it’s important to address whether, and why, reader privacy is important. Librarians are adamant about the importance of reader privacy. The American Library Association has affirmed a right to privacy for readers since 1939,and states that “one cannot exercise the right to read if the possible consequences include damage to one’s reputation, ostracism from the community or workplace, or criminal penalties. Choice requires both a varied selection and the assurance that one’s choice is not monitored.”

[...] the wholesale sharing of your reading history with Facebook friends may ultimately impact the Supreme Court’s understanding of what constitutes a “reasonable expectation of privacy.”

[...] it may be another step toward the death of the Fourth Amendment by a thousand cuts.

Daniel Solove has argued that the proper metaphor for contemporary privacy violations is not the Big Brother of Orwell’s 1984, but the inscrutable courts of Franz Kafka’s The Trial.[11] I agree, and believe that the lack of a coherent mental model of privacy harm helps account for the lag between the advancement of technology and privacy law. There is no story, no vivid and specific instance of a paradigmatic privacy violation in a digital universe, upon which citizens and lawmakers can premise their concern.

Drones and other robots have the potential to restore that mental model. They represent the cold, technological embodiment of observation. Unlike, say, NSA network surveillance or commercial data brokerage, government or industry surveillance of the populace with drones would be visible and highly salient. People would feel observed, regardless of how or whether the information was actually used.

[bad law/bad tech?] Sony music group employed a dumb simple bot called "Web Sheriff" that crawled the web looking for filename matches...it was two of the stupidest weeks of my life, all because of some problematic laws granted new powers to copyright holders and I had to engage in a prolonged legal fight thanks to a mistake made by a bot...

These bills, and the enforcement philosophy that underlies them, represent a dramatic retreat from this country’s tradition of leadership in supporting the free exchange of information and ideas on the Internet. At a time when many foreign governments have dramatically stepped up their efforts to censor Internet communications, these bills would incorporate into U.S. law a principle more closely associated with those repressive regimes: a right to insist on the removal of content from the global Internet, regardless of where it may have originated or be located, in service of the exigencies of domestic law.

Most ambitious South Asians at the time went to Silicon Valley. “Wall Street was tough to get into for us. Not to be crude, but there’s a Jewish mafia, and a WASP mafia, and an Irish mafia up in Boston.” He rattles off the names of the leading money houses, identifying each by the ethnicity it is stocked with. “They hire their own; they socialize among their own.” When it comes to the South Asians, he bemoans the fact that “for us as a group there’s no unity.” He mentions the microscopically specific matrimonial ads in India Abroad, a community newspaper. “A Punjabi Khatri wants to marry a Punjabi Khatri ...”

He was among the South Asian pioneers on Wall Street. “We didn’t grow up reading The Wall Street Journal. We didn’t have someone who knew someone who could give us an interview. We didn’t have the domain knowledge; we were all foreigners.” Americans had the connections [...]

“So I don’t generally believe in fortune tellers and astrologers,” Rajaratnam says. “But the ola leaves were written thousands of years ago. In those days there was no share business. I found it interesting.”

1. call everything an experiment
2. when you're given the go-ahead from authorities, go fast
3. build up a user base
4. when you achieve your objective, don't be afraid to be nice
5. keep asking, keep re-phrasing the question
6. when you get the microphone, make your point clearly
7. get standing
8. try to get the bureaucrats to threaten you
9. look for over-reaching
10. don't be afraid to fail

Cass’s work points out that parties who disagree on basic things — such as a would-be polity that wants to produce a constitution for the first time — risk coming away empty handed if they insist on their own views. But they don’t want to compromise, either. So what they do is strategically punt: they come up with texts that are intentionally vague, leaving it for another day to figure out what they mean in practice, so they can move on with a joint endeavor of some kind. There are lots of vague statements of that sort in the proposal, some of which are drawn from another likely-intentionally vague set of FCC principles about the Net. So, for example, under the proposal, carriers can’t engage in undue discrimination. They can do reasonable network management. There’s to be transparency, but not neutrality, for wireless at this time. These definitions would have to be much more fleshed out to understand what the agreement means, and lawyers use terms like these so that the parties’ different ideas of “undue,” “reasonable,” and “now” can be parked in peace under the same roof [...]

The proposal is aimed for Congress to adopt in part to clarify the FCC’s ability to regulate here, and it can be divided into two types of suggestions: one about the ground rules (limited by the vague language sampled above) to be observed by ISPs, and one that’s meta, i.e. about who should make and enforce whatever rules there are to be [...]

At the very least, it’s clear that the substantive ideas represented in the Google/Verizon proposal are important enough not to simply be left to these two players. Both freely admit as much — they call the framework simply a starting point, soliciting others’ views, and acknowledging that it’s ultimately up to bodies like the U.S. Congress to decide what the rules will be and how they’ll be refined and enforced. But their opening bid is to ask Congress to lay down a few rules and then butt out — leaving the FCC to play a limited role in enforcement, and making the bar for adjustment one where Congress would have to revisit the issue, such as for wireless, if trouble is seen there.

aren’t all families “broken” in some way? Marriage customs bring together two people from different lineages and place them under a common roof. By definition, marriage is a joining of unlike elements. (Close blood relatives aren’t supposed to mate. Yuck.) Even when the bond is strong, a seam both connects and divides husband, wife and the web of in-laws they bring to the table. A couple’s biological offspring really are a blend, but the rest of the family is patched together.

"Apple is not concerned that the practice of jailbreaking will displace sales of its firmware or of iPhones," wrote the Register, explaining her thinking by running through the "four factors" of the fair use test. "Indeed, since one cannot engage in that practice unless one has acquired an iPhone, it would be difficult to make that argument. Rather, the harm that Apple fears is harm to its reputation. Apple is concerned that jailbreaking will breach the integrity of the iPhone's ecosystem. The Register concludes that such alleged adverse effects are not in the nature of the harm that the fourth fair use factor is intended to address." [...]

Amazon may have clamped down on the feature in response, but the Library of Congress has now given users the right to crack e-book DRM in order to hear the words. Exemption number six only applies in cases where there is no alternative; if e-book vendors offer any sort of version that allows screen-reading or text-to-speech, even if the price is significantly higher, people must use that version rather than bypass DRM.

According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants — including search engines, social-networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter and online-gaming sites. Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos and discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups [...]

By “erasing external memories,” he says in the book, “our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.” In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which everything is recorded “will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.” [...]

Alex Türk, the French data-protection commissioner, has called for a “constitutional right to oblivion” that would allow citizens to maintain a greater degree of anonymity online and in public places. In Argentina, the writers Alejandro Tortolini and Enrique Quagliano have started a campaign to “reinvent forgetting on the Internet,” exploring a range of political and technological ways of making data disappear. In February, the European Union helped finance a campaign called “Think B4 U post!” that urges young people to consider the “potential consequences” of publishing photos of themselves or their friends without “thinking carefully” and asking permission. And in the United States, a group of technologists, legal scholars and cyberthinkers are exploring ways of recreating the possibility of digital forgetting. These approaches share the common goal of reconstructing a form of control over our identities: the ability to reinvent ourselves, to escape our pasts and to improve the selves that we present to the world.

[see "forgetting" solutions by Cuil, TigerText, Vanish]

The senators who will soon decide Ms. Kagan’s nomination to the court should read Justice Souter on life experience in a changing world, and his appreciation of complexity. But more important, we hope the speech emboldens Ms. Kagan to speak her heart before the Senate in a way she has never done in public, which perhaps was Justice Souter’s intention. As the speech showed, rigid neutrality is not only disingenuous, it is a hindrance to proper decision-making. Certainty is an illusion, he said, quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, and simplicity “devalues our aspirations.”

@1:15:00 music industry is totally corrupt, also @1:47:00

* MR doesn't think the climate crisis is anything to worry about ("work on Malaria and AIDS instead", "things that directly affect people" [hmmm...])

* millions upon millions in profit earned throughout his life, and he's working on a cloud music service

[links links links!]

People involved in the distribution of published material have tried their best to call such actions “stealing” since the beginnings of copyright. If you really want to understand what copyright is about, what its origins were, then please go and read this excellent piece. It tells you why copyright had everything to do with distributors, distribution and central control and very little to do with authors, musicians and artists. Why it had everything to do with censorship and exclusivity and very little to do with creativity and free expression. In fact, if you get the chance, spend time at questioncopyright.org; there’s some very useful material there, including this video, Copying is Not Theft

[...]

If internet copying was really stealing, then there would be an active disincentive to produce digital works. Yet, in the apparent heyday of internet copying, every form of digital publishing is on the rise. There are more books being written and published, more films made, more albums released [...]

The democratic process itself is being subverted, lobbyists are seeking to ensure that the Bill is not properly debated in Parliament before being passed. To me this is more criminal than anything the Bill seeks to prevent.

[Google book settlement]

Bunch is correct that the secondary purpose of copyright is to reward creators for their work, but only insofar as to encourage the primary purpose of copyright, the continued creation of new work.

a resource that startups can continue to come back to

The Obama administration has offered up a strange mix of copyright policies in its first year (both ACTA and Creative Commons, for instance), but it has at least made clear that "better copyright law" does not always mean "more copyright protection."

We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all. To understand how an opinion has influenced other decisions, you can explore citing and related cases using the Cited by and Related articles links on search result pages. As you read an opinion, you can follow citations to the opinions to which it refers. You can also see how individual cases have been quoted or discussed in other opinions and in articles from law journals. Browse these by clicking on the "How Cited" link next to the case title. See, for example, the frequent citations for Roe v. Wade, for Miranda v. Arizona (the source of the famous Miranda warning) or for Terry v. Ohio (a case which helped to establish acceptable grounds for an investigative stop by a police officer).

the objectors say little to nothing about the impact of the settlement on consumers, who already benefit from Google's efforts and would benefit even more, if the agreement is approved.
The interests of information users ought to be the top priority of U.S. copyright officials, but Marybeth Peters, U.S. Register of Copyrights, condemned the original agreement. She spoke on behalf of the theoretical owners of orphan works--authors and publishers, in other words, who were given a powerful monopoly and then abandoned it. Peters accused Google and the organizations who sued the company of conspiring to execute an "end-run around copyright law as we know it."
There's the real problem. Copyright "as we know it" is a disaster and an embarrassment. Rather than complain about the ingenuity, leadership, and careful diplomacy of Google in trying to clean it up, why doesn't Peters focus on the job she was hired to do: urging Congress to bring copyright law in line with the realities of the 21st century?
Congress and its enthrallment to entertainment lobbyists created this mess. Reset the balance of copyright to something fair for authors and consumers, and all the objections to the Google Books settlement evaporate.

There's a lot of misinformation out there about legal rights and responsibilities in the digital era.

The final conclusion: put addicted people in enriched environments. (mp3 link)

Law.Gov is an outgrowth of 3 years of work we've done at Public.Resource.Org along with our numerous colleagues in the open law movement across the country. There have been a series of piecemeal successes which have demonstrated that there is a demand and a need for more legal information to be more broadly available. I'm hopeful now that a truly national movement may have coalesced and that there is at least a chance we can bring this across the finish line and create a new function inside of government, the publication of America's operating system on an open source platform.

LexPublica is opening up the world of legal knowledge to everyone. Especially to you (well, especially to small businesses right away, but hopefully specifically to you as we get rolling). We're beginning by building a community that's developing free contract templates and supporting information for you to use.

[skip first 1/3. snooooze. Note responses at end: Pollitt Coontz Ackelsberg]

The public debate, instead, is primarily about the expressive aspects of marriage. It is here that the difference between civil unions and marriage resides, and it is this aspect that is at issue when same-sex couples see the compromise offer of civil unions as stigmatizing and degrading.

The expressive dimension of marriage raises several distinct questions. First, assuming that granting a marriage license expresses a type of public approval, should the state be in the business of expressing favor for, or dignifying, some unions rather than others? Are there any good public reasons for the state to be in the marriage business at all, rather than the civil union business? Second, if there are good reasons, what are the arguments for and against admitting same-sex couples to that status, and how should we think about them?

http://change-congress.org/ al gore @ 37:00 - "democracy crisis" Q&A 42:00