From MetaFilter comes a warning that there are at least two online resume collection companies, Passport Access and Aquent, who are employing spiders and webcrawlers to find resumes on people’s websites, suck them into their databases, and then sell them to clients. This is a major, flagrant violation of U.S. Copyright law — you hold copyright on your resume, whether or not you indicate so with a little © symbol, and for them to take it and sell it is a Federal offense. I spoke with someone at Passport Access, and here is the text of an email (with copyright law links) that I sent as a followup to our discussion.
I just got a call from John Malone at Passport Access, and they seem to understand the issue, as of now. He is forwarding my email onto their IP lawyers, and will keep me informed as to the response they get. He also said that if anyone wishes to express their opinions on this, they can either email Larry Vitatoe at larry@equest.com or call (888) 425-2816.
Wow… a high school basketball player in San Antonio has been sentenced to five years in prison for elbowing an opponent during a game. The longer version: he was on probation for two counts of burglary, and after elbowing the opponent, he was charged with aggravated assault. The sentence was not directly related to the probation, though; aggravated assault alone carries a two to 20 year sentence.
Makes me shudder to think about the potential precedent this sets; if I’m an NBA player, I’m scared to play in San Antonio now, lest my flagrant foul land me in prison. And how about someone like Latrell Spreewell, who choked his coach hard enough to leave brusies?
The insurer for Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, Goshawk, is suing to get out of their contract with the game show, claiming that the show is too generous — they want harder questions and dumber contestants.
Remember the judges who prevented APBNews from getting access to all of the federal judicial financial disclosure forms? Well, it turns out that months before this, they let USA Today have even more than APBNews asked for.
Re CNN’s site redesign and unreadability on Internet Explorer: if you read through their Technical message board (which is what they are telling people to use to report the problem), it appears that they never tested the redesign on Internet Explorer. There are more than one problem that appear on IE, but don’t on Netscape; this seems like a boneheaded testing scheme, seeing as IE has around 75% of the browser market. (That link may not work in the future; StatMarket has decided to go to a subscription service.)
(Note that I’m not trying to make this into another Netscape v. Internet Explorer thing. Instead, this is a usability thing, and it should be a big concern for websites that depend on having users. A site should, at a bare minimum, be usable on all browsers, even if all the baubles and tinsel don’t work properly.)
As a follow-up to the note a few days ago about the Orange County school district trying to ban a student group dealing with gay-straight outreach issues, the school is now on the cusp of banning all school groups just so they can legally prevent the students from meeting. In the wisdom of Dilbert: “People are idiots who deserve to be mocked.”
