Righthaven copyright trolls never had the right to sue, have their asses handed to them by the EFF

Righthaven copyright trolls never had the right to sue, have their asses handed to them by the EFF: "Righthaven is the extortion racket spun out by the Las Vegas Review-Journal: they received a license from the Review-Journal for its copyrights, then attempted to make the license pay by threatening any blogger who quoted the newspaper with expensive lawsuits and domain confiscation. They firehosed these legal threats around without regard for their legal merits (and attracted more desperate, unethical newspapers to their client roster in the process) and so it was inevitable that eventually they'd misfire at someone who got pissed off enough to do something about it.

That someone is Democratic Underground, a political site that contacted the Electronic Frontier Foundation for legal help. EFF's lawyers got a court to force Righthaven to reveal the terms of its license with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and discovered that Righthaven's license only gives it the power to sue on the Review-Journal's behalf (that is, Righthaven doesn't actually control the Review-Journal's copyrights in any meaningful way). And that is illegal -- a license to sue is not sufficient to have standing to use the courts for redress. Democratic Underground is now seeking recovery of legal fees, which the Review-Journal and other newspaper clients may be liable for.

So what began as a business deal in which there was no downside for Stephens Media now looks like a situation where the company could be on the hook for a serious chunk of change. It's worth noting that the contract actually has a specific clause (see Section 11) in which Righthaven indemnifies Stephens Media in the event that attorneys' fees need to be paid to an opponent. But could Righthaven really fulfill that obligation? What assets does Righthaven really haven? Likely not much; it's a company set up just to file lawsuits. One generous estimate is that the company has made a couple hundred thousand dollars of gross revenue in the single year it's been in business. That's surely been distributed to attorneys and staff. That means that a situation where newspaper companies ultimately end up on the hook for payments is a real possibility.

Righthaven wanted to keep these documents sealed, but they utterly failed to convince the U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt to take their side. Other defendants, and the public at large, should have a right to view the contracts, as well as DU's arguments that they are a sham, which were sealed until Friday. 'Because these cases have generated a great deal of public interest, particularly in the media and on the internet, that there is a right of the public to this information which overrides any claimed confidential commercial rights,' Hunt wrote in his order.

Hunt also shows how peeved he is at Righthaven's litigation behavior. (The company truly seems to have a knack for angering judges.) Judge Hunt criticizes how Righthaven has attacked opposing counsel, writing: 'There is an old adage in the law that, if the facts are on your side, you pound on the facts. If the law is on your side, you pound on the law. If neither the facts nor the law is on your side, you pound on the table. It appears there is a lot of table pounding going on here.'

Righthaven's Secret Contract Revealed: Will Its Strategy Collapse?

James Gleick: What Defines A Meme?

James Gleick: What Defines A Meme?: "

Smithsonian Magazine has posted a fantastic excerpt from James Gleick's new book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. In this piece, he presents a popular yet fresh introduction to the concept of the 'meme,' crediting Richard Dawkins, of course, but also going back years before The Selfish Gene, to French biologist and Nobel laureate Jacques Monod, who said that ideas have 'spreading power.' 'Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet.' He continues with several fascinating examples of memes (see video above) and lands on Twitter as a powerful meme incubator. From Smithsonian:

Inspired by a chance conversation on a hike in the Hong Kong mountains, information scientists Charles H. Bennett from IBM in New York and Ming Li and Bin Ma from Ontario, Canada, began an analysis of a set of chain letters collected during the photocopier era. They had 33, all variants of a single letter, with mutations in the form of misspellings, omissions and transposed words and phrases. “These letters have passed from host to host, mutating and evolving,” they reported in 2003.

Like a gene, their average length is about 2,000 characters. Like a potent virus, the letter threatens to kill you and induces you to pass it on to your “friends and associates”—some variation of this letter has probably reached millions of people. Like an inheritable trait, it promises benefits for you and the people you pass it on to. Like genomes, chain letters undergo natural selection and sometimes parts even get transferred between coexisting “species.”

Reaching beyond these appealing metaphors, the three researchers set out to use the letters as a “test bed” for algorithms used in evolutionary biology. The algorithms were designed to take the genomes of various modern creatures and work backward, by inference and deduction, to reconstruct their phylogeny—their evolutionary trees. If these mathematical methods worked with genes, the scientists suggested, they should work with chain letters, too. In both cases the researchers were able to verify mutation rates and relatedness measures.

Still, most of the elements of culture change and blur too easily to qualify as stable replicators. They are rarely as neatly fixed as a sequence of DNA. Dawkins himself emphasized that he had never imagined founding anything like a new science of memetics. A peer-reviewed Journal of Memetics came to life in 1997—published online, naturally—and then faded away after eight years partly spent in self-conscious debate over status, mission and terminology. Even compared with genes, memes are hard to mathematize or even to define rigorously. So the gene-meme analogy causes uneasiness and the genetics-memetics analogy even more.

'What Defines a Meme?' (Smithsonian)

'The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood' by James Gleick (Amazon)

Hive mind can now contribute to Google Maps in the US

Hive mind can now contribute to Google Maps in the US: "

Have you ever been looking for something on Google Maps, only to find your favorite restaurant mislabeled, or an excellent hole-in-the-wall bookstore completely missing? Google users in other parts of the world have been using a tool called Google Map Maker in order to add roads, schools, businesses, and more to Google's mapping database, and now US users are being allowed in on the fun.

According to a post on the official Google Blog, users in the US can not only add descriptions to businesses or fix errors, they can also add bike lanes or entire buildings. Google then reviews each contribution for accuracy, and if they are approved, they will appear in Google Maps 'within minutes.' (Google allows other users to review edits as well, helping to expedite the process. In a way, it's a bit like a wiki version of Google Maps.)

That's just the basic feature set that has been available to more than 180 other countries for some time. Google also announced that it's adding some new features to the Map Maker, including the ability to use Street View within Map Maker so you can be as accurate as possible with your edits. You can also use satellite view, which is especially helpful for adding accurate roads or pathways.

In my short time playing with Google Map Maker here in Chicago, I already managed to approve someone's edits regarding a club that has been closed, change a friend's address from a restaurant to an apartment building, and map out a few bike paths. Map Maker did toss me a few errors when I was navigating around, though—they went away after refresh—so it seems that Google might still be catching up to the influx of new users.

Update: Some have pointed out that Google Map Maker is very similar to OpenStreetMap, and there's some criticism that Google is exploiting its open communities with this update.

Legendary "royal star" was an actual supernova [Secret History]

Legendary "royal star" was an actual supernova [Secret History]: "

In 1660, Britain restored the monarchy after a decade of Oliver Cromwell's puritanical dictatorship. Charles II's supporters pointed out that his birth was marked by a glorious noon-day star, proving his divine right to rule...and that wasn't necessarily just propaganda. More »

World's Oldest Man Dies at 114 [Rip]

World's Oldest Man Dies at 114 [Rip]: "

His grandparents told him stories of the Civil War and entertainment didn't come at the push of a button for him. But now at 114 the oldest man in the world, Walter Breuning, has died in Montana. He died of natural causes in a Great Falls hospital, where he had been a patient because of an undisclosed illness. [AP] More »

Latest Energy Breakthrough Threatens the Entire Existence of Solar Panels [Energy]

Latest Energy Breakthrough Threatens the Entire Existence of Solar Panels [Energy]: "

Upending a theory of physics maintained for over a century, researchers at the University of Michigan have discovered that magnetic fields coming from light waves are 100 times stronger than previously believed, creating new possibilities for harvesting solar power. More »

Life could actually survive inside a black hole [Fringe Science]

Life could actually survive inside a black hole [Fringe Science]: "

Black holes have a well-deserved reputation for being cosmic destroyers, ripping apart anything that comes into contact with their intense gravitational forces. But a radical new theory says advanced intelligent life could live on planets inside black holes. More »

What schizophrenia looks like on a molecular level [Brains]

What schizophrenia looks like on a molecular level [Brains]: "

What you're looking at are neurons grown from a schizophrenic person. An incredible study, published today in Nature, reveals how scientists grew schizophrenic brain cells to understand the inner workings of this still-mysterious neurological disorder. More »

Will iPad & Tablets Be Our Sunday Paper?

Will iPad & Tablets Be Our Sunday Paper?: "

From Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, it seems more and more newspapers are turning to iPads and other tablets in an effort to capture a fraction of our daily attention. And as this graphic from Column Five Media illustrates, iPad is well on its way to becoming our Sunday newspaper.