
WE'RE BLOWN AWAY: This Startup Could Literally Change The Entire Software Industry - Bu... - 0 views
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"Startup Numecent has come out of stealth mode today with some of the most impressive enterprise technology we've seen in a decade. Plus the company is interesting for other reasons, like its business model and its founder. Numecent offers something it calls "cloud paging" and, if successful, it could be a game-changer for enterprise software, video gaming, and smartphone apps. Red Hat thinks so. It has already partnered with the company to help it offer Windows software to Linux users. "Cloud paging" instantly "cloudifies" any software, even an operating system like Windows itself, says founder and CEO Osman Kent. It lets any software, with no modification, be delivered from the cloud and run as fast or faster than if the app was on your desktop. Lots of so-called "desktop virtualization" services work fast. But cloud-paging can even operate the cloud software if the PC gets disconnected from the network or Internet. It can also turn a smartphone into a server. That means a bunch of devices like tablets can run the software -- like a game -- off of the smartphone. Imagine showing up to a party and letting all your friends play the latest version of Halo from your phone. That's crazy cool. Cloudpaging can do all this because it doesn't use "pixel-streaming" technology like other virtualization tech. Instead it temporarily downloads bits of the application itself (instructions) and runs them on the device. It can almost magically predict which parts of the app the user will need, and downloads only those parts. For business owners, that's not even the best part. It also helps enterprises sidestep extra licensing fees associated with the cloud. For instance, Microsoft licenses its software by the device, not by the user, and, in many cases, charges a "Virtual Desktop Access" fee for each device using a virtual version of Windows. (For a bit of light reading, check out the Microsoft virtual desktop licensing white paper: PDF) Cloudpaging has what Kent calls "f
Google News - 0 views
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Prepare to be blown away. I viewed a demo of Numecent today and then did some research. There is no doubt in my mind that this is the end of the shrink wrapped- Microsoft business model. It's also perhaps the end of software application design and construction as we know it. Mobile apps in particular will get blasted by the Numecent "Cloud - Paging" concept. Extraordinary stuff. I'll leave a few useful links on Diigo "Open Web". "Numecent, a company that has a new kind of cloud computing technology that could potentially completely reorganize the way software is delivered and handled - upending the business as we know it - has another big feather in its cap. The company is showing how enterprises can use this technology to instantly put all of their enterprise software in the cloud, without renegotiating contracts and licenses with their software vendors. It signed $3 billion engineering construction company Parsons as a customer. Parsons is using Numecent's tech to deliver 4 million huge computer-aided design (CAD) files to its nearly 12,000 employees around the world. CAD drawings are bigger than video files and they can only be opened and edited by specific CAD apps like AutoCAD. Numecent offers a tech called "cloud paging" which instantly "cloudifies" any Windows app. Instead of being installed on a PC, the enterprise setup can deliver the app over the cloud. Unlike similar cloud technologies (called virtualization), this makes the app run faster and continue working even when the Internet connection goes down. "It's offers a 95% reduction in download times and 95% in download network usage," CEO Osman Kent told Business Insider. "It makes 8G of memory work like 800G." It also lets enterprises check in and check out software, like a library book, so more PCs can legally share software without violating licensing terms, saving money on software license fees, Kent says. Parson is using it to let employees share over 700 huge applications such as Au
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Sounds like Microsoft must-buy-or-kill technology.
Does It Matter Who Wins the Browser Wars? Only if you care about the Future of the Open... - 1 views
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The Future of the Open Web You're right that the browser wars do not matter - except for this point of demarcation; browsers that support HTML+ and browser that support 1998 HTML. extensive comment by ~ge~ Not all Web services and applications support HTML+, the rapidly advancing set of technologies that includes HTML5, CSS3, SVG/Canvas, and JavaScript (including the libraries and JSON). Microsoft has chosen to draw the Open Web line at what amounts to 1998-2001 level of HTML/CSS. Above that line, they provision a rich-client / rich-server Web model bound to the .NET-WPF platform where C#, Silverlight, and XAML are very prominent. Noticeably, Open Web standards are for the most part replaced at this richer MSWeb level by proprietary technologies. Through limited support for HTML/CSS, IE8 itself acts to dumb down the Open Web. The effect of this is that business systems and day-to-day workflow processes bound to the ubiquitous and very "rich" MSOffice Productivity Environment have little choice when it comes to transitioning to the Web but to stay on the Microsoft 2010 treadmill. Sure, at some point legacy business processes and systems will be rewritten to the Web. The question is, will it be the Open Web or the MS-Web? The Open Web standards are the dividing line between owning your information and content, or, having that content bound to a Web platform comprised of proprietary Microsoft services, systems and applications. Web designers and developers are still caught up in the browser wars. They worry incessantly as to how to dumb down Web content and services to meet the limited functionality of IE. This sucks. So everyone continues to watch "the browser wars" stats. What they are really watching for though is that magic moment where "combined" HTML+ browser uptake in marketshare signals that they can start to implement highly graphical and collaboratively interactive HTML+ specific content. Meanwhile, the greater Web is a
excerpt: Another option for a developer is to do what Google did when it created Android, and create replacement code libraries that are compatible with the existing code libraries, but which are new copyrighted works. Being "compatible" in this context means that the new libraries are called in the same way that the old libraries are--that is, using the same APIs. But the actual copyrighted code that is being called is a new work. As long as the new developer didn't actually copy code from the original libraries, the new libraries are not infringing. It does not infringe on the copyright of a piece of software to create a new piece of software that works the same way; copyright protects the actual expression (lines of code) but not the functionality of a program. The functionality of a program is protected by patent, or not at all.
In the Oracle/Google case, no one is arguing that code libraries themselves are not copyrightable. Of course they are and this is why the Google/Oracle dispute has no bearing on the enforceability of the GPL. Instead, the argument is about whether the method of using a code library, the APIs, is subject to a copyright that is independent of the copyright of the code itself. If the argument that APIs are not copyrightable prevails, programs that are created by statically-linking GPL'd code libraries will still be considered derivative works of the code libraries and will still have to be released under the GPL.
Though irrelevant to the enforceability of the GPL, the Oracle/Google dispute is still interesting. Oracle is claiming that Google, by creating compatible, replacement code libraries that are "called" in the same way as Oracle's code libraries (that is, using the same APIs), infringed