Computer Ethics, Spr 2015

Corboy 301, Thursdays 4:15

Class 5

Week 5 Readings

  Read Chapter 2.

Paper 1 revision: due Thursday February 26


The Authors Guild v Google appeal has not yet been decided.

The Second Circuit did issue its appeal in Authors Guild v Hathitrust. They upheld the creation of a searchable database of the books in question as Fair Use, though by that point a search would yield only the page numbers and not the actual passages.

They did rule that a use was not transformative just because it made an important contribution to society, such as enabling access by the visually impaired. Recall that the District Court judge, Baer, was particularly concerned about this as he has a significant hearing impairment. The Second Circuit wrote

[A] transformative work is one that serves a new and different function from the original work and is not a substitute for it....  [T]ransformative use adds something new to the copyrighted work and does not merely supersede the purposes of the original creation.

The Second Circuit compared the database's enabling of access for the blind with a translation's enabling of access to a book for non-English readers; translations have never been regarded as Fair Use. But at the end of the argument, the Second Circuit did agree that, for other reasons, the access for the blind here was Fair Use.

They agreed, on the other hand, that the search feature was " a quintessentially transformative use". " There is no evidence that the Authors write with the purpose of enabling text searches of their books."

The Second Circuit spoke vaguely to the sampling controversy when it wrote " Lost licensing revenue counts under Factor Four only when the use serves as a substitute for the original." Generally, the music industry has argued that lost sample-license revenue makes sampling not Fair Use; the Second Circuit here appears to disagree with that but exactly what was meant by "substitute for the original" is unclear; book search is much less a "substitute for the original" than is music sampling.

The Authors Guild was dismissed from the suit: " “the Copyright Act does not permit copyright holders to choose third parties to bring suits on their behalf"!


Rapidshare.com is closing! At the end of March 2015.

One theory is that, after adopting some anti-piracy mechanisms in 2012 (apparently including ending their free download service), they were abandoned by their users. Rapidshare, with a large headquarters building in Switzerland, has always considered itself to be a legitimate company. While they hosted lots of pirated content, they provided no search engine for it, and apparently did not create incentives for users to upload unlawful content.

Rapidshare blamed piracy on search sites that did provide search for RapidShare's public files.


FaceBook will soon be able to ID you in any photo

The article here is from Science.

FaceBook is way ahead of the FBI in this regard.

Facebook has claimed that this will protect your privacy: “you will get an alert from Facebook telling you that you appear in the picture,.... You can then choose to blur out your face from the picture to protect your privacy." Yeah, sure.

FaceBook's DeepFace system was trained on all those FB pictures in which people are tagged. Did you know you agreed to that?

Police could use such a system to identify people on the street, or participants at a rally. Stalkers could use it to find out the real identity of their chosen victim.


Resume with privacy from the government, after the Jerry Day video about smart meters