I understand that Yale and Harvard have a rivalry and compete for students. Out of curiosity, how might Harvard have handled a similar situation?
The Great Firewall of Yale
121–130 of 135 posts
Re: The Great Firewall of Yale
#122To focus only on the actual website issue:
Could it be in order to govern the information, rather than "copyright" per say?
My thinking is that, from Yale's perspective, having a 3rd party (and especially a student) be the go-to source for course info might be a bad shift in power.
When it's all in good kind, it may not look bad, and even if it is well intended, there are a few problems that could arise:
- Bugs in crawling code causing some course information to be false, omitted or stale.
- Changes in OCI causing said crawler to keep stale data and fail to update. - Students complaining to Yale with wrong information.
all the way to the more paranoid:
- 3rd party maliciously falsifying information.
- Generel confusion as to which information is reliable, driving students to have a more, rather than less, difficult time finding and verifying class scheduling.
I'm all for net neutrality and strongly against censorship in all forms, but "playing devil's advocate" can't there be a somewhat "legitimate" reason to shut the 3rd party page off for Yale students?
Re: The Great Firewall of Yale
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maintaining data integrity is probably fairly important to them. By allowing a separate service which is used by a significant portion of the students, the system is open to serious exploitation. Professors can get black-balled by disgruntled system administrators or hackers, just by screwing with the numbers. Yale owning both the data and the interface is understandably important to them, though this might be an opp…
Blackmail is illegal, and intentionally screwing with ratings is almost certainly libel. Both of those hypothetical can be dealt with by the law already; I don' think there is much sense in warping copyright law to protect you from the possibility of those things happening.
If you improve ratings artificially, that's probably not libel. Would it be any kind of crime?
Re: The Great Firewall of Yale
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blackmail is illegal, and intentionally screwing with ratings is almost certainly libel. Both of those hypothetical can be dealt with by the law already; I don' think there is much sense in warping copyright law to protect you from the possibility of those things happening.
If you improve ratings artificially, that's probably not libel. Would it be any kind of crime?
Would it even really be a concern? If a professor had their own rating raised, they could be dealt with internally.
Re: The Great Firewall of Yale
#125To focus only on the actual website issue: Could it be in order to govern the information, rather than "copyright" per say? My thinking is that, from Yale's perspective, having a 3rd party (and especially a student) be the go-to source for course info might be a bad shift in power . When it's all in good kind, it may not look bad, and even if it is well intended, there are a few problems that could arise: - Bugs in c…
> can't there be a somewhat "legitimate" reason
Of course there can be legitimate reasons. If the 3rd party inserted wrong data, or did 1,000 requests per second, causing high load on the servers, then I would call it legitimate.
However, the ones you've listed are not legitimate, because of the term "could." Anything could go wrong. An editorial in the local newspaper could have wrong information about the courses, but that doesn't justify the university excluding that edition of the newspaper from campus stores.
Things go wrong all the time. Someone may have printed out an old copy of the schedule, and based decisions on that. Or left a page on the screen for a week. Which means the system must already have support for people using stale information. Anything else is unreasonable. So long as the additional burden is not substantially higher than background, I don't believe there is a "legitimate" justification here.
As for copyright, this sounds very much like like Feist v. Rural. Quoting from Wikipedia: "Feist had copied information from Rural's telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural sued for copyright infringement. The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable and that therefore no infringement existed."
Re: The Great Firewall of Yale
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It doesn't matter whether you control the user environment to covertly install the MITM certificate. You simple notify your network users this is happening with instructions on how to install the certificate. Respectfully, I disagree. This is certainly possible, but from an operational perspective this would be a nightmare. Even setting aside the likely backlash that would follow in response to such a sweeping poli…
For what it's worth, at my university, UNC Chapel Hill, there are two networks, one of which requires you to install a custom root certificate, and is the network that the university prefers you connect to. For devices on which this is not possible, there is another network which only requires that you register your device's MAC address to your university id for access. Regardless of which option you choose, you are…
Change your MAC address to indicate an allowed device profile? Run a small VM to connect to the network and NAT back to your host?
Re: The Great Firewall of Yale
#127So MIT murders a student (Arron S.), Yale does some ridiculous censoring...
What's next?
Re: The Great Firewall of Yale
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
IANAL, but since the database is just (presumably) all of the classes at Yale, it's hard to see how their selection could be copyrightable. I haven't used the app, but it's quite possible they have course descriptions in there too, though, which are copyrightable. But then there's the separate question of why Yale wants to do any of this.
> But then there's the separate question of why Yale wants to do any of this. I suspect that providing easy/effective access to course and professor ratings trampled on some feet. Somebody's course enrollment is hurting and making somebody look bad.
But what are these people thinking? Do they really think Yale students are so lame they can't get around censorship easily to get the data they want? If the students are that lame they need to select better students, it seems to me.
Re: The Great Firewall of Yale
#129There is no way that a valid copyright claim can be made over the underlying data because it is a statement of fact . Such a work is not eligible for copyright protection.
Does this apply even when the "copyright holder" has meaningfully manipulated the information in order for it to be in a useful form? Have they imparted some IP that is now protected in some way? IE, could I mirror deep-level sports statistics without attribution? One would think the agency I "took" it from had applied meaningful resources to extrapolating this data, which may be in fact be statement of fact . I'm pu…
In the US, yes, the selection and arrangement of facts _can_ be protected by copyright.
It needs to be an arrangement or presentation that involves a significant degree of creative choice, not an arrangement that is obviously inherent in or determined by the facts themselves. (For instance, an alphabetic arrangement of terms would obviously not be copyrightable either, but the order of a list of buildings ranked by prettiest might be).
The individual sports statistics are definitey not protected by copyright -- nobody can require me to get permission to tell you that Joe Blow has an RBI of X. But if you copy the entire database of sports statistics from someone, and present them in the same order/categories, those elements (selection and arrangement) _might_ be copyrightable -- it depends on the specifics and how well the lawyers make their case that the particular selection and arrangement involved were creative choices, not just obvious in the data itself.
In the U.S. , that you "applied meaningful resources to extrapolating" is completely irrelevant to copyright -- that it took lots of resources to assemble purely factual information still does not make them copyrightable. This is known as the 'sweat of the brow doctrine', and the courts in the U.S. decided that it did _not_ apply to copyright here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#US_copyright_...
Re: The Great Firewall of Yale
#130"They had contacted us warning that we were using copyrighted data" last I understood you can't copyright data or facts [in the US]. You can own copyright to a particular published format though. One can't copy and publish a phone book verbatim but you can certainly scrap a phone book for its data/facts and publish them in a different format.
Now I'm not sure if this is a slam dunk. My friend works developing a fantasy sports startup, he's talked about all kind of legal grey areas around the legality of where you get those stats. He didn't go into specifics though.
There may be terms of use/service when using (agreeing to use and access) data/fact providers. You might be violating a contract but not copyright.