Facebook and privacy

19 July 2009

Yesterday, I begrudgingly decided I’d reactivate my Facebook account, after I had it deleted a few months ago. Without going into why I wanted to re-join, I was shocked when I logged in for the first time after reactivating it — all my personal information was still present. I have a feeling Facebook is breaking a bit more than Canadian law.

When I had my account ‘deleted’ a few months ago, I had the intention of leaving permanently — the fact that I have rejoined is irrelevant — I wanted to purge myself from the world of Facebook for good. However, during the period that I thought I was free, they retained:

  • My e-mail address (understandable)
  • My name (sort of understandable)
  • My avatar
  • My birthdate (uh…)
  • All the registered applications and their settings (including OAuth associations with external accounts)
  • My networks and friends (though my friends had no way to ‘un-friend’ me or view this status during this period)

I would have expected all the above to be purged, and was certainly hoping so when I requested the profile be deleted. I’m going to very strictly limit myself as to how much I post on Facebook in future.

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Musings on copyright dates

3 January 2009

In the context of a blog, with lots of posts from different years, how would copyright apply? Would each post on the blog have a separate copyright? Or would the blog have a copyright as a whole? Or is it up to the author how it should work?

Say I added a footer to the bottom of my blog in the year 2005, which reads:

Copyright © 2005 by Jeremy Visser. All rights reserved.

(Please note that the copyright notices in this post are purely for discussion and illustrative purposes, and are not intended to state the true copyrighted nature of any of the content on this website.)

Now, it’s the year 2009, so there seems to be two popular ways to update this kind of line:

  1. Copyright © 2005-2009 by Jeremy Visser. All rights reserved.
  2. Copyright © 2009 by Jeremy Visser. All rights reserved.

So in the latter one, the copyright date is simply bumped up to 2009. Is it legal to arbitrarily bump the copyright expiration date like that without formal renewal?

In Australia, this is not a problem, as copyright expires 70 years after the author’s death — it has nothing to do with the publication date. In which case, it does not make sense to add a year to copyright declarations of Australian works. I think the following would do fine for me:

Copyright © by Jeremy Visser. All rights reserved.

It would then be up to somebody to look up the date of my death to find out if any of my works are in the public domain.

So why do we add dates to copyright notices? In the United States, the case is the same as Australia — copyright expires 70 years after the death of an author.

I could not find any information on how copyright expiration applies to a corporation in Australia (after all, a corporation cannot die), but in the United States, copyright on a work produced by somebody as part of their official duties while working for a corporation expires 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation (whichever is shorter). In this case, adding dates to copyright notices does make sense.

So, it seems to me that the reason we all add dates to our copyright notices is because we are all sheep and simply copy each others’ copyright notices. Ironic, eh?

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SourceForge being sued for hosting Shareaza

15 November 2008

According to a TorrentFreak article, SourceForge is being sued in France because it is hosting Shareaza, a popular P2P file-sharing application, which happens to be used by the community for illegally sharing music.

This is just beyond ridiculous. You know, terrorists can use the telephone system to coordinate attacks, so why don’t we ban the telephone? I can make copies of music in my mind — why not ban thinking, too?

I wonder if the US-based companies that are being sued by the French record labels can be dragged over to France and prosecuted. The linked article says so, but if they refuse to fly to France to show up in court, can the French police ask the US police to seize them nonetheless? Can I be immune from ridiculous foreign lawsuits by residing in a country where it is legal? Does it make them liable because they are conducting their business in France by sending data traffic to that country? So many questions.

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Parliament’s view on Technological Protection Measures

20 July 2008

I’ve just been reading a report named Inquiry into technological protection measures (TPM) exceptions by our House Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs.

The report sadly speaks of digital rights management quite positively (although they deviously disguise the term as “technological protection measures”), but even they could not ignore the fact that it does hinder the development of new technology in some cases:

Anti-circumvention laws ban certain technologies. As a result, these laws may impact on – and inhibit – both innovation, and competition in technology markets.

The above quote, interestingly, was referenced in a footnote as being quoted from Kimberlee Weatherall, an Australian intellectual property lawyer who was the recipient of the 2007 Rusty Wrench award.

Sorry to anyone who was expecting me to come to some sort of conclusion or argue a point at the end of this post. I just wanted to say what I’d been doing, and felt this was too big for Twitter, so I posted it in my blog instead.

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