Thomson Reuters Thinks Not Responding To Their Email Means You've Freely Licensed All Your Content

Copyright

from the say-what-now? dept

We’ve seen some unique interpretation of copyright law over the years, but generally the really big companies — especially content-driven companies — have semi-decent lawyers. So it’s just bizarre and surprising that media giant Thomson Reuters apparently believes that it can license whatever content it wants by merely sending an email and saying that a refusal to respond will be taken as consent that it can use your content. Here’s the form letter that Thomson Reuters apparently sent to the Indian site MediaNama, and which it has likely sent to others as well:

from: n***********@thomsonreuters.com
to: releases@medianama.com
date: Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 6:19 PM
subject: Thomson Reuters ? use of your website content

August 20, 2014

MediaNama
MixedBag Media Pvt. Ltd.
20 A Rajpur Road,
Civil Lines, Delhi-110054

Dear Sir/Madam,

Thomson Reuters ? use of your website content

Thomson Reuters is a global provider of electronic information, committed to providing our customers with comprehensive, timely and reliable information. Our services include the provision of key financial market content to the largest and most diverse group of financial market participants in the world. Our business customers, who include analysts, fund managers, corporate financiers and traders, watch news and prices on more than 300,000 screens linked to a secure private communications network spanning more than 150 countries.

We are writing to seek your consent to use and redistribute certain content from your website (the ?Content?), in particular, articles that pertains to companies that have received investment funding from Private Equity firms and other Private Equity related articles, within Thomson Reuters services (the ?Services?). For the purpose of this letter Thomson Reuters means the Thomson Reuters Group.1 We may use automated tools in order to identify and obtain such content from your website.

As such the Thomson Reuters group shall have the right to use, incorporate and distribute the Content in its Services to its subscribers and to permit such subscribers to use and redistribute the Content. We are aware that you will be receiving numerous requests of this nature and that asking you to give a response in each case would be burdensome for you. We would ask, therefore, that you respond either to the address or e-mail address given below within 14 days of the date at the head of this letter only if you wish to refuse your consent. Otherwise, Thomson Reuters will presume that your consent has been given for the purposes set out in this letter. Performance by Thomson Reuters under this letter will constitute adequate consideration for the purposes of this letter.

Please do not hesitate to contact us for any further information; for questions and clarifications, you may contact Maria Nikka De Vera, Research Analyst ? Private Equity at n***********@thomsonreuters.com.

Yours Faithfully,

Kate Brown
Head of Content Acquisition ? EMEA
Reuters Limited

1 ?Thomson Reuters Group? shall mean any company from time to time under the control of, controlling or under common control with the entity signing this letter and also includes any third party from time to time authorised by Thomson Reuters. For the avoidance of doubt, Thomson Reuters Group shall also include The Thomson Reuters Corporation and any entity from time to time, that is directly or indirectly controlling, controlled by or under common control with Thomson Reuters Corporation. An entity will be deemed to control another entity if it has the power to direct or cause the direction of the management or policies of an entity, whether through the ownership of voting securities, by contract, or otherwise.

Now, some of us don’t mind when our content is used in this manner — and let others freely share it. And, there are cases where I think there’s a strong fair use case to be made for things like news clippings and the like — but India doesn’t have a broad fair use structure like the US, so that wouldn’t apply here. And, of course, by pushing this bizarre “licensing by failure to respond” setup, it would seem like the company is admitting that it thinks it does need to license the content in question.

So here’s the question: if we send Thomson Reuters a similar letter, and the company fails to respond, and then we start reposting Reuters stories on Techdirt, how quickly do you think their lawyers would nastygram us?

Filed Under: consent, copyright, licensing
Companies: thomson reuters

Facebook Messed With The Emotions Of 689,003 Users… For Science

Studies

from the and-maximum-creepiness dept

As you may have heard (since it appears to have become the hyped up internet story of the weekend), the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) recently published a study done by Facebook, with an assist from researchers at UCSF and Cornell, in which they directly tried (and apparently succeeded) to manipulate the emotions of 689,003 users of Facebook for a week. The participants — without realizing they were a part of the study — had their news feeds “manipulated” so that they showed all good news or all bad news. The idea was to see if this made the users themselves feel good or bad. Contradicting some other research which found that looking at photos of your happy friends made you sad, this research apparently found that happy stuff in your feed makes you happy. But what’s got a lot of people up in arms is the other side of that coin: seeing a lot of negative stories in your feed appears to make people mad.

There are, of course, many different ways to view this: and the immediate response from many is “damn, that’s creepy.” Even the editor of the study, admits to the Atlantic, that she found it to be questionable:

“I was concerned,” she told me in a phone interview, “until I queried the authors and they said their local institutional review board had approved it?and apparently on the grounds that Facebook apparently manipulates people’s News Feeds all the time… I understand why people have concerns. I think their beef is with Facebook, really, not the research.”

Law professor James Grimmelmann digs deeper into both the ethics and legality of the study and finds that there’s a pretty good chance the study broke the law, beyond breaking standard research ethics practices. Many people have pointed out, as the editor above did, that because Facebook manipulates its news feed all the time, this was considered acceptable and didn’t require any new consent (and Facebook’s terms of service say that they may use your data for research). However, Grimmelmann isn’t buying it. He points to the official government policy on research on human subjects, which has specific requirements, many of which were not met.

While those rules apply to universities and federally funded research, many people assumed that they don’t apply to Facebook as a private company. Except… this research involved two universities… and it was federally funded (in part) [Update: Cornell has updated its original story that claimed federal funding to now say the study did not receive outside funding.]. The rest of Grimmelmann’s rant is worth reading as well, as he lays out in great detail why he thinks this is wrong.

While I do find the whole thing creepy, and think that Facebook probably could have and should have gotten more informed consent about this, there is a big part of this that is still blurry. The lines aren’t as clear as some people are making them out to be. People are correct in noting that Facebook changes their newsfeed all the time, and of course Facebook is constantly tracking how that impacts things. So there’s always some “manipulation” going on — though, usually it’s to try to drive greater adoption, usage and (of course) profits. Is it really that different when it’s done just to track emotional well-being?

As Chris Dixon notes, doing basic a/b testing is common for lots of sites, and he’s unclear how this is all that different. Of course, many people pointed out that manipulating someone’s emotions to make them feel bad is (or at least feels) different, leading him to point out that plenty of entertainment offerings (movies, video games, music) also manipulate our emotions as well — though Dixon’s colleague Benedict Evans points out that there’s a sort of informed consent when you “choose” to go to see a sad movie. Though, of course, a possible counter is that there are plenty of situations in which emotions are manipulated without such consent (think: advertising). In the end, this may just come down to being about what people expect.

If anything, what I think this does is really to highlight how much Facebook manipulates the newsfeed. This is something very few people seem to think about or consider. Facebook’s newsfeed system has always been something of a black box (which is a reason that I prefer Twitter’s setup where you get the self-chosen firehose, rather than some algorithm (or researchers’ decisions) picking what I get to see). And, thus, in the end, while Facebook may have failed to get the level of “informed consent” necessary for such a study, it may have, in turn, done a much better job of accidentally “informing” a lot more people how its newsfeeds get manipulated. Whether or not that leads more people to rely on Facebook less, well, perhaps that will be the subject of a future study…

Filed Under: consent, emotions, ethics, informed consent, newsfeed
Companies: facebook

FL Schools Go Minority Report On Students, Give Parents Opt Out Choice Afterward

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the scan-you-see-the-problem? dept

In past discussions around the use of technology to achieve school security, we have typically found that the practice has more to do with money than safety. Such was the case when a Texas school district issued RFID-chipped student IDs, the impetus for which was actually all about receiving government funding based on attendance. While there was backlash from students and parents in that case, the ire was likely somewhat muted by the fact that these were still basically just ID cards with a little extra juice in them.

The situation is quite different in the case of Polk County, Florida schools, which instituted compulsory iris scans of its high school, middle school, and elementary school students, and then sent out a letter to parents announcing they could opt out after the scans had already been completed.

Reports were confirmed Wednesday that Daniel Jenkins Academy, a high school, Davenport School of the Arts, a middle school, and Bethune Academy, an elementary school, planned a pilot scan program with a security program and the schools allowed officials from Stanley Convergent Security Solutions to take iris scans of an unknown number of students. Parents of the students were sent a letter on Friday, May 24, although the letters were dated for delivery the day before. The letters stated that the scanning program would begin on May 20, and allow for students to opt out. However, all students were scanned before any letters were sent home.

There is a saying that goes something like this: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. While public school administrations can often be found rife with the latter, the lack of judgment in this case seems unbelievably grotesque. Anyone with a modicum of sense simply had to know that scanning irises of students was going to raise at least some controversy. To supercharge that by conducting the scans a full three days before a letter informing parents was scheduled to go out, and four days after it actually did, reeks of masochism. Add to that anyone on the lower levels of the operation, who might not be aware of the late-arriving letter to parents, not batting an eye when there wasn’t a single instance of parents opting out of the procedure and you have the kind of cauldron of dumb that keeps private schools in business.

To add insult to injury, parents are reporting that attempts to get answers from the school are about as useful as a wedding ring is to the Pope. One particular parent was hilariously directed by the school, which should have had the answers to questions about procedures conducted on its students, to instead contact PCSB, the county school board.

By the time we were able to make a phone call to PCSB (a time span of about 1 hour), the secretary told us that this pilot program had been suspended. When we did get a return call from one contact, she reiterated that the program has been suspended, like this should appease us. My husband continued to ask where our son’s private scans were, and she said the company was instructed to destroy the information. When we asked how do we know this has happened, there was no answer.

It is interesting that this letter went home on Friday afternoon at 3pm. Like I told you originally, everyone was gone by 4pm when I tried to make calls. So when exactly did this program get suspended? As of Friday afternoon, it was still in effect. Are they trying to say that somehow it was suspended by Tuesday morning (Monday being a holiday)? It seems like they are mostly focused on this program, like the program was the problem. It’s not, it’s the invasion of my family’s Constitutional right to privacy that is the problem, as well as the school allowing a private company access to my child without my consent or permission. This is stolen information, and we cannot retrieve it.

The district has since claimed that all records and scans from the program have been destroyed, but hasn’t bothered to offer any method for parents to confirm this claim. So now we get to endure the resulting suspicion and resentment that is likely going to go unresolved. The district will claim error, parents will stay outraged, and the lawsuits will likely fly. All because the schools couldn’t be bothered to tell parents their children were going to have their irises scanned.

Filed Under: consent, florida, iris scans, students, surveillance