SISummer11

"The state librarian of Kansas, with the backing of state attorney general's office, is planning to terminate the Kansas Digital Library Consortium's contract with ebook vendor OverDrive and is asserting the bold argument that the consortium has purchased, not licensed, its ebook content from OverDrive and, therefore, has the right to transfer the content to a new service provider."

A review of the book, "Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright" - perhaps a fair use for dummies - academic edition.

Lessig starts with a story about a documentarian and the specter of litigation in that community of practice when it comes to fair use and clearing images, sounds, etc. in documentary filmmaking. He goes on to consider how to reframe copyright: "[W]e need an approach that recognizes the errors in both extremes, and that crafts the balance that any culture needs: incentives to support a diverse range of creativity, with an assurance that the creativity inspired remains for generations to access and understand."

"For years the top record label executives have been claiming that it's impossible to compete with free, but YouTube is proving them wrong. With billions of views every month the major record labels are making millions by sharing their music for free."

Privacy & Licensing issues with google+, fwiw, compare the posted Google+ terms of service with facebooks terms;  "For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content"), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook ("IP License"). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it."

In 2006, Harvard sociologists struck a mother lode of social-science data, offering a new way to answer big questions about how race and cultural tastes affect relationships. The source: some 1,700 Facebook profiles, downloaded from an entire class of students at an "anonymous" university, that could reveal how friendships and interests evolve over time.

And now the fun begins.... very timely topic

This happened a few days ago now, but I forgot to post it until I went to talk about it in my journal this week! From the article: "Over the course of three days in June, artist Kyle McDonald captured the faces of Apple patrons in two of the company's Manhattan stores. He did this by installing a program on computers in the stores, which automatically took an image every minute." His idea was that the photos constituted an art project about what people look like when they engage with technology. The Secret Service confiscated his computers after an Apple Store employee traced where the photos were being transferred to. I thought this was interesting because it's an example of visual surveillance of people's physical presence/actions in public spaces like Greenfield talks about, rather than surveillance of their digital actions, which so much of the literature focuses on. I definitely think the artist's project constitutes a violation of the privacy of the people whose photographs he took, but I can't help thinking it's also a really fascinating project that wouldn't work if people knew their photo was being taken in that moment.

Here's a wiki that aims to educate students on digital responsibility and to become good digital citizens. There are a lot of good links to specific lessons for students.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned News of the World is ceasing publication. News Corp. announced Thursday that the final issue of Britain's best-selling tabloid will be Sunday. The paper is accused of hacking into the cell phone messages of victims ranging from a missing schoolgirl to grieving families, royals and politicians in a quest for headlines.

Interesting way to educate users about privacy settings

Just to backtrack a couple of weeks: I came across this FAQ pulled together by the ALA Office for Information Technology Policy that might be handy as a pocket-guide for the future to supplement the wiki the presenting group compiled.

The best social network you've (probably) never heard of is one-five-hundredth the size of Facebook. It has no video chat feature, it doesn't let you check in to your favorite restaurant, and there are no games. The company that runs it has just four employees, one of whom is responsible for programming the entire operation.

For companies in the telecommunications industry, 2010 has proved to be an eventful year in the regulatory context with the release of the National Broadband Plan by the FCC. Congress intended the Plan to be a long-reaching analysis of what the government and private industry needed to do to achieve ubiquitous broadband access.

I see a lot of the "the Plan recommends" and "the Plan expresses concern"...but it doesn't seem like there's too much in the way of regulation or enforcement.

Opinion-editorial from Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circui, and his law clerk Stephanie Grace on the changing nature of the Fourth Amendment, reasonable expectations of privacy and technology.

I came across this new Droid app that enables users to obscure the faces of individuals in photos or videos they've taken on their mobile devices. The app creators are involved more generally in developing technologies and technology policies for human rights defenders, especially ones that document abuses, protests and other demonstrations and share the videos/pictures through various media channels and see a need to hide identities from repressive governments. I think it ties our discussion last week of Evgeny Morozov's research into the Internet and government oppression into the issue of privacy.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND WORKERS' PRIVACY: ENFORCEMENT Hans-Joachim Reinhardt The use of information technology at work has emphasized a tension between two distinct principles that appear at first sight to be opposed to one other: On the one hand, there is the principle of the inviolability of the employees' private lives and private communications and, on the other, the principle of the employers' rights to enjoy their private property and their managerial powers of command.

The ALA Intellectual Freedom Committee and the IFC Privacy Subcommittee developed the "Resolution to Protect Library User Confidentiality in Self-Service Hold Practices" after receiving requests from librarians and library users to examine the issue of reader privacy and self-service holds (June 28, 2011).

Interesting tips for social media users that go well with the NPR recording on how employers really have more power to fire people than I originally thought. This may be a must read for teens/college students in regards to new jobs and social media.

I thought this was an interesting case where privacy wouldn't matter...I posted it in this week's discussion as well.

I think that this is a very good idea and am glad to see that even when the network is down they can still communicate through text.

Privacy issues in the communications sector are increasingly prevalent as new technology and new applications enter the market, such as social networking and the use of location based information. These new technology privacy issues add to the existing privacy issues in the sector, such as spam, telemarketing and the misuse of silent telephone numbers. Complaints are a vital element in privacy protection - indeed, the entire system of privacy protection in the communications sector is built on the receipt and management of complaints. There are few proactive requirements to protect privacy in the sector, and the volume and scale of business in the sector is so large that no regulator could hope to monitor compliance without relying heavily on complaints. Proactive steps are necessary and crucial, but this report focuses on complaint paths. The aim of this study is to analyse and compare common communications privacy complaint paths in order to obtain optimum outcomes for consumers through the development.