By now you should have read the first four sections of Baase chapter 1 and the first three sections of chapter 4.
What It's Like to Live in a Surveillance State
nytimes.com/2018/02/03/opinion/sunday/china-surveillance-state-uighurs.html
Imagine that this is your daily life: While on your way to work or on an errand, every 100 meters you pass a police blockhouse. Video cameras on street corners and lamp posts recognize your face and track your movements. At multiple checkpoints, police officers scan your ID card, your irises and the contents of your phone. At the supermarket or the bank, you are scanned again, your bags are X-rayed and an officer runs a wand over your body....
Not a dystopian description of the US, but a pretty accurate description of China's Xinjiang province, with its sizeable Uighur population.
lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2018-February/040139.html: should we be worried about this kind of data?
Alexandra Elbakyan: theverge.com/2018/2/8/16985666/alexandra-elbakyan-sci-hub-open-access-science-papers-lawsuit
Drake vs Estate of Jimmy Smith: the rap musician Drake used a sample from Jimmy Smith on his track Nothing Was the Same / Pound Cake. The judge ruled in 2017 this was Fair Use. Sort of. See law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2014cv02703/425904/135/.
1. Smith's track was spoken, not sung. It was the final track of his jazz CD. Smith originally said "Jazz is the only real music that’s gonna last.". Drake edited the words so they said "Only real music is gonna last". The full edited passage Drake used, 35 seconds long, is here:
Good God Almighty, like back in the old days.
You know, years ago they had the A&R men to tell you what to play, how
to play it and you know whether it’s disco rock, but we just went in the
studio and we did it.
We had champagne in the studio, of course, you know, compliments of the
company, and we just laid back and did it.
So we hope you enjoy listening to this album half as much as we enjoyed
playing it for you. Because we had a ball.
Only real music is gonna last, all that other bullshit is
here today and gone tomorrow.
Smith said only jazz was going to last. Drake disagrees.
2. Drake's team had obtained a license to sample from Smith's recording. But they did not have a license to sample from Smith's composition. The only argument Smith's estate had was that Drake used a sufficiently large amount of Smith's track that they needed a composition license too.
One way to look at this is to argue that the situation would be the same if Drake had simply copied Smith's words in print. As a quotation. Who would care about that?
3. Judge William Pauley gave a careful Fair-Use four-factor analysis, ultimately ruling that Drake's use was transformative. On the purpose of the use factor (the first factor), Drake's legal team had argued that Drake's track (and Drake's message) was quite different:
The judge regarded points 2 and 3 as making Drake's track a derivative work, but felt that point 1 rose to the level of "transformative".
The judge felt that factor 2, "the nature of the work", was slightly in favor of Jimmy Smith.
For factor 3, the amount of the work used, the judge cited Cariou v Prince (remember essentially all of Cariou's original photo was used).
For factor 4, the effect on the market for the original, Judge Pauley writes "There is no evidence in the record to suggest that Pound Cake usurps any potential market for JSR or its derivatives". This is, for sampling (and especially for small-scale sampling), almost always the case. Judge Pauley did note that Smith's work "targets a sharply different primary market" than Drake's. That probably should not be relevant to a factor-4 conclusion, but there it is.
Privacy
What have you got to hide?