The Harvard Cooperative Society — also known as our campus bookseller (also a Barnes & Noble) — has been claiming that it has an “intellectual property” right in the ISBN numbers and/or prices of the textbooks that we as faculty assign to our students. We’ve got an op-ed in The Crimson this morning disputing their … Read more
Jim Moore has reposted, on Google Video (heh), the “offending” work that prompted the nastygram from Viacom today. It’s hard to imagine what might have prompted the take-down. As JZ asks in the comments from an earlier post, what can we surmise about the tactic in getting to 100,000 take-downs? Was some bot scanning for … Read more
Jim Moore has received a cease and desist letter from Viacom for a home video that he shot. (I love Jim, but the video’s pretty bad. Highly unlikely to be affecting any market that Viacom cares about, among other things.) The DMCA’s Section 512 has a provision that allows for counter-notification for people, like Jim, … Read more
Mike Arrington is reporting that he’s received a cease and desist letter from YouTube. Mike writes: “Buried in my email this evening I found a cease and desist letter from an attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, representing their client YouTube. We’ve been accused of a number of things: violating YouTube’s Terms of Use, … Read more
The Independent candidate for governor of Massachusetts, Christy Mihos, is typosquatting at http://www.kerryhealy.com. His Republican opponent, Kerry Healey (note the extra “e”), must not be too amused. The people of Massachusetts aren’t in too much danger of actually electing Mr. Mihos in November — the race is plainly between Healey and the Democratic nominee, Deval … Read more
An extraordinary piece in the LAT, (via John Bracken), on the crackdown on free expression in China. The story’s lead, written by Mark Magnier, goes like this: “BEIJING — With their control over newspapers, television, magazines and the Internet secure, censors in China are now turning their attention to the dim recesses of the nation’s … Read more
David Hornik, famous as the VC at August Capital who made some of the first true web 2.0 investments, is actually a lawyer. And a good one. Not to mention a Harvard Law School grad. (Who now teaches at a business school.) He has the go-to post on the web 2.0 trademark controversy, in which … Read more
An alternate version of “The Game”: Harvard vs. Yale via Alexa.
I hope that the unfortunate story of GoogleCircles.com, told here, is itself a prank. But fear it’s all too true, that Google has invoked the DMCA against an April Fool’s joke. Oof. It is amusing that the original prank is still in Google’s cache, at least for the time being. (Via David W.)
A fifteen-minute video satire on Blogging Incredibility and Journalism: The Conference That Never Was. Starring Ethan Zuckerman, David Weinberger, Jay Rosen, Andy Carvin, and some people we don’t know but would like to meet. (Sponsored by Peet’s Coffee, I think.)