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Documents Web

Harvard Business School: it will cost you to link to us

Discovered via Facebook, Harvard Business School’s extraordinarily parsimonious attempts to milk every last penny out of its material:

No one ever charges people for the act of curating and directing attention. That is our job. It is our mantra. But that is precisely what HBSP are doing. To be sure, HBR looks like any other magazine and is already paid for under an institutional license by the UofT library. What HBSP are charging for are the links to those articles made by academics in the ordinary course of teaching. While our Dean was clear that he wanted us to continue to treat ideas as ideas and give the best to our students, he also wanted us now to be aware that it was costing money each time we did so. I don’t know how much it costs but my guess is that it is $5 or so per article per student. So if I have a class of 40 students and in the process of being thorough, add 10 HBR articles to my reading list or class webpage or, if the students do the same on bulletin boards for the class, we have to pay $2,000 for the privilege. I want to adhere to norms but that is enough to cause me to think twice.

Note, this isn’t direct access to the article content, this is just linking to, or citing the article.

I guess Harvard must be hard up for cash.

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Documents

Lavabit Court documents

The company Lavabit shut down rather than give the government encryption keys that would expose all private communication related to its email server. This is the same server used by Edward Snowden.

The Lavabit founder, Ladar Levinson, was finally able to get the court documents related to this action unsealed, and they were posted yesterday. I was fairly sure that Kevin Poulsen of Wired’s Threat Level would post an actual copy, rather than just discuss them, and I was correct.

I’m also posting a copy in the interest of dissemination. I recommend, though, that you read Poulsen’s overview of the case.

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Documents

Open Feynman Lectures

At Quantum Frontiers:

Last Friday the 13th was a lucky day for those who love physics — The online html version of Volume 1 of the Feynman Lectures on Physics (FLP) was released! Now anyone with Internet access and a web browser can enjoy these unique lectures for free. They look beautiful.

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Books Critters

Sharing photos

Ringling Brothers: The Greatest Show in Court book coverThe photo for my newest book comes from Shutterstock. It’s not a perfect photo. It’s a little dark, a little blurry and out of focus. But no other image worked for the book. When I saw it, I knew this was the image I wanted for my cover. Authors get funny that way, which is why publishers rarely let us anywhere near the cover.

Thankfully, O’Reilly’s Director of Brand Management and expert on all things book covers, Edie Freedman, kindly volunteered to help me pummel the photo into shape. She also helped educate me on what makes a good book cover. For instance, I didn’t know about needing to leave space on all sides of the cover page. I also wasn’t aware that when you’re a relatively unknown author, as I am, you want to put your name at the top of the page; get a little name recognition going. She helped polish away many of the photo’s distractions, and find a font that, I think, really makes the cover snap—especially in smaller sizes, which is what shows up on Amazon pages.

The cover image is probably the only photo I’ll be using from Shutterstock in my book. Most of the images will come from the court case and investigations the book covers. The others are coming from photos at Flickr made freely available for use with a Creative Commons license. You can use a photo in a book, as illustration, if the CC license permits noncommercial use.

Some of the photos are from folks who have attended the Ringling Brothers circus or the associated animal walks. Others, though, come from the Circus collection of the Boston Public Library. This wonderful institution has not only uploaded extraordinary graphics and photos to its Flickr account, it kindly allows people like me to use the photos in a non-commercial setting (such as within a book for editorial or illustrative purposes). My favorite set of theirs is, of course, the one related to the circus.

I’ve always been reluctant about the Creative Commons license, not the least of which, the licenses are a bit confusing. For instance, it took me the longest time to figure out that using a photo as illustration within a book that isn’t focused on selling said photo is not a commercial use of the photo. Or at least, that’s the interpretation I’ve seen most frequently given, and the one I’m sticking with.

I can now see, though, why having a licensing scheme such as the Creative Commons is so helpful. It wasn’t necessary to have older photos and circus posters in the book…but the added color and history makes it more lively.

Old circus poster

I was so grateful to the Boston Public Library that I decided to upload all of my photos to my new Flickr account and offer them for use. The CC license I picked is very open, other than I restrict commercial use because I don’t have model releases for people and buildings and don’t want to hassle with the potential content copyright issues.

I’ve already had one of my photos used in a Missouri Department of Tourism pamphlet, for illustrative purposes. I don’t claim to be the best photographer in the world, and most of my photos are ordinary. But you never know when one of your photos might help someone, so I just uploaded them all, let folks use them or not.

Categories
Documents Legal, Laws, and Regs

No Appeal on PACER Fee Exemption Decision

Courthouse News Service posted a story about journalists losing a court case on PACER fees. The journalists were from a non-profit organization, which can usually apply for a PACER fee exemption. However, they’re also journalists, and a new policy note attached to the 2013 fee schedule change warned against fee exemptions for journalists.

The note states:

Courts may exempt certain persons or classes of persons from payment of the user access fee. Examples of individuals and groups that a court may consider exempting include: indigents, bankruptcy case trustees, pro bono attorneys, pro bono alternative dispute resolution neutrals, Section 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organizations, and individual researchers associated with educational institutions. Courts should not, however, exempt individuals or groups that have the ability to pay the statutorily established access fee. Examples of individuals and groups that a court should not exempt include: local, state or federal government agencies, members of the media, privately paid attorneys or others who have the ability to pay the fee. [emph. added]

Unfortunately, the note is making a rather dated assumption that all journalists work for the Washington Post, when in actuality, many journalists work for small nonprofits who don’t have a great deal of cash on hand.

Problems with fee exemption language aside, what stood out in this case was the court’s aside on the fact that there really is no way for an individual or organization to appeal a PACER fee decision. As Judge O’Scannlain noted at the beginning of his opinion:

I write individually to acknowledge “the elephant in the room”: to whom does one go for review when an application for an exemption from PACER fees has been denied?

Yes, indeed: who do we go to when appealing a PACER fee exemption decision? Considering how expensive PACER is, and how the costs can quickly escalate because of arbitrary charging for almost all activity, entities can find it extremely expensive to access court documents via the application. Yet many of the entities serve the needs of the community when accessing the documents, and do so without generating a profit. So, where do these entities go when a fee exemption decision doesn’t go their way?

Evidently, as things now stand, nowhere. At the end of O’Scannlain’s opinion, he wrote:

PACER fee determinations are just one of the “increasing numbers of administrative responsibilities” being assigned to district courts “that are not subject to review by appeal.”….

Because (as the opinion discusses) there is “no right of formal appeal” to contest the amount of a Criminal Justice Act fee award, Congress decided to create an administrative “review process separate from the traditional right of appeal.” In re Smith, 586 F.3d 1169, 1173 (9th Cir. 2009) (explaining that “excess fees must be approved both by the presiding judge and the chief circuit judge or his delegate”).

Assuming ordinary PACER-fee determinations are not reviewable by the judiciary’s administrative apparatus, it will be up to Congress to decide whether to fashion an appellate review mechanism, or whether to leave them within the exclusive purview of district courts.