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Last week, the CEO of AIG invoked the phrase "lynch mob" to compare the vitriolic reaction his company received about its employees' 2009 bonuses. Lynching was so common that a writer even referred to it being as "American as apple pie."
Something has been off all month and I just realized what it was. I haven’t been bookmarking enough books and hadn’t downloaded anything new to read in nearly 20 days. In general there just hasn’t been enough reading going on this month.
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar, a timely history of the constitutional changes that built equality into the nation’s foundation and how those guarantees have been shaken over time.
The Declaration of Independence announced equality as an American ideal, but it took the Civil War and the subsequent adoption of three constitutional amendments to establish that ideal as American law. The Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed all persons due process and equal protection of the law, and equipped black men with the right to vote. They established the principle of birthright citizenship and guaranteed the privileges and immunities of all citizens. The federal government, not the states, was charged with enforcement, reversing the priority of the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In grafting the principle of equality onto the Constitution, these revolutionary changes marked the second founding of the United States.
Eric Foner’s compact, insightful history traces the arc of these pivotal amendments from their dramatic origins in pre–Civil War mass meetings of African-American “colored citizens” and in Republican party politics to their virtual nullification in the late nineteenth century. A series of momentous decisions by the Supreme Court narrowed the rights guaranteed in the amendments, while the states actively undermined them. The Jim Crow system was the result. Again today there are serious political challenges to birthright citizenship, voting rights, due process, and equal protection of the law. Like all great works of history, this one informs our understanding of the present as well as the past: knowledge and vigilance are always necessary to secure our basic rights.
Whenever you compose (or edit) a post in WordPress, you will notice that there is a section called “Custom Field” where you can add custom variable (also known as meta-data) and value to your post. This is a very useful feature that allows you to customize each post with a custo...
This didn’t do what I wanted it to, but it did do something related that I was also missing.
Jamie Tanna (Jamie Tanna)Some recommendations for how to mark up licensing information with Microformats, for making license information machine-discoverable and machine-readable.
Great write up Jamie. Some interesting things to think about and lots of useful examples.
I suspect that for most personal websites the idea of fair use will give people enough protection for reply contexts. Of course it will depend on their jurisdiction as fair use can vary by country or potentially even within countries in terms of how it is applied.
I would almost have to think that barring particular legislation and precedent that people/companies who are explicitly providing Open Graph Protocol or similar meta data on their websites are explicitly granting a license to use that content as the only use for that data on most systems is to provide it for creating contexts on services like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Facebook likely created OGP as a proprietary format to give itself broad legal protection for just such use cases, though I suspect they parse pages and take titles or other snippets when OGP doesn’t exist. Naturally some large systems like WordPress may push OGP into code without the site’s owners being aware of what they’re potentially giving away, so the area is really murky at best. It would be beneficial to consult an attorney to see what their best advice might be or if there are precedents with respect to these areas.
For future reference, here is the relevant section for Fair Use from Title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States:
107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use40
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
Brett Kosinski (The “B” Ark)Taking back control of my content, I’m pulling my (modest) book reviews from Goodreads back to my blog. An underrated favourite of mine is Last Chance to See by the astounding Douglas Adams. #indieweb #books #ownyourdata
Congrats! I love the increasing number of people I’ve seen even in the last few days working on this! Are you using IndieBookClub.biz to post to your website?
I’m waiting for people to start documenting examples of owning their knitting on their websites and syndicating to/from Ravelry. #IndieWebKnittingChallenge