An Ars interview with Oren Sreebny, “director of emerging technology for the central IT and networking unit at the University of Washington,” reveals an interesting confluence between law, technology, and education.
Q: [Regarding the] legal headaches that higher ed IT departments have to deal with. He said something like “We spend more time being lawyers than we do IT people because of all these government requirements.” Do you find the same thing to be true where you are?
A: If you were a typical corporation, it’s my impression that you’d have lots of control over your data, and you’d say “this stuff can’t move to the cloud, and we won’t let it.” But in higher ed you don’t have that much control over people, because it’s a more loosely knit confederation of enterprises, so it becomes more of an education problem than a control problem.
[emphasis original]
Certainly an addition to the “education problem” is that the laws aren’t crystal clear. Technologists either need access to lawyers, a legal education, or clear guidelines. This offers another perspective on nervous service providers.
I use OS X’s colored labels and smart folders to keep track of articles to read and things to do. Using the menus can be kind of a pain, and surprisingly, Quicksilver doesn’t have the ability to label built in.
These Applescripts can be used to quickly label an item in the Finder. Simply select the item, invoke Quicksilver, and type the name of the label. Don’t forget to have QS index the directory where you keep the scripts (mine are in ~/Library/scripts).
Enjoy!
Another response to my assertion that FERPA has some scared tells me deserves a bit of clarification.
The trouble (and in some respects, benefit) of laws like copyright and privacy, which only become certain after long and expensive litigation, is that they are not completely explicit. Borderline cases leave small providers wondering whether they might be liable if they were sued–and this uncertainty leads some to steer clear of anything that pushes the boundaries.
My own theory is that FERPA was written in a protectionist paradigm, rather than a control paradigm. This means that certain categories of data are completely locked down, rather than giving the student or instructor the options to contol the data how they see fit. With fine-grained facebook-like privacy controls, it should be technically possible to let students control what is publicly released (indeed many do it anyway by doing things like posting a course video project to YouTube). The nervousness creates a situation where law (rightly or even by misinterpretation) limits what people might do with technology.
What does one need to prove that a business is built on infringement? A judge who ordered Google to hand over detailed viewing data to Viacom states:
They need the data to compare the attractiveness of allegedly infringing videos with that of non-infringing videos. A markedly higher proportion of infringing-video watching may bear on plaintiffs’ vicarious liability claim, and defendants’ substantial non-infringing use defense.
Aside from the occasional difficulties of how one might define a video as “infringing,” it seems odd that Viacom needs to know who has watched what video and when. YouTube has (as far as I can remember) always been open about what their “Most Viewed” videos are–including the laughing babies, “official” content, and Naruto fansubs. The mix of different types of content is pretty striking.
Considering that Viacom also asked to see Google’s search algorithm, it seems like they’re just trying to hit Google where it hurts in any way possible. It’s troubling that this request may make a large number of their users feel violated. If a site like this were considered more of a library than a business, perhaps there would be a more historically grounded argument for keeping the data private. I’ve heard Google doesn’t make much money off of YouTube, so there’s some chance the analogy could work.
This one almost slipped past the long weekend radar 
