Just a quick reminder: The October 26th Privacy
Foundation Seminar
The
EU GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation): Impact on the U.S.
Register
online at: http://dughost.imodules.com/gdpr.
If you have other questions, contact Sarah
Brunswick
sbrunswick@law.du.edu
We need intelligence that’s not too artificial.
Opinion |
No, A.I. Won’t Solve the Fake News Problem
… As Mr. Zuckerberg has acknowledged, today’s
A.I. operates at the “keyword” level, flagging word patterns and
looking for statistical correlations among them and their sources.
This can be somewhat useful: Statistically speaking, certain patterns
of language may indeed be associated with dubious stories. For
instance, for a long period, most articles that included the words
“Brad,” “Angelina” and “divorce” turned out to be
unreliable tabloid fare. Likewise, certain sources may be associated
with greater or lesser degrees of factual veracity. The same account
deserves more credence if it appears in The Wall Street Journal than
in The National Enquirer.
But none of these kinds of correlations reliably
sort the true from the false. In the end, Brad Pitt and Angelina
Jolie did get divorced. Keyword associations that might help you one
day can fool you the next.
If you copyright the only source of laws, have you
created ‘secret law?” Georgia will probably stop paying for
annotations now that they don’t own the copyright.
Appeals
Court Says Georgia’s Laws (Including Annotations) Are Not Protected
By Copyright And Free To Share
techdirt:
“The 11th Circuit appeals court has just overturned
a lower court ruling and said that Georgia’s laws, including
annotations, are not covered by copyright, and it is not infringing
to post them online. This is big, and a huge win for online
information activist Carl Malamud whose Public.Resource.org was the
unfortunate defendant in a fight to make sure people actually
understood the laws that ruled them. The details here matter, so
let’s dig in: For the past few years, we’ve been covering the
fairly insane situation down in Georgia, where they insist that the
state’s annotated
laws are covered by copyright. This is not quite the same thing
as saying the laws themselves are covered by copyright. Everyone
here seems to recognize that Georgia’s laws are not covered by
copyright. But here’s where the problem comes in. The state of
Georgia contracts out with a private company, LexisNexis, to
“annotate” the law basically giving more context, and discussing
the case law interpretations of the official code. The deal with the
state is that LexisNexis then transfers whatever copyright it gets
from the creation of the annotations back to the state. Finally,
the only “official” version of Georgia’s state laws is in the
“annotated” version. If you want to look up the
official law of Georgia you are sent to the “Official Code of
Georgia Annotated” (OCGA), and it’s hosted by LexisNexis, and it
has all sorts of restrictive terms of service on top of it. Indeed,
every new law in Georgia literally says that it will amend “the
Official Code of Georgia Annotated,” which certainly suggests that
the OCGA — all of it — is the law in Georgia. And the state
insisted that part of the law was covered by copyright. [Note:
Twitter
posting on this matter by The Free Law Project]
Malamud found this obviously troubling, believing
that the law must be freely accessible to anyone in order to be
valid. The state of Georgia threatened him and then sued
him claiming that reposting the OCGA in a more accessible fashion
was copyright infringement. The district court not only found that
the annotations (even if part of the official law) could be covered
by copyright but further that it
was not fair use for Malamud to post them online. This was a
horrifying decision. And, it’s also no longer a valid one.
The appeals court has put together a
thorough
ruling rebuking the lower court’s analysis, and noting that the
OCGA is not subject to copyright at all.
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