Recently upon popular demand, the Library Journal Club is returning at the USF Tampa Library! Barbara Lewis, Coordinator of Digital Initiatives and Services, announced the following:
Who: All invited, LeEtta Schmidt will facilitate the discussion
What: 3 Steps for Licensing Your 3D Printed Stuff – https://www.publicknowledge.org/documents/3-steps-for-licensing-your-3d-printed-stuff
Where: LIB 125D (or may be moved to Florida Studies Room if the 4th floor work is really ahead of schedule)
When: Monday, June 22, 12-1pm
Why: Professional development and peer engagement
Will a robot steal your job in the future? NPR has a new tool to check the probability that you’ll be replaced by a robot in 20 years. But 20 years is so far away. What about tomorrow? Like, literally tomorrow. We’ve come up with our own quiz to answer just that.
The legendary music producer follows up on his classic 20 year old rant about the music industry's awfulness with a modern, streaming-era wholesale dismissal of copyright and its business-models.
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Tired of Cthulu and zombies? Try some games about Dorian Gray, H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, and many other fruits of a jam themed around public domain works. Read the rest
But, ironically, while Java was intended to make programmers' lives easier, the court case between Oracle, Java’s owner, and Google over Google’s use of Java as the basis of its Android mobile operating system may make things considerably more difficult.
Google adopted Java for Android apps, using its own, rewritten version of the Java run-time environment (the Java virtual machine or VM) called Dalvik. The Oracle vs Google court case centres around the use of Java in Android, particularly in relation to Application Program Interface (API) calls.
An API is a standard set of interfaces that a developer can use to communicate with a useful piece of code – for example, to exchange input and output, access network connections, graphics hardware, hard disks, and so on. For developers, using an existing API means not having to reinvent the wheel by accessing ready-made code. For those creating APIs, making them publicly and freely accessible encourages developers to use them and create compatible software, which in turn makes it more attractive to end users.
For example, OpenGL and Microsoft’s DirectX are two APIs that provide a standardised interface for developers to access 3D graphics hardware, as used in videogames or modelling applications. Hardware manufacturers ensure their hardware is compatible with the API standard, the OpenGL Consortium and Microsoft update their APIs to ensure the latest hardware capabilities are addressed and games developers get a straightforward interface compatible with many different types of hardware, making it easier to create games.
Java runtime and compatible Android equivalent
Author provided
Fight for your right to API
Google designed Android so that Java developers could bring their code to Android by recreating (most of) the standard Java API calls used in the Java libraries and supported by the standard Java VM. The case revolves around whether doing this – by essentially re-creating the Java API rather than officially licensing it from Oracle – is a breach of copyright. If the case finds in favour of Oracle it will set a precedent that APIs are copyrightable, and so make developers lives a lot more legally complex.
To be clear, the case doesn’t revolve around any claim that Google reused actual code belonging to Oracle, but that the code it produced mimicked what Oracle’s Java run-time environment was capable of.
The initial finding came in May 2012, when a US court agreed with Google’s claim that using APIs them falls under fair use, and that Oracle’s copyright was not infringed. Then in May 2014, the US Federal Circuit reversed part of the ruling in favour of Oracle, especially related to the issue of copyright of an API. Now, at the US Supreme Court’s request, the White House has weighed in in Oracle’s favour.
Can you ‘own’ an API?
For most in the industry, a ruling that it’s possible to copyright an API would be a disaster. It would mean that many companies would have to pay extensive licence fees, and even face having to write their own APIs from scratch – even those needed to programmatically achieve only the simplest of things. If companies can prevent others from replicating their APIs through recourse to copyright law, then all third-party developers could be locked out. Also the actual call to the API and its functionality could be copyrighted too, so that the functionality would have to be different too, otherwise it would be a copy.
In the initial trial, District Judge William Alsup taught himself Java to learn the foundation of the language. He decided that to allow the copyrighting of Java’s APIs would allow the copyrighting of an improbably broad range of generic (and therefore uncopyrightable) functions, such as interacting with window menus and interface controls. The Obama administration’s intervention is to emphasise its belief that the case should be decided on whether Google had a right under fair use to use Oracle’s APIs.
It’s like the PC all over again
Something like this has happened before. When IBM produced its original PC in 1981 (the IBM 5150), a key aspect was access to the system calls provided by the PC BIOS, which booted the computer and managed basic hardware such as keyboard, monitor, floppy disk drive and so on. Without access to the BIOS it wasn’t possible to create software for the computer.
One firm, Compaq, decided to reverse-engineer the BIOS calls to create its own, compatible version – hence the term “IBM PC compatible” become standard language to describe a program that would run on an IBM model or any of the third-party hardware from other manufacturers that subsequently blossomed. IBM’s monopoly on the PC market was opened up, and the PC market exploded into what we see today – would this have happened had IBM been able to copyright its system calls?
So 20 years after the birth of Java, through the groundwork laid by its original creator, Sun Microsystems, Java has become one of the most popular programming languages in the world through being cross-platform and (mostly) open. But now it seems it ends in a trap. The wrong decision in this case could have a massive impact on the industry, where even using a button on a window could require some kind of licence – and licence fees. For software developers, it’s a horrible thought. Copyrighting APIs would lock many companies into complex agreements – and lock out many other developers from creating software for certain platforms.
For Google, there’s no way of extracting Java from Android now; its runaway success is bringing Google only a whole lot of problems. But as we go about building a world built on software, be assured that one way or another this ruling will have a massive effect on us all.
Bill Buchanan does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
Isabel Wixon is weird. Not only does she see dead things, but her list of friends consist of a talkative ventriloquist’s dummy and the gentlemanly spider that lives in her hair. Real friends? Too hard. Inventing friends is much easier.
Inventing the Boatman—a terrible monster that lures kids into a strange sleeping sickness and never lets them go—probably wasn’t one of her better ideas though.
Sound intriguing? That’s the summary for Kat M. Hawthorne’s brilliantly creepy middle grade horror novel The Boatman, and guess what? The cover artwork is by Yours Truly!
I was lucky enough to get to illustrate this amazing book as well as doing the cover art. The book releases on May 26th, so check back then for a peek at some of the interior artwork and some inside info on the process of creating it!
From the team behind Kurz Gesagt (In a Nutshell), this terrific animation about Net Neutrality that premiered at last night's Webby Awards in New York City.
European Digital Rights has published 300 Edrigrams -- crucial newsletters on all things digital in the EU -- and to celebrate, the 300th edition features 37 pages of news from the year 2025.
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The enemies of the Trans Pacific Partnership don't necessarily oppose free trade, but they're foursquare against the kind of corrupt, secretive negotiations that line the pockets of favored industries at the public's expense.
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For such a large and culturally diverse place, Europe has surprisingly little genetic variety. Learning how and when the modern gene-pool came together has been a long journey. But thanks to new technological advances a picture is slowly coming together of repeated colonisation by peoples from the east with more efficient lifestyles.
In a new study, we have added a piece to the puzzle: the Y chromosomes of the majority of European men can be traced back to just three individuals living between 3,500 and 7,300 years ago. How their lineages came to dominate Europe makes for interesting speculation. One possibility could be that their DNA rode across Europe on a wave of new culture brought by nomadic people from the Steppe known as the Yamnaya.
Stone Age Europe
The first-known people to enter Europe were the Neanderthals – and though they have left some genetic legacy, it is later waves who account for the majority of modern European ancestry. The first “anatomically modern humans” arrived in the continent around 40,000 years ago. These were the Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers sometimes called the Cro-Magnons. They populated Europe quite sparsely and lived a lifestyle not very different from that of the Neanderthals they replaced.
Then something revolutionary happened in the Middle East – farming, which allowed for enormous population growth. We know that from around 8,000 years ago a wave of farming and population growth exploded into both Europe and South Asia. But what has been much less clear is the mechanism of this spread. How much was due to the children of the farmers moving into new territories and how much was due to the neighbouring hunter-gathers adopting this new way of life?
In recent years, new technologies, including the ability to read the sequences of DNA in ancient bones, have shed much light on such questions. Researchers have found evidence in the DNA of modern Europeans for ancestry from both groups, as well as from a third fascinating people known as the Yamnaya.
The Yamnaya were nomadic herders from the steppe in what is now Ukraine and Russia. Archaeological evidence shows that they swept into Europe around 4,500 years ago, bringing with them horses, wheels, their famous “kurgan” burial mounds and quite possibly Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral tongue of most European, as well as many South Asian languages. Just like farming before it, their package of resources, technologies and behaviours gave them an advantage over the pre-existing Europeans and they seem to have left a substantial genetic legacy across Europe.
An 1899 painting by Viktor Vasnetsov imagining a kurgan burial rite.
wikimedia
Now, by looking at the variability between the Y chromosomes of 334 modern European and Middle-Eastern men, my colleagues and I have discovered another interesting pattern.
Y chromosomes are pieces of DNA that are very useful when studying populations. Every male has a Y chromosome, inherited from his father. Unlike most DNA, the Y chromosome is not shuffled as it is passed down, so change happens only slowly through mutation. Tracking these mutations allows scientists to create a family tree of fathers and sons going back through time. Each man may have several sons, or none – and while some branches die out each generation, others become more common and go on to produce many more branches themselves.
Genetic revelation
The new technology of “Next-Generation Sequencing” allowed us to identify many mutations and to make a more accurate and detailed tree than ever before. Figure 1 shows such a tree generated using our European samples.
Figure 1: the Y chromosomal tree generated from our European samples, with their most recent shared ancestor at the top. Different major branches are displayed in different colours.
Nature Communications
Two-thirds of modern European men are found on just three branches (called I1, R1a and R1b). Our results show that these branches each trace their paternal ancestry to a surprisingly recent individual (shown as red dots in Figure 1). By counting the number of mutations that have accumulated within each branch over the generations, we estimate that these three men lived at different times between 3,500 and 7,300 years ago. The lineages of each seem to have exploded in the centuries following their lifetimes, to dominate Europe.
Similarly, a maternal tree can be generated by looking at mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down solely from mothers to their children. However, when looking at this maternal tree, there is no similar explosion. This indicates that whatever factors were responsible for this pattern were specific to men. As the Y chromosome itself contains few genes that could give one man an evolutionary advantage over another, the explanations for this must be a mixture of chance and the cultural factors passed down alongside the genes.
It has previously been proposed that these very branches became established across Europe during the spread of the Yamnaya legacy. One might speculate that, if a male elite was established with the advantages of Yamnaya culture, along with a paternal ancestry from a very few Yamnaya and/or European Y lineages, they could have monopolised women and had children with a large number of partners. Over many generations, this could lead to those lineages becoming extremely widespread. In fact, similar inferences have previously been made for the situation when Neolithic farmers first arrived.
Then, between 2,100 and 4,200 years ago, in the Bronze Age, something else interesting started to happen. Our tree suddenly splits into many smaller branches (within the pink bar across Figure 1), meaning that the number of men reproducing was on the rise. It’s important not to fall into the trap of over-interpreting data but it is interesting to speculate as to what this might mean. Could it represent a return to a system of relatively monogamous relationships? Could it be that as the Yamnaya cultural package had become so widespread that it no longer gave anyone an advantage over anyone else?
For the moment such questions remain to be answered, but as each new study adds new evidence and the technology continues to improve, our picture becomes more complete and more fascinating.
Daniel Zadik works for the University of Leicester. He receives funding from the Wellcome Trust.
Marcus Aurelius was a Roman Emperor who ruled from 161AD to 180AD. By all accounts, Aurelius was a fair and benevolent ruler, unlike say, the real ‘mad king’ Caligula or Aurelius’ son and successor Commodus, who believed himself a demigod (Commodus was played by Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator). While his reign was great by Ancient Rome standards, Aurelius is remembered more today as a philosopher and is one of the three main figures of Stoicism (the other two being Seneca and Epictetus). Aurelius’s philosophy is known thanks to the personal journal that he wrote over many years while on military campaign, that was eventually published as the book Meditations. The book, written solely for himself, is a collection of stoic reminders on how to live a good life.
Stoicism is a complex philosophy and not just the ‘stiff upper lip’ ethos that most, including myself, stereotype it as (before I did research for this post that is). Its main tenets focus on finding happiness within yourself rather than chasing external and material goals, control of your emotions, not letting destructive emotions rule your mind and recognising that humans are one with nature. In today’s culture of immediate gratification and the relentless pursuit of more shiny things, it’s no wonder stoicism is enjoying a resurgence in popularity.
Would you eat at a market inspired by the 1982 dystopian classic Blade Runner? Anthony Bourdain is hoping you will. He’s currently negotiating to open a market in the renovated 100,000 square foot SuperPier in New York. The floor plan is said to evoke “the set decor of Blade Runner and the vibrant back alleys of Tokyo.”
Facebook lets people share their most intimate details online, engage in a comments war and like their grandma’s new profile picture all at the same time. Now, users can use it to get the news faster than...
The opah, or moonfish, a large colourful fish living across the world’s oceans, has been found to have a warm heart and maintain a high body temperature, according to a report in the journal Science. It’s a zoological curiosity and a remarkable evolutionary development for fish.
In the cold darkness of the deep sea there is a clear advantage to being warm-blooded and able to move faster than all the other creatures in order to hunt them down or to avoid being eaten. Mammals such as seals or whales exploit this to great effect. They take a big breath and dive down, insulated from the cold by a thick layer of blubber, to snatch live food such as squids, fish and shrimps from the depths.
Until now it was thought that fish couldn’t keep warm in this way because instead of breathing air they extract oxygen directly from the water through their gills. The advantage of this is obvious: fish can stay underwater indefinitely. However, although their blood may be warmed by muscle activity on every circuit of the body as it comes gushing out of the heart it goes directly into the gills and is instantly cooled to ocean temperature.
The gills are intricate oxygen exchangers. A tiny membrane one thousandth of a millimetre thick is all that separates the blood and the sea, which ensures instant transfer of oxygen into the red blood cells. Heat flows faster than oxygen, so no matter how much heat the fish might be generating, its blood is automatically chilled with every heart beat.
The opah (Lampris guttatus) has evolved a unique solution to this problem. A team from the NOAA SouthWest Fisheries Science Center in San Diego, led by Nicholas Wegner, analysed fish collected off the coast of central and southern California and discovered they had a special insulated network of blood vessels between the heart and the gills. These vessels act as a heat exchanger in which warm blood from the heart reheats oxygenated blood leaving the gills before it goes to the body. In this way heat is retained and not dissipated into the ocean.
This enables the opah to maintain a body temperature 5°C higher than the surrounding water and to dive 500 metres below the surface without cooling down. An insulating layer of fat in the skin keeps the heart, brain, muscles and vital organs warm.
Hiding in plain sight
This discovery is surprising since the opah is large and conspicuous; indeed, it’s already a favourite in fish markets and restaurants. Wegner and his colleagues deserve great credit for recognising and describing in detail the specialised gill heat exchangers that have been hidden right under the noses of fishermen and chefs for centuries.
The opah is shaped like a flattened disc with bright red fins. It grows up to two metres long and can weigh up to 80 kilograms. It’s a solitary fish, never caught in large numbers and is found in all oceans except polar seas. It swims by continuously flapping its pectoral fins in a similar way to the wings of a bird – and it is the energy from these muscles that provides most of the heat.
It has long been known that certain high-performance fishes such as sharks, tuna and swordfish can warm some muscles, the brain or their eyes using a dense web of warm and cold heat exchanging blood vessels around the area in question. However their blood is still cooled to ocean temperature each time it passes the gills, as in all other fishes. With its heart and all its vital organs working at an elevated temperature, the opah is the first fish that can be regarded as truly warm-blooded.
It is intriguing to speculate whether this is a new evolutionary trend for fish that in future might emulate the warm-bloodedness of birds and mammals. For most fishes living in tropical seas this adaptation is not necessary; the warm water temperature is ideal for life. But for the opah, which wants to stay down deeper for longer in order to hunt squid in cold waters, the warm-blood adaptation helps it outcompete partially heated rivals like the Albacore tuna.
This lucky opah has volunteered to help scientists record its body temperature following release.
NOAA Fisheries, CC BY-NC-SA
The mechanism can only work for large-bodied fish with space for insulation, meaning heat loss to the surroundings can be controlled. Even with specialised heat-retaining gills like the opah has, a small fish the size of a mouse would quickly cool down, the heat absorbing capacity of water is too great for any small animal to retain body warmth.
Even the opah is not able to compete with warm-blooded diving foragers such as penguins and seals, or whales in the polar seas. The fish is a zoological oddity belonging to a group that appeared in the last 100m years at the same time as mammals and birds evolved. We cannot know if the fossil species were warm-blooded and if we search further we may find other species with similar adaptations.
Imants Priede does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
Libraries have always been places where people gathered for intellectual inquiry, where communities could form around emerging ideologies that challenged the status quo.
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A panel of judges from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the NSA's mass phone-record collection program was not authorized by Congress in the Patriot Act.
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Senator Ron Wyden [D-OR] and Rep. Jared Polis [D-CO] have introduced legislation in the US Senate and House to fix one of the worst computer laws on the US statute books: section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which forbids breaking digital locks, even for lawful purposes.
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BOOM!Studios invited me to do a six page comic with the characters of Ben Bocquelet's THE AMAZING WORLD OF GUMBALL. Patrick Wirbeleit, the author of KISTE, came up with this cute story idea that makes a beautiful use of the medium.
Jem, the 80's animated TV show about an all-woman pop group, captured the decade's obsessions with image, celebrity, technology and wild neon-colored hair.
by Bryan W Schlake, Instructor in Rail Transportation Engineering at Pennsylvania State University
The National Transportation Safety Board made an 'urgent' recommendation to improve the safety of oil-carrying rail cars. Rick Wilking/Reuters
The Energy Information Administration recently released a map that reflects a massive change to our economy few people appreciate.
The graphic, shown below, shows the latest data on crude oil-by-rail movements around the country and the surge in oil shipments from North Dakota to the different corners of the country. Last year, trains transported more than one million barrels of oil per day in 2014 – a huge jump from 55,000 barrels per day in 2010.
Energy Information Administration
This increase in oil-by-rail transportation has come with a number of high-profile derailments, including an accident in Illinois just last month, which have caused substantial economic and environmental damage. Can technology improve safety? Yes. In much the way automobiles are becoming increasingly high-tech, various stakeholders in rail transportation are exploring various technologies to improve safety.
Building a better rail car (and maintaining it)
Railroads have already taken some steps to improve equipment with better braking systems and upgrades to the track infrastructure. New practices can improve safety as well, including better track inspections, speed restrictions for oil trains and choosing routes to reduce exposure to population centers. Railroads have also increased the use of freight car defect detectors installed alongside the the tracks that automatically identify mechanical defects on the railcars based on force, temperature, sound, or visual measurements.
The industry standard needs to be improved, say safety officials, but it’s unclear who will pay for upgrades.
Roy Luck, CC BY
Many of these technologies are already being implemented by the railroads both to improve safety and to increase economic benefits. In addition to minimizing the safety risk associated with derailments, improved track and vehicle inspection practices help to reduce the potential for delays, which can cost railroads hundreds of dollars per hour.
An economic analysis from 2011 estimated that the annual train delay costs due to railcar defects (resulting in trains stopping unexpectedly enroute) was over US$15 million for all US Class I railroads. For comparison, each year the four largest US Class I railroads spend an average of $35 million on track and equipment damages due to main-line derailments. Thus, the economic drivers behind the reduction of derailments and train delays are quite substantial.
Federal agencies and lawmakers are also working to ensure that federal safety requirements and public policy address the new transportation landscape resulting from the domestic oil boom and increased imports from Canada. The federal government is currently considering new safety standards for improved tank cars specifically designed for the transportation of crude oil.
However, movement towards such legislation has presented considerable challenges due to the fact that the vast majority of tank cars are owned by private companies other than the railroads that transport them.
As a result, questions arise regarding who should bear the economic burden of replacing and/or retrofitting the crude oil tank car fleet. Due to safety and economic incentives mentioned above, some railroads have already begun to purchase their own improved tank cars, but this has not become a universal trend across the industry.
Role of research
Researchers, too, are exploring how technology can improve safety in a variety of ways, including:
Improved Tank Car Design: The Association of American Railroads (AAR) is working to promote tougher federal standards for tank cars carrying crude oil and other hazardous liquids. Extensive research is ongoing both within the Federal Railroad Administration and at various universities to assess tank car safety and develop an optimized tank car design: Cooperative Research in Tank Car Safety Design.
Acoustic bearing detectors, the white-colored machines on either side of the tracks, take sound measurements which allow railroads to predict when railcar roller bearings are beginning to wear out.
Bryan Schlake, Author provided
Track and Infrastructure Inspection: Railroad track failures have been found to be a leading derailment cause in the US. As a result, railroads have begun to perform more track inspections, including the use of advanced track geometry vehicles – which use laser systems to measure the profile of the rail – on routes carrying crude oil trains. Ultrasonic rail inspection methods as well as ground-penetrating radar systems are also being developed to improve the ability of railroads to detect track defects.
Risk Assessment: Railroad transportation risk research associated with hazardous materials is ongoing. Risk assessment has included rail defect inspection, evaluating routing and train speed, track quality and an integrated framework to reduce risk. This framework addresses operating practices, train routing, infrastructure, and car design to identify the financial and safety risk associated with hazardous materials transport by rail.
Automated Condition Monitoring Technologies: Various wayside detector systems have been developed and installed across the country at locations adjacent to track to assess the condition of locomotive and freight car components enroute. These systems incorporate various technologies to identify critical defects resulting in both safety and economic benefits. Some key technologies include:
infrared temperature sensors used to measure overheated wheels/bearings
accoustic bearing detectors to identify worn roller bearings in railcars
High-tech rail: a closer look at an acoustic bearing detector.
Bryan Schlake, Author provided
laser systems to measure wheel profiles and identify worn wheels
machine vision systems to detect low air-hoses, structural defects and broken or missing railcar safety appliances
load impact sensors to identify damaged wheels that are out-of-round or exhibit flat spots.
Advanced Braking Systems: Both technology and operating practices can play a role in improving braking for oil trains. Some have suggested the use of Electronically Controlled Pneumatic (ECP) brakes. ECP brakes allow for faster application of the brakes on all cars in a train using an electric signal, instead of an air signal, to initiate a brake application.
ECP brakes have been used on a limited basis for coal trains, but the costs have not been proven to justify the safety and economic benefits. A better option may be the use of either:
distributed power, where locomotives are dispersed throughout the train (i.e. front, rear and even in the center) and/or
two-way end-of-train devices (EOTD) that allow brake signals to be initiated from the rear of the train.
Both of these operating practices result in faster braking and reduce “run-in”, where the cars in the front of the train begin braking before those on the rear, causing the rear cars to “run-into” the cars in front of them, creating higher in-train forces. After these measures were proposed by the US Department of Transportation in July of 2014, US Class I railroads agreed to implement enhanced braking in the form of distributed power or two-way EOTDs on all oil trains.
A derailment in Lynchburg, Virginia in 2014 emptied at least one car’s load of crude into the James River
Waterkeeper Alliance Inc., CC BY-NC-ND
Positive Train Control (PTC): This technology will automatically slow or stop a train to prevent a collision or derailment due to human error, such as speeding or missing a signal. After a federal mandate in 2008, railroads have begun to develop and install this GPS-based safety overlay system, which will eventually cover more than 60,000 miles of track in the US.
Emergency Response: Railroads are working together with various organizations to improve community safety through emergency response training.
Reducing risk
In addition, new technologies are being developed to improve the speed and effectiveness of environmental cleanup efforts. For example, researchers at Penn State University have developed a patented technology called Petro-SAP to absorb oil from the environment after a spill. Technologies like this can be used in the future to mitigate environmental impact of train related oil spills.
While the risk associated with oil train derailments has not been eliminated, the transportation of crude oil by rail has certainly become safer through extensive research, development and implementation of new technologies.
Continued efforts by railroads, government agencies, research institutions and universities will continue to improve the safety of crude oil transportation by rail, reducing risk and potentially alleviating public fears associated with railroad transportation.
Bryan W Schlake does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
It's been a long time since there was a new issue, but that changes next week, with the release of issue no. 7: Chance! More info soon. But if you sign up for the email list today (look to the column on the right), you'll be able to pre-order the issue this week and recieve it before anyone else. For now, here's a bonus, web-only story by Savannah Schroll Guz. You can also find her on twitter and on facebook.
Don't look -- unless you are a neighbour, that is ...
There is no doubt that privacy concerns related to the use of personal data, including one's own images and portraits, have become of pre-eminent interest especially in the view of technological developments that permit not only a precise identification and tracking of individuals but also the viral dissemination of the data gathered through the internet. The basics of data/privacy protection can be summarised in the right of natural persons to a lawful processing of their bundle of personal information which must be collected for legitimate purposes and with the consent of the interested party, provided that such a right can be limited by derogations made on the basis of countervailing interests of equal rank.
Data protection is a matter of national law, which may lead to discrepancies and/or conflict among jurisdictions. While the European Union waits for the reform of data protection legislation, in New York State the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court explained in its judgment in Foster v Svenson how much legislation may need to catch up with the speedy evolution of technology in order to prevent undesired invasions of personal lives within our globalised society.
Are long lenses only useful for bird-watching sessions?
Arne Svenson, a critically acclaimed fine art and cat photographer[and not to be confused with Nils Svensson, here], clandestinelyshot his neighbours' environmental portraits by means of a bird-watching telephoto lens “inherited” from a friend, from the window of his apartment and through the glass façade of the building in which they lived. The photographic project, called “The Neighbors”, sought to represent the photographer's analysis on the “anonymity” of urban life. It was exhibited in galleries in Los Angeles and New York City. In some of the photographs displayed in artist's website, the subjects' faces were partially recognisable.
Was Snowy's consent sought -- or given? Does it even matter ...?
Among the photographs were some that showed the plaintiffs' children, aged three and one, without sufficiently obscuring their faces. Once the plaintiffs learnt of those photographs through the promotion of the exhibition in the media they sought their removal from the exhibition, the gallery's and the defendant's websites [an online check indicates that this attempt appears to have been successful, at the time of drafting this post, but following the judgment at issue]. Svenson did not comply with this demand with regard to a picture of the three-year-old girl in her swimsuit. That photograph was used in the project's advertisement on a New York City television broadcast and on other media, including NBC's “Today Show”. Finally, the depicted building's address was revealed in print and online.
The plaintiffs sued for injunctive relief and damages for the statutory tort of invasion of privacy and the common law tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress. However, the Supreme Court dismissed their complaints and sided with the defendant, who had pleaded theFirst Amendment defence against the plaintiffs' privacy claims. The Court affirmed that the photographs' publication, sale and use could not be impeded. On appeal, the decision was confirmed.
First, the Appellate Division held that Svenson's conduct did not fall under the scope of protection of the statutory tort of invasion of privacy, according to Articles 50 and 51 of the New York Civil Rights Law. In particular section 50 reads as follows:
A person, firm or corporation that uses for advertising purposes, or for the purposes of trade, the name, portrait or picture of any living person without having first obtained the written consentof such person, or if a minor of his or her parent or guardian, is guilty of a misdemeanour.
Article 51 adds a proviso that
“nothing contained in this Article shall be so construed as to prevent any person, firm or corporation, practicing the profession of photography, from exhibiting in or about his or its establishment specimens of the work of such establishment, unlessthe same is continued by such person, firm or corporation after written notice objecting thereto has been given by the person portrayed”.
Allowed in NY
The Court of Appeals applied the settled case law on the newsworthy and public concern exemption, as construed in Howell v New York Post Co,granting art works the same leeway as is accorded to the press in the name of the public interest in the dissemination of images and aesthetic values. As affirmed in the relevant case-law, this exemption covers various types of artistic expression, photographs included, in so far as their publication is not to be considered for mere advertising and trade purposes, as required by the statutory tort of invasion of privacy.
That was the case for Svenson's photographs, stated the Court, since the plaintiffs failed to prove those purposes and did not contest the photographs' status as art works. No argument was submitted as to the artistic idea of urban anonymity elaborated in the photographic project. Could Svenson not have undertaken his urban investigation after previously advising his neighbours accordingly and obtaining their previous consent without photographically trespassing into their home?
Secondly, in regard to the allegation of the improper manner in which the pictures were taken, not even the plea based on the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress prospered. The Court did not find Svenson's conduct sufficiently “atrocious, indecent and utterly despicable” as to overcome the First Amendment protection, considering the high threshold for retaining outrageous behaviour [as construed in Howell v New York Post Co],even although minors were involved in the present case.
Quoting the judgment's last paragraph, there is nothing else to add, other than
“Undoubtedly, like plaintiffs, many people would be rightfully offended by the intrusive manner in which the photographs were taken in this case. However, such complaints are best addressed to the Legislature —- the body empowered to remedy such inequities (see Black v Allstate Ins. Co., 274 AD2d 346 [1st Dept 2000]; Yankelevitz v Royal Globe Ins. Co., 88 AD2d 934 [2d Dept 1982], affd 59 NY2d 928 [1983]). Needless to say, as illustrated by the troubling facts here, in these times of heightened threats to privacy posed by new and ever more invasive technologies, we call upon the Legislature torevisit this important issue, as we are constrained to apply the law as it exists”.
The idea that the Copyright Office should move out of the Library of Congress was first raised some years ago by Bruce Lehman, who was, at the time, the Director of the Patent and Trademark Office. The idea seemed to be that the Copyright Office should join the PTO as an agency within the Commerce Department. That idea did not seem to be very well-received by many, and I had not heard of the discussion for a while. But apparently the possibility of moving the CO is still kicking around, and last month current Registrar of Copyright Marie Pallante sent a letter about the topic to Rep. John Conyers, the Ranking Member of the House Committee on the Judiciary. Her letter was requested after a hearing about the functions and resources of the CO held back in February.
Pallante’s letter makes interesting reading, especially if one is interested in the inside politics of Executive Branch appointments, separation of powers, and the like. The bottom line, however, is that Registrar Pallante thinks that the Copyright Office should be separated from the Library of Congress, should not move into the Commerce Department, and should instead become an independent agency with its leader directly appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. There has been some discussion about this letter and the ramifications of the debate among my colleagues, and I want to consider two issues that I think are of interest to a wider audience, while admitting that I am shamefully cribbing ideas from those colleagues.
The first issue is why the Copyright Office should leave the Library of Congress in the first place. Registrar Pallante offers several reasons in her letter. One is the claim that the Library of Congress is in a Constitutionally awkward position, since it is apparently an Executive branch agency (the Librarian is appointed by the President), but its functions, including advising Congress about copyright law, are at least partially legislative. While I see the issue, it is not clear to me why it is more pressing for the CO than it is for other offices within the Library, including, for example, the Congressional Research Service. Nor do I fully understand why making the CO an independent agency, with its head still appointed by the President, would solve this dilemma. There is certainly an issue of prestige here, but I am not convinced that it is enough to justify a new Federal agency.
The other reason Pallante offers for moving out of the Library of Congress are the “operational challenges,” including staffing and pay. All bureaucracies are difficult, of course, and rumor has it the LoC is more difficult than most these days. But, again, it is not obvious that a new agency would necessarily be better. Everything would depend on the personnel and the budget. More troubling, however, are the footnotes in Pallante’s letter that refer to the “conflict of interest” between the CO and the Library, which apparently was mentioned by some witnesses during those February hearings.
Is there a conflict of interest between a library and the office that administers our national copyright policy? If there is, what does that tell us? To my mind, it suggests that our copyright policy has gotten out-of-line. We may be developing an approach that sees copyright as a trade regulation that protects specific industries, not as a policy decision about how best to ensure the continuous creation of new works of knowledge and culture.
This concern was clearly raised during the hearings, where Rep. Zoe Lofgren challenged the assumption that the Copyright Office was no longer a good fit with the Library of Congress by suggesting that over the years, the librarians have been better at understanding copyright than some staff at the CO. To her credit, in her letter Pallante does not endorse the idea of moving the CO to Commerce, where the symbolism of copyright as a sort of trade regulation would be even stronger. But I would argue that our predecessors knew what they were doing when they centralized copyright services inside the Library of Congress. Libraries epitomize the social benefits that copyright is supposed to support, and the “optics” of moving the Office, at least, would inevitably undermine that long-standing commitment to the public good.
In fact, if the CO was located in the Commerce Department, as my colleague Brandon Butler points out, it would have to consider all aspects of commerce related to copyright, including those industries that depend on fair use and other copyright exceptions. The wrong-headed narrative about the competition between the content industry and the technology sector, with the former held up as copyright dependents and the latter as modern-day pirates, would be harder to sustain. The unfortunate possibility exists that the CO’s desire for independence represents a desire to become even less balanced in its approach than it has been in the past, focusing entirely on its perceived role as enforcer of rules that protect Hollywood from the threatening innovations of Silicon Valley. An office in the Commerce Department would be less able to take sides.
In terms of rationale and purpose, the Library of Congress is a good fit for the Copyright Office, even if the CO does not, under its current leadership, recognize this. If a new home is really necessary, Butler makes the wonderful suggestion that the Department of Education should be considered. The DoE, more than Commerce and maybe even more than the Library of Congress, could refocus copyright policy on the reason we have these laws in the first place — to promote the progress of knowledge and science. If we lose track of that purpose, it becomes an open question whether we need the law or the CO at all.
Recently upon popular demand, the Library Journal Club is returning at the USF Tampa Library! Barbara Lewis, Coordinator of Digital Initiatives and Services, announced the following:
The enemies of the Trans Pacific Partnership don't necessarily oppose free trade, but they're foursquare against the kind of corrupt, secretive negotiations that line the pockets of favored industries at the public's expense.
Senator Ron Wyden [D-OR] and Rep. Jared Polis [D-CO] have 
