A Wikipedia critic claims that plagiarism is rampant on the site:
Daniel Brandt found the examples of suspected plagiarism at Wikipedia using a program he created to run a few sentences from about 12,000 articles against Google Inc.’s search engine. He removed matches in which another site appeared to be copying from Wikipedia, rather than the other way around, and examples in which material is in the public domain and was properly attributed. Brandt ended with a list of 142 articles, which he brought to Wikipedia’s attention. The site’s founder, Jimmy Wales, acknowledged that plagiarized passages do occasionally slip in but he dismissed Brandt’s findings as exaggerated.
It seems to me that there’s some ambiguity here between plagiarism and copyright infringement. Some of the articles were determined to be “OK because copied passages came from the public domain.” That’s a defense against copyright infringement, but not against plagiarism. This confusion is intensified by the final paragraph of the article:
Editors found extensive problems in several cases, with many still not yet fully checked. Articles with offending passages have been stripped of most text. An entire paragraph in Alonzo Clark’s entry, for instance, was deleted, leaving the article with the bare-bones: “Alonzo M. Clark (August 13, 1868-October 12, 1952) was an American politician who was Governor of Wyoming from 1931 to 1933.” The original article, Brandt said, was copied from a biography on the Wyoming state government site.
Aren’t government documents automatically placed in the public domain? If so, isn’t the remedy simply to include an attribution that the material came from the state of Wyoming’s website?
Techdirt is reporting that voting machines in California, manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems, allows you to cast multiple votes if the machines are placed in “manual mode.” Apparently the machines emit a “loud beep” when the “manual mode” button is pressed, but that hardly strikes me as an adequate safeguard, especially given that poll workers often receive limited training.
I’ve been beating up on Diebold lately, but the fundamental problem isn’t Diebold-specific. The problem is simply that e-voting is needlessly complex (and therefore error-prone) and inherently insecure. That will continue to be true no matter who’s manufacturing the machines.
Here’s what I’ve been waiting for since the day I bought my Microsoft XBOX 360. If these rumors are true, Microsoft could soon be making downloadable high-definition movies available via its XBOX Live / XBOX Marketplace service. You’ll need a pretty fast Internet connection, of course, but luckily I do via Verizon’s outstanding FIOS (fiber) service. I currently download all sorts of HD movie trailers and game demos via the XBOX Marketplace and they look great and work perfectly. I can just leave my XBOX running overnight and order up a bunch of content and it’s all sitting there when I wake up in the morning. Or I can just download that content while I’m playing games and the system notifies me once the clips and demos have finished downloading.
So, it’s only natural that Microsoft would want to take the next step and allow users to download entire movies at some point. This would be a welcome alternative to the somewhat cumbersome MovieLink and CinemaNow systems that I’ve looked into. They don’t have much HD material on their services.
Microsoft will also be willing to work with the studios to ensure secure delivery and proper compensation, so I don’t see any copyright concerns here. Importantly, however, the XBOX 360 does not have HDMI or DVI digital outputs, only analog component video connections. Consequently, some users are still concerned that studios might down-res HD video content in the future via the “image contraint token” copy protection scheme. So far the studios have not felt the need to do that, however. But they might in the future if illegal redistribution of copyrighted content becomes a bigger concern. Right now, it’s just too hard to pirates to move big high-def files around on current generation networks, so it’s not a big deal yet. Read this IGN.com story for more details.
Regardless, I hope Microsoft makes this happen, and soon. I have already pre-ordered Microsoft’s upcoming HD-DVD sidecar ($199) from Amazon and it is due to be delivered in a few weeks. It will play next-generation movies of the HD-DVD format, but that still doesn’t give me a Blu-Ray solution. So, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to download all my HD movies via my XBOX Live connection in the future instead of having to purchase a Blu-Ray player.
Now it looks like I’ll next need to go buy that rumored 100GB hard drive for the XBOX if MS makes it! That 20-gig drive I’ve got now won’t be able to hold too many HD movie downloads.
Yesterday the FCC ruled that the Massachusetts Airport Authority cannot prevent Continental from putting up a Wi-Fi antenna in its Logan Airport lounge. Some folks, such as Julie Ask of Jupiter, have see this ruling as validating the “no one owns it” character of unlicensed spectrum. As I’ve argued before, unlicensed spectrum works in part because it is used consistent with physical property rights. This is why Ask goes on to say that she “dread[s] the day that a Muni network is overlayed or my neighbors set up 802.11n.” This particular case is actually about property and competition.
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In recent blogs, I’ve been documented the troubling reports of government losing laptops and compromising private information. And as I mentioned in another report, Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA), the Chairman of the committee, has introduced H.R. 6163, the “Federal Agency Data Breach Protection Act” to try to get this problem under control, although the legislation would really do nothing of the sort.
Sadly, there’s more news to report on this front.
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Via Slashdot, Diebold is pissed off about HBO’s new documentary “Hacking Democracy.” They say it’s full of inaccuracies. For example:
The first of these material errors is the statement that Diebold tabulated more than 40 percent of the votes cast in the 2000 Presidential election. Diebold was not in the electronic voting business in 2000. Diebold purchased Global Election Systems in 2002, but Global had at the time only eight percent of the market.
Oh wait, it turns out that they haven’t actually seen the film. But they say the promotional materials on HBO’s website suggest the film contains these errors. Of course, they couldn’t be bothered to provide a URL or an in-context quote of the claims in question, so for all I know Diebold is wildly misrepresenting what it says on the website, which could be different from what the documentary says.
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I think one of the best pieces of evidence that patents are harmful to the software industry is the way that software companies’ behavior changes when they’re facing bankruptcy. A couple of weeks ago I discussed Transmeta’s transformation from an innovative technology company into a patent troll. Back in June, I covered Creative’s lawsuit against Apple after losing in the marketplace. This week we’ll consider SGI, another company with a proud history that has sadly descended into trolldom.
If a software patent were an ordinary productive asset like a plot of land or a truck, SGI’s behavior would make no sense. If somebody were squatting on SGI’s land, they would evict him immediately, they wouldn’t wait until they were facing bankruptcy before defending their property rights. Likewise, Disney or Merck wouldn’t tolerate another company using its movie copyrights or pharmaceutical patents without permission. Yet here we have SGI suddenly interested in suing over Patent #6,650,327, granted three years ago. Why didn’t SGI file this lawsuit back in 2003?
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Microsoft and Novell announced a collaborative effort. Whoa, this is big news! Windows and SuSE Linux, proprietary and open source, Microsoft and Novell–working together? Well, yes, according to a recent announcement. And for this collaborative effort to have even been formalized, a required element was some intellectual property rights housecleaning.
Microsoft’s press release says this:
First, Microsoft will work with Novell and actively contribute to several open source software projects, including projects focused on Office file formats and Web services management. Second, Microsoft will not assert its patents against individual noncommercial open source developers. And third, Microsoft is promising not to assert its patents against individual contributors to OpenSUSE.org whose code is included in the SuSE Linux Enterprise platform, including SuSE Linux Enterprise Server and SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.
From an intellectual property perspective, numbers 2 and 3 standout – Microsoft’s legally binding promise not to assert its IP rights against SuSE Linux.
What is Microsoft doing here? It’s trying to put SuSE developers at ease that they won’t be sued. So there’s no need to obtain a license from Microsoft. Furthermore, there’s no need for sublicensing – which is particularly important for the decentralized nature of open source development.
Non-assertion covenants (also called a “promise not to assert” or “covenant not to sue”) are binding agreements. It’s a “promise” but it’s still legally enforceable under the doctrine of promissory estoppel–if Microsoft were to withdraw its promise, anyone who justifiably relied on the promise and suffered harm from the withdrawal can sue. They are ways for one party with intellectual property rights to create zones of enforcement and increase certainty for other parties. Its an example of market participants contracting around (or within) the patent and copyright legal system to reduce transaction costs of negotiating, monitoring and enforcing licenses.
Non-assertion promises are better than RAND (Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) licenses. What is “reasonable” and “non-discriminatory” depends on the particular circumstance and is open to legal interpretation and business negotiation hassles. Furthermore, RAND does not mean royalty-free. For more on Non-assertion covenants see Andy Updegrove’s informative blog post.
I believe we’ll see more and more of these non-assertion agreements from IP rights holders. And I expound further on this in my posting at the ACT blog.
Apparently UTube is suing YouTube for causing their website to have too much traffic. Jason Schulz is on the case:
Now I’m definitely sympathetic to Universal Tube’s plight. They’re a small business that mostly operates in an off-line world. This much traffic shutting down its servers is not something it asked for or deserves. But to respond by suing YouTube for it doesn’t make any sense. YouTube didn’t ask those people to go to the wrong website. In fact, YouTube wants nothing more than for all those people to find the right website. (Okay, maybe not the child pornographers, but everyone else).
Moreover, the fact that Universal Tube is suing primarily under trademark law and the old property doctrine of “trespass to chattels” is particularly disingenous. I mean, the company isn’t even called “utube”–it’s called Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment. They just picked the domain “utube” as a shorthand.
Trademark law is about companies in the same field using similar marks to confuse consumers not about blaming companies for the mistakes of Internet searchers who can’t find the right websites. No consumer looking for videos on the Internet is going to mistakenly buy used tubbing or visa-versa (unless of course, they’re looking for a series of tubes ;). What Universal Tube is trying to do here is right a wrong by squeezing a square peg in a round hole. There is no “trespass” here or trademark violation and they shouldn’t try to trick a court into finding one.
The only way this lawsuit makes sense is if it’s a negotiating tactic. After all, Mike says they’ve already turned down a million dollar offer for the domain–it surely doesn’t cost a small business a million dollars to change its web address. So they can’t honestly feel they’ve been injured. More likely, they’re expecting Google to buy them out, and they’re hoping a lawsuit will give them more leverage in the price negotiations.
Mike Masnick has some depressing news:
Within the security community, there’s been a lot of talk about “security theater” when it comes to the airline business. In the last few years, plenty of new security measures have been put in place–but just because we can see or deal with new security measures (dump your liquids, everyone!), does it actually make us any safer. While there’s been a ton of attention paid in the last week to a security researcher who showed just how easy it was for anyone to create their own boarding pass to get past the security check point, a much scarier story is sent in by Damon, who points out for all of the security changes, new technologies and new processes it doesn’t do a damn bit of good if the TSA screeners let people with weapons through the checkpoint. That’s exactly what happened at Newark airport, where a “secret shopper” (or should that be “secret bomber”?) test found that 20 out of 22 weapons got through the security clearing process. Now aren’t you glad that you have to remove your shoes and can’t bring a bottle of water on board any more? If we’re serious about air travel security, then it’s about time that we actually focused on security–not play-acting to make people think that something’s been done.
Let me repeat that: 20 out of 22 weapons got through. That’s more than 90 percent failure.
The fundamental problem here is that the TSA has no particular incentive to make air travel safer. They have to act like they’re responding to terrorist threats, but as long as they appear to be “doing something,” it doesn’t matter if any of their “security measures” actually accomplish anything. And, not surprisingly, it appears that to a first approximation, they don’t.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.