Friday, April 25, 2003
Textbook Sharing vs. File "Sharing": Bob Frankston (via Dan Bricklin) muses on the apparent disparity between the crackdown on file "sharing" on college campuses and the absence of a similar crackdown on textbook sharing. In fact the publishing industry isn't cracking down because they've already litigated this issue to death and won; see Basic Books, Inc. v. Kinko's Graphics Corp., 758 F. Supp. 1522 (S.D.N.Y 1991); American Geophysical Union v. Texaco, Inc., 60 F.3d 913 (2d Cir. 1994); and Princeton University Press v. Michigan Documents Services, Inc., 99 F.3d 1381 (6th Cir. 1996). In plain English, you just don't have a legal right to make and distribute copies of copyrighted materials without the permission of the copyright holder. You can legally share a textbook in the sense Bob uses because you're not making a copy.Tuesday, April 22, 2003
Worst...Website...Ever! It doesn't take much imagination to suspect The Falcon's Nest of being the online equivalent of a numbers station -- hidden among all the apparent random noise and cruft might be detailed instructions for the assassination of a diplomat in the men's room of a disco in Munich.Sunday, April 20, 2003
I made some minor tweaks tonight, mainly to fix the hundred or so links I broke when I started using a server-parsed home page. The url changed from .html to .shtml but being the bright fella I am I neglected to update most of the rest of the site to reflect this. I also added an RSS feed and'll get a link for it up after I post this message.