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Comment Some Public Records ... You Know ... Just in Case (Score 5, Informative) 448

So a whois.net domain name lookup on their site yielded nothing. And there are suspiciously no patents mentioning "wetag" or "ifind" and the names they listed (Dr. Paul McArthur) are in patents but for cold fusion BS in California.

Surely, though, they must have registered the "iFind" trademark? And if you search on TESS we find:

Owner (APPLICANT) WeTag, Inc. CORPORATION TEXAS 3309 San Mateo Drive Plano TEXAS 75023

With an attorney listed as "Richard G. Eldredge" which corresponds to a local attorney. Before you deploy the door kickers to lynch somebody, that address is just somebody's $200,000 house and could possibly be a random address used by a jerk. Remember that it's entirely possible that this is all a front by some other actor and someone was paid western union/bitcoin to register this trademark through this attorney without realizing they were just being used by literally anyone in the world ... of course, kickstarter should have even better transaction details (hopefully).

Comment Re:Just Maybe... (Score 1) 435

IT, at least if you listen to the media and the politicians, is currently one of the most important industries that the US has. While it may come down to preference, we don't want to have a culture that in some way discourages people who haven't historically had opportunity from one of the healthiest sectors of the economy. We have some pretty strong statistics that say something is going on here and that something is going on from middle school to end of career. What this means is we need to find out what is happening because we may be failing at even conservative ideas of equality: equal opportunity.

Comment Re:Key Point Missing (Score 2) 34

The summary misses a key point. Yes they scan and store the entire book, but they are _NOT_ making the entire book available to everyone. For the most part they are just making it searchable.

Agreed that it's not in the summary, but as you correctly note, it's just a "summary". Anyone who reads the underlying blog post will read this among the facts on which the court based its opinion: "The public was allowed to search by keyword. The search results showed only the page numbers for the search term and the number of times it appeared; none of the text was visible."

So those readers who RTFA will be in the know.

Submission + - Appeals Court finds scanning to be fair use in Authors Guild v Hathitrust

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: In Authors Guild v Hathitrust, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has found that scanning whole books and making them searchable for research use is a fair use. In reaching its conclusion, the 3-judge panel reasoned, in its 34-page opinion (PDF), that the creation of a searchable, full text database is a "quintessentially transformative use", that it was "reasonably necessary" to make use of the entire works, that maintaining maintain 4 copies of the database was reasonably necessary as well, and that the research library did not impair the market for the originals. Needless to say, this ruling augurs well for Google in Authors Guild v. Google, which likewise involves full text scanning of whole books for research.

Comment Re:Irresponsible (Score 1) 354

Both sides want to keep more people alive and they are firmly convinced the other side's opinion on how to do that will fail miserably. My parents live in a relatively quiet neighborhood but there was an incident where three unarmed teenagers beat an elderly man to death for money and medication. They were strongly resistant to even toy guns in the house but now they own one because they simply would be overcome if anyone broke in. Gun deaths would drop without guns and maybe even overall deaths, but your position makes the elderly, the female, the weak far more tempting targets than the strong young men you think of as gun nuts. That to me is unconscienable unless you are severely reducing overall violence and that doesn't seem to follow the worldwide stats.

Comment Re: Irresponsible (Score 1) 354

That is a rather strange presumption that something that would cause enough unrest to cause the gun owning segment of the US population to revolt would leave the military intact. If normal firearms are worthless in battle then why does the government keep spending my tax money to make sure our soldiers have them?

Submission + - Councilman/Open Source Developer submits Open Source bill (gothamgazette.com)

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: New York City Council Member Ben Kallos (KallosEsq), who also happens to be a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) developer, just introduced legislation to mandate a government preference for FOSS and creating a Civic Commons website to facilitate collaborative purchasing of software. He argues that NYC could save millions of dollars with the Free and Open Source Software Preferences Act 2014, pointing out that the city currently has a $67 million Microsoft ELA. Kallos said: "It is time for government to modernize and start appreciating the same cost savings as everyone else."

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