Entries Tagged 'education' ↓

I have been working on a book on how to be an Amazon seller, some of the tricks and tips that I have learned in nearly a year of selling books on Amazon. Just as I was getting into getting the proof developed with the publisher, along comes a person threatening to sue because they were quoted in the book. The interesting debate about Fair Use, permission, and the rest of it, and in looking at what passes the “reasonable person test”, the book got pulled.

Specifically this is the area that I seriously would run into trouble with. From the Copyright Office notice on what is fair use the following four rules apply in determining what is and what is not fair use. The interesting part is that I can punch holes in the argument on why you want to sue me based on these four rules.

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes

I would fail this test, as it is a book for commercial purposes, in other words, I plan on making money off the quotes that I would have used. While it would be great to call it educational, and the express purpose of the book is to educate people on how to be a better Amazon seller, it still falls under commercial purposes. The idea of writing the book is to make money.

The problem here is that this will require a substantial rewrite of the book to deal with this, and rather than directly quoting, provide the resource name, and where they can get additional information. While not optimal, this would seem the best way to work on removing potentially infringing information out of the book, and getting back into the publishing track.

2. The nature of the copyrighted work

The nature of the copyrighted work, the quotes are pulled from a forum, that has a clear copyright notice on the Amazon site, but since the quotes were pulled from there, it is possible to ask Amazon for permission to quote from the seller’s community. This would be the optimal way of getting around this, and the copyright office points out that if in doubt, seek permission, or show that you made every single attempt that a reasonable person could make in getting permission to use their content.

3. Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole

There are 4 specific quotes that need to be seriously revised to meet the substantiality portion, while the “300 word limit” was more of a secret handshake, with the nature of copyright rules, fair use in flux, with the confusing court cases around them, erring on the side of caution here is a much better idea. Cutting down or removing the quotes in its entirety would be the best way of going around this in lieu of getting permission from Amazon to use quotes from the system.

4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

This one is interesting, and could go either way in terms of how it is interpreted, the effect on the potential market is negligible. There is no Amazon book that is an excerpt from the sellers community, Amazon has not monetized the site at all, no ads, and the community participants self post information there. What would be a detriment though in the longer run would be if people thought they could be or would be quoted in a book, the loss of trust in the forum. While public, the impression that I get is that people believe that they are talking in a trusted community of peers, and to have their information published in a book is a breach of trust. That would have an influence on the marketability and use of the Amazon Sellers forum in the longer run, people might stop using it, which could have an influence or impact on the 3rd party sellers system used at Amazon.

Interesting in how you can look at things to go for or against the idea of “fair use” when looking at how the publication of words and idea’s in a book is somehow more substantial than the information that is put on a public forum.

In the mean time, the book has been pulled as a just in case, and a substantial rewrite needs to take place to meet a definitive “reasonable person test” when it comes to fair use.

Tags: Amazon, sellers, 3rd party sellers, community, book, fair use, copyright, publishing, pain

Kreativraschen has an English language blog entry on how Germany’s new data retention law is altering human behavior when it comes to using telecommunications systems, such as the phone. Germany enacted a data retention law that requires telecommunications companies to log who called who and store that information for six months so that law enforcement could use the data if they needed to.

The Forsa institute did a survey of a little over 1000 people to see how the data retention law altered their behavior if any. Their results are very interesting.

* 73% know about the data retention
* 11% said that they had already abstained from using phone, cell phone or e-mail in certain occasions
* 6% believe to receive less communication since the beginning of the data retention
* 52% said they probably would not use telecommunication for contacts like drug counselors, psychotherapists or marriage counselors because of data retention
And the sad fact: 48% still think that data retention is a necessary step for crime prevention.

Source: Kreativraschen

What is interesting is one of the side bar comments on the entry about people not calling their therapists, which can be bad depending on how much the person under therapy is in trouble mentally or emotionally. There is also the argument that beyond crime, this information can be used to determine what journalist broke what story, and that if using the phone, journalists should not be doing so when contacting confidential or private contacts.

In all this is an interesting survey, well worth taking a look and dumping it into babel fish to get the full translation and the full impact.

Tags: germany, data, retention, law, user, habits, altered

Truly interesting, and thanks to CBS for allowing the embed below, but this 60 minutes clip talks about how to deal with Millenials as they hit the work force. Managers and co-workers beware, the “coddled” are just not prepared to work for your company.

How much of this is fear, how much of this is pandering to an agenda is anyone’s best guess, because while the video is a broad paintbush, parental interference is something to think about. While I have yet to have a parent call me wanting to know why Junior got canned, the potential is there.

Ahh yes, your precious snowflake is about to hit the cold harsh reality of business, where it is not merit, not everyone wins, and sometimes people get their feelings hurt. The oddity in this is that one of the interviewed says that it is ok to have four jobs in a year, guaranteed as a hiring manager, four jobs in one year is going to make a hiring person stop and think.

While it is great to have time to go do the things you want to do, and many companies are just not there, this video raises some interesting provocative ideas. Can business accommodate the millenials, and 20 years from now, who will win the change of culture?

Tags: snowflake, millenials, jobs, working, fantasy, 60 minutes, paintbrush, thanks

This one is interesting, with the democratic race sewn up for the presidential primary, who has a more comprehensive technology platform, McCain or Obama. It is still Obama who actually has a technology platform to work with.

Read Obama’s technology platform here and it is enough to warm up the hearts of many folks who want a free and open internet. As well as acknowledging that we have a generation of people who are hitting the job market who know how to use the internet. Web 2.0 over the last few years has transformed how we do things, along with updating our infrastructure to manage all the content that is coming as well as what is already here.

John McCain does not have a technology platform on his web site, there is no way to tell how he plans on integrating technology, updating, or otherwise using technology to further American business.

That is the sharp demarcation between the two candidates for people who follow technology, one who acknowledges we have technology and can use it to our benefit, and a candidate that does not have a plan on his web site. Frankly we would love to see some kind of platform on McCains web site about where he wants to take technology.

There are a lot of questions that need to be answered that only an informed policy can provide. Right now we are seeing a subtle erosion of what we can do in relationship to fair use, copyright, time shifting, reselling, and a host of other things we can do with the materials, entertainment and goods that we purchase. The head long collision between corporations and users that we have all been suffering under requires a strong leader to bring some sanity back to where we are going with Web 2.0.

Maybe we will get lucky, at least there is one candidate left on the field that has an idea of what they want to do. As well Obama has been very effective in using the internet to get the word out, something to think about as we vote in five months. If you can use it, or have those around you use the internet effectively, we might just stand a chance at copyright reform, patent reform, data portability, security, privacy, education, and just about everything else that relies on technology today.

Tags: obama, mccain, technology, platform, politics, participation, future

I know it has been very quiet this week on Techwag, but what has been keeping me busy is teaching Web 2.0 to some great students over at CityU of Seattle. The video is being edited, but these are some rush photo’s from the shoot. There is nothing better than teaching students how to use a video camera, record, lights, and getting support from two program managers.

Two of the students were working out how to frame the shots when the speaker is ready to start pacing the front of the classroom. This is an excellent shot of them collaborating on how the video will be shot.

This is one of the senior faculty members giving their presentation on equity markets and debt instrument management. This looks like it will be a lot of fun, especially as they teach stock trading, debt instruments, and how to run a financial portfolio.

This is me preparing for my coverage of the information systems program at the school, in which Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 technologies are going to be a big part of the program. I can honestly say, that this is going to be a kick butt program.

Of course it is just exciting to watch someone speak through a camera.

In all you cannot beat the experience that we had over the week, from orchestrating the whole production to actually getting to shoot and capturing video. It should be very interesting to see what comes of this project. In the longer run though even if we don’t ever use an ounce of video, or the videos are so poor that they cannot be used, this is still one great learning experience. It was also fun that CityU of Seattle would let me use their facilities to do this.

Tags: cityu of seattle, web 2.0, web 3.0, video, shoot, students, learning, education, teaching, programs, fun

Interesting that another word press blogger would suddenly wake up and find themselves in the “Google has banned me” listing, and frankly it is important to get these stories out. Not that anyone is going to blame Google, word press, or space aliens for the recent spate of hacking against many sites, the problem is with the outcome. The idea of being labeled malware, or being banned from the Google index altogether can be very lonely when you are wondering what you did, what is wrong, and why you were banned.

Often the answer is not immediately apparent, we got lucky because we got a “your site is a malware site” warning. Others not so, like Ryan Stewart.

But I think that’s kind of the problem. I had no warning, no heads up. I like to think I’m a pretty good Netizen - not some SEO firm trying to game the system. My Page Rank is (was) supposedly a 9 for goodness sake (which of course makes me more attractive to spammers). And yet I got totally removed. I use Google because it DOES keep search results free of spam. That’s great. But I realized last night that Google is holding all the cards. They can do whatever the heck they want to. So Microsoft, keep going after search. Get us better results, give webmasters more options. Startups, keep trying to find the weak link. Make Google make itself better. Improve the search experience across the board for everyone - users and webmasters. Source: Ryan Stewart

There are a lot of ramifications, that Ryan is going to see in the future, not just the ones that happened to us, loss of visitors, page rank, time, money, energy, effort. With Yahoo also starting to ban sites for malware, with Firefox three not allowing people to go to sites that have been hacked, there is both good and bad here.

The good part, and this is the very good part, and part of being part of a greater organism, is that people will no longer able to go to a hacked site, they will have to make it a conscious choice to go to a site that is hosting malware links or actual malware. We have needed this for a very long time, and needs to be done. Even though we were hacked, people were saved the problem of this site delivering malware links. This is all good.

The bad part is that there is a total lack of communication, often we stumble across the fact that we have been banned or labeled with few if any idea why. I got lucky, I am a security engineer and had a clue on how to look for and delete malware links. I knew of tools, technology, and processes that would allow me to clean up the site quickly. The even worst part is that the vast majority of people are not security engineers; they have no idea how to even start cleaning up their site.

While having the internet policed for malware and blocking those results in both Yahoo and Google now is a good thing. People need to learn to clean up after an attack, no your hosting company will not help you, it is your site. The local computer geek kid down the road might be able to, but you will have to pay. If there is a company out there that could fit this into a service model, spending days cleaning up someone’s site, then this might work out ok as a business model. As the search engines get into a bigger policing role, the need to have people who can really clean up the mess is something that in the longer run is going to be needed.

Comcast buys Plaxo, which is making me really thank everyone that I never really got into plaxo, and while I am a comcast customer, it might be time to bail. Here is the nightmare scenario, comcast knows what I watch, and if I used plaxo it will also know my friends, and they will monitor what I watch, what I download, where I surf. Let alone all the traffic shaping controversies of the last year.

Habits, friends, what I watch, all owned by one company. If you bought the comcast package of services just add to that list.

This is the company that wanted to add a video camera to their set top boxes to know who was in the room.

Sorry if I am not convinced that this is the greatest deal in the world, many of the privacy, security, and personal issues are going to fly under the wire given the number of folks who are all thinking this is a great idea (back to techmeme).

Frankly it might be a great deal from the business side, but for everyone else, it might not be a great deal. When the first egregious privacy issue arises, everyone will freak out, and they need to. But right now you can do something for yourself, find the competitor that doesn’t have the same ethical challenges that comcast has.

ReadWriteWeb brings up the same questions on ethics that we are, two ethically challenged companies merging is not all that great for the customers. The most troublesome is that customers are going to remain blissfully unaware of the controversy until there is a major incident somewhere in the chain. While those that are technically savvy can figure this one out fairly quickly, the average person who is able to barely surf the Internet, they are going to be the real losers in this deal. They won’t know, they don’t want to know.

This also bring ups one other nagging issue of the “walled garden”, if Comcast is able to make their own “AOL Equivalent” as a walled garden of services and goods only for comcast customers, everyone will loose here as well. Walled gardens, traffic shaping, advertising, and a total life media intersection, on an ISP that has issues, this might not be a good thing for customers.

Tags: comcast, plaxo, buy out, deal, bad, customers, ethics, challenges, privacy, issues