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In this case, Corbis, the owner of copyrighted photographs, sued Amazon.com for copyright infringement after several of Corbis’ photographs, without its consent, appeared on third party vendor platforms hosted by Amazon.com. Amazon.com’s primary defense was that it is protected from liability for the alleged copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”). Thus, the Corbis case is pertinent to my analysis in that many of the issues facing YouTube in meeting the requirements of the DMCA were addressed in this case.
The Corbis court addressed the DMCA’s requirements that the service provider 1) not have actual or apparent knowledge of the infringing activity and 2) not have the ability to control the content of users’ postings. The Corbis court ruled that actual knowledge requires that the copyright holder provide evidence that it notified the service provider of the specific infringing material. The court also found that Congress contemplated that apparent knowledge of infringing activity requires that the service provider turn a blind eye to red flags of “pirate sites.” For purposes of my paper, the extent to which user sites are obviously infringing will be critical to the application of the knowledge test.
The Corbis court also amplified the DMCA’s right and ability to control test. It explained that the ability to control the infringing activity cannot simply mean the ability of the service provider to remove or block access to materials posted on its website or stored in its system. According to the court, there must be some level of active involvement with content decisions. In the case of YouTube, its screening techniques and its technology for identifying and removing infringing videos will be relevant to determine whether YouTube runs afoul of this requirement.
Whether or not YouTube satisfies the requirements of the DMCA, including its level of knowledge and the ability to control infringing activity, will be fact dependent. However, the court’s analysis in Corbis and its discussion of the DMCA’s legislative history will be helpful in applying the facts of the YouTube litigation to the law.
tagged amazon control_test copyright_culture corbis dmca knowledge_test pirate_sites by kbleic ...on 22-NOV-08
“Early Experiments in Cloud Computing”
by Gale Gruman
InforWorld.com
April 7, 2008
What do the New York Times and the Nasdaq have in common? Both companies have made a critical and substantial leap into the world of cloud computing through Amazon.com. Amazon offers its cloud computing infrastructure to third parties for “internet-provisioned computing and storage services.” [pg. 3] Amazon’s two products are called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3).
The New York Times used S3 in order to convert 11 million articles published between 1851 (the year the newspaper was founded) and 1989 from TIFF to PDF files. The reason the newspaper converted the files was so that they could shrink them in size and then make them accessible through the nytimes.com website search engine. What actually happen Ned? The New York Times cut up old newspapers into columns to fit into the scanners in TIFF format and then uploaded the files to S3. In total, the TIFF data took up 4TB worth of storage space (1TB = 1,000 GB). Then, the New York Times used EC2 to convert the 4 TB of raw data (the articles as they scanned them) into PDF files reducing the total size of the data to roughly 1.5 TB. The greatest part of the story is that, “[t]he Times didn’t coordinate the job with Amazon – someone in IT just signed up for the service on the web using a credit card, then began uploading the data.” [pg. 4] The New York Times IT staff completed the job in roughly 24 hours using 100 Linux computers.
Nasdaq sought to make extra revenue by selling historic data regarding stocks and investment funds. Nasdaq turned to Amazon to host the data using S3 and also had Amazon design a special reader application using Adobe AIR technology in order for customers to be able to view the data purchased.
“The traditional approach wouldn’t have gotten off the ground economically…[t]he expenses of keeping all that data online was too high. So Nasdaq took its market data and created flat files for every entity, each holding enough data for a 10-minute replay of the stock’s or fund’s price changes, on a second-by-second basis. (It adds 100,000 files per day to the several million it started with.) The Adobe AIR app Courbois’ (the VP for Data Products at Nasdaq) team put together in just a couple of days pulls in the flat files stored at Amazon.com and then creates the replay animations from them." [pg. 4]
Several issues arise in this story that are pertinent to further discussion regarding policy matters and cloud computing. As is the case in many other situations, there is a concern about privacy. For both Nasdaq and the New York Times there should also be concerns regarding the safety and availability of their data. If either of these companies wants access to its information, they are at the mercy of Amazon, instead of controlling their own data by purchasing and maintaining its own additional servers to do the job. Of course, both companies measured this risk and it is evident that in both cases, they determined that the cost (or the risk of holding their data remotely in these instances) was outweighed by the benefits (saving lots of money on hard ware as well as labor to maintain the hard wear to house the data).
tagged amazon cloud_computing ec2 privacy s3 by jessefs ...on 15-APR-08
Call#: Van Pelt Library F2230.1.R3 R47 1988
While this is the example of only one tribe’s values, other tribes regard them as antiquated, indicating these values apply broadly to Amazon tribes. Thus one could use the Waura people as a way to understand the mindset of the tribesmen in Fitzcarraldo. When one looks at the attitudes of the tribe, they conflict in almost every way possible with those of Klaus Kinski and to a lesser degree Herzog. Thus, while watching the film, one can regard the tribesmen slightly differently when interacting with Kinski on screen. They would view him as a lesser human and would be very disturbed by any sort of explosive actions on his part. While most of Kinski’s wildest outbursts took place off screen, the apprehension of the natives in approaching him sometimes can be better understood in the context of what took place right before the action on screen begins. It may be little wonder why the natives offered to kill Kinski as a kind gesture to Herzog by the end of the shoot.
Call#: Van Pelt Library HD9161.B8 P3
Chapter XIX from this 1911 book gives an account of rubber production in Peru, written during the period of the rubber boom. Given the time, one can assume this chapter was written as a guide for those interested in entering the rubber business in Peru. As rubber became a very profitable export, Iquitos grew very quickly and foreign companies quickly began to build roads to facilitate access to the city. The text mentions that for two years around 1902, an English steamboat company had a monopoly on rubber export using boats specially built for the area. It lasted until direct shipments from Iquitos to New York and Liverpool began. At the time, several tribes had settled and would “wage relentless warfare against the wholly savage tribes,” capturing them and teaching them to work as rubber laborers. The chapter gives an overview of the extraction techniques and types of rubber. Lastly, the author gives an overview of the legal issues in securing land from the government, including that the government allows land contracts to go into effect only after a surveyor has viewed the land.
This source is rather unique in that it acts as a primary source for the rubber boom in Peru. By looking at a guide to Amazonian rubber at the time, one can better understand the mindset of the characters that inspired the movie. The section on legalities indicates that the entire purpose behind Fitzcarraldo’s journey has a historical basis rather than existing solely as a creation of Herzog’s to make a more coherent plot. The discussion of Iquitos allows one to better understand the setting of the film. The town was just on the brink of a population explosion during the period in which the film takes place. Watching the film, one can understand that most of the wealth in the town has just emerged. As Fitzcarraldo explores the land in the film, he contributes to only the earliest stages of the rubber boom, and while somewhat apparent in the film, one understands this far more upon reading this account written a little over a decade of the movie’s setting.
tagged amazon iquitos primary_source rubber by koplan ...on 09-APR-08
Call#: Van Pelt Library HD9161.B82 W44 1983
In the chapter entitled, “Tappers and Traders,” Barbara Weinstein gives an overview of the Amazon rubber economy during the rubber boom around the turn of the century, while the book focuses on Brazil, the same methods were used in Peru. For a variety of natural causes, rubber trees grow very far apart naturally. Thus, in the extractive stage of rubber production, huge amounts of land were needed. Typically the estate owner would lease trails through the jungle to individual tappers. The tapper would then collect rubber from a number of trees, and sell the collection to the owner for roughly 50% of the market value of rubber. The rubber would sometimes change hands six times before being sold to consumers, hence the small fraction of the actual value the tapper received. The estate owner would sell the collected rubber to either an local intermediary who collected from a number of owners to then transport to Manaus or Belem, or if an estate had a river dock the owner would transport rubber directly to a major city like Manaus. Generally establishing a plantation involved little capital, and the money to be made during the boom helped offset any risk.
This overview of the rubber economy helps contextualize Fitzcarraldo. By understanding the ways in which rubber was extracted, one can see why Fitzcarraldo needed such a huge tract of land. Additionally, in the film, most of the loan he takes goes to financing the ship. Because of the importance of transporting rubber, and the lack of any intermediaries in the area he was exploring, the motivation for moving the ship over the mountain becomes more evident. Without a means of transport, extracting rubber would prove to be fruitless. Fitzcarraldo seeks to establish his own company that would own the land and then transport the rubber a market. In doing so, he could maximize his profit by selling the rubber at the fair market value.
From FAQ's
A coverpop can be a unique work of art, a software toy, or a fun way to shop for stuff.
Each coverpop is an interactive mosaic, made of tiny images, such as magazine covers. These are called "micro thumbnails". As you drag the mouse over each micro thumbnail, it pops up to a full-sized thumbnail image, and provides some information about the item. For some coverpops, you can click again to produce either a full-sized image, or to go to another website to learn more information about the item.
Some coverpops arrange the images by time, by price, or color. Other coverpops arrange the images into a photomosaic.