December 18, 2009
Celebrate the holidays with the 11th annual CP Holiday Train. Grab scarves, mitts and a non-perishable food item and head down to the 11th annual CP Holiday Train. Port Moody is the last stop on the train’s cross-Canada journey, which raises donations for food banks across the country.  Entertainment in the Queens St. Plaza starts at 8pm and kicks off with the big, brassy Port Moody Community Band. Last year, this ensemble braved -14 degree temperatures (with bare hands!) to play a great set of classic and contemporary Christmas carols. Following them are the Broadway Young Stars Advanced from Lindbjerg Academy , a musical theatre troupe that definitely knows their holiday tunes. They’ve also got Port Moody Fire and Rescue on board to light up the night with a crackling bonfire. Queens St. Plaza ( Clarke St. and Queens St. ) in Port Moody. 8pm, 604-469-4612.

December 18, 2009
Polar PJ Party. Put on your cosiest PJs and join us for our Polar PJ Party with a night of family adventure at TELUS World of Science. Explore our feature exhibition, The Geee! in Genome, then settle in with popcorn and juice in the Science Theatre for a showing of The Polar Express. 604-443-7500, www.telusworldofscience.com/vancouver

December 19, 2009
Birds Walk at the Mouth of the Little Campbell River, 9-11am. Discover the birds that make the mouth of the Little Campbell River home with naturalist Lynn Pollard. For beginners to intermediate birders. Bring binoculars and a field guide if you have them. Wear comfortable waterproof foot wear, dress warmly. Rain or shine. FREE. 604-501-5158.

December 19 – 31, 2009
Twelve Days of Christmas. During Twelve Days of Christmas, the Museum features a break from the busy holidays with self-guided crafts for kids and festive decorations. Celebrate the season with learning and sharing at the Vancouver Maritime Museum and help provide safe harbour for those in need. With a non-perishable food bank donation, children under ten receive free admission (maximum of two free children when accompanied by a paid adult). From Saturday, December 19 to Sunday, January 3, the Maritime Museum will be open every day from 10 am to 5pm. Exceptions are Sundays, open from noon to 5pm, December 24, open from 10 am to 2 pm and closed on December 2. (604) 257-8300.

December 20, 2009
Six Censational Sundays presents Charlotte Diamond & the Hug Bug Band – Holiday Delight Concert. For over 20 years, Charlotte Diamond has been charming North American audiences with her delightful sing-a-long concerts. One of the most popular children’s entertainers in Canada, Charlotte’s music is fun and sing-able, inspiring children to care for each other and to celebrate our diverse cultural mosaic. Centennial Theatre, North Vancouver;  604-984-4484, http://www.centennialtheatre.com

Okay, Jeff Barnett-Winsby did not aide and abet anyone.

He was, however, indelibly tied to a fugitive pair of lovers – one an inmate, the other a prison volunteer. Winsby had done a couple of photo series at Lansing Correctional Center, Michigan. He knew – and photographed – both John Manard and Toby Young before Young drove a van out the prison with a dog-crate in the back. Manard was in the dog-crate. They were on the run for twelve days until the authorities caught up with them in Tennessee.

All the details about the police hunt and climactic high speed car chase, car crash and return to custody can be found here.

Toby was the founder and coordinator of the Safe Harbour Program, and John Manard, a dog-handler and Young’s escort within the prison. She was vulnerable, he was hopeful, they were close. Manard did most of the planning. “By the time he brought me in to what he was doing, I was in love with him and I couldn’t say no,” Young said. “I was not in a safe and sane place in my life, but I still could’ve said no, but I didn’t.” It seems like a straight up case of manipulation; a true power imbalance.

This tale is like something out of a movie. Jeff has muttered things about making a movie. We’ll see. At the very least, we can all look forward to his book published J&L Books and due out any time now.

I was reminded of this story again by the Too Much Chocolate’s recent feature. TMC’s coverage is good, but Feature Shoot has a more liquid dissection of the events as Barnett-Winsby experienced them:

‘Early on, after the escape, I was contacted by the prison. I had taken the latest photos of John and they needed images which featured his newer tattoos. These photos ran on America’s Most Wanted and in other newspapers around the country. I was obligated to give these photos and felt pretty conflicted.

‘After they were transfered back to Kansas, John wrote an open letter to a Kansas City TV station professing his love and Toby’s innocence. I started writing to John in response to this and we traded several letters over a couple months. In them, he covered much of the escape story and described what sounded like a honeymoon.

‘Post graduation, I decided I needed to see where they had been so I headed to Tennessee, rented the same cabin and stayed there for several days. I thought a lot about how I should be spending my time while in Tennessee.

‘What I realized was that my interest in this story was not specifically about the escape, it was about what they were escaping for. I think I was down there trying to honor that’.

Barnett-Winsby’s gloss portraiture is pretty atypical of prisoner representations. It’s very giving.

The accompanying images of prisoners and their dogs work as a foil to the straight portraits. Instantly, our response to the inmate changes. Barnett-Winsby plays on visual dissonance. He exposes our inbuilt prejudice and softness toward animals: “If someone loves an animal they can’t be violent, right?”

As well as Safe Harbor, Barnett-Winsby also photographed the objects in single occupancy cells for his project Marks of Intention. The two deliberate projects are very much separate and the third, Love Notes and Promised Freedom, was born of the luck photographers dream about when hunting for a good story.

A federal district court judge has granted summary judgment to Veoh over Universal Music. Veoh, a video hosting website similar to YouTube, had claimed that it was protected from liability of infringing videos through the DMCA’s safe harbour for hosting services. Judge A. Howard Matz sided with Veoh and ruled that Veoh is protected against infringement claims due to the DMCA safe harbour, largely because he found that Veoh took reasonable steps to address any copyright infringement that takes place through its services.:

Rather, the issue is whether Veoh takes appropriate steps to deal with copyright infringement that takes place. The record presented demonstrates that, far from encouraging copyright infringement, Veoh has a strong DMCA policy, takes active steps to limit incidents of infringement on its Web site, and works diligently to keep unauthorized works off its Web site. In sum, Veoh has met its burden in establishing its entitlement to safe harbor for the alleged infringements here.

The full decision is available on scribd, while C-Net provides some interesting commentary, reporting that Universal has immediately stated its intention to appeal.

Techcrunch is reporting that boxing promoter Square Ring Inc. has sued web broadcasting platform Ustream.tv for copyright infringement for allowing a recent match between Roy Jones Jr. and Omar Sheika to be broadcast. Ustream describes itself as a service that “enables anyone with a camera and an Internet connection to quickly and easily broadcast to a global audience of unlimited size” and it appears that at least one user decided to use the service to broadcast the fight.

Square Ring argues that they notified Ustream of their concern in advance of the match to try to proactively implement procedures to stop the match from being streamed but that UStream ignored their requests. Ustream has stated that they believe they are protected by DMCA safe harbor provisions.

Very interesting case to come out of the US 4th Circuit last month. In Quantum Systems Integrators, Inc. v. Sprint Nextel Corp., (4th Cir. July 7, 2009), Sprint terminated its software license with Quantum. However, Sprint did not fully purge its systems of the software, and some of their computers were left with installed copies of Quantum’s software. This software would automatically load into RAM whenever the computer was booted and send a message to Quantum telling them that the software was being accessed (even though Sprint employees were no longer using the program).

The district court had awarded Quantum $69,000 in damages plus $400,000 in fees. The 4th Circuit upheld this award, rejecting Sprint’s argument that it did not engage in “volitional” copying and noting that creating a RAM copy satisfies the fixation requirement. The Court also rejected Sprint’s safe harbour “mere conduit” defense under the DMCA, ruling that the software installed on Sprint computers was not analogous to a passive ISP that has no control over the information that is transferred.

You all know how much I love a bit of Bootlaw action. Big time. But I’m starting to think that I should find a new way of starting these posts for fear of Barry and Danvers growing used to the gooey, gushiness that seems to come as standard. Keep them on their toes I think.

Last night, my favourite lawyers on the whole planet (oh bah, there I go – gush, gush, gush) hosted their fifth Bootlaw with a brilliant guest speaker: Trevor Callaghan, Senior Product Counsel for Google EMEA who told us all about Google’s approach to legal issues within its business. Handy.

Trevor started with the five principles behind Google’s legal thinking that has worked well for them:

Faster is Better

This is Google’s mantra and as far as anything online goes, it’s true. And that applies equally to the legal sides of doing digi-business. It’s everyone’s natural inclination to take a look at a job, suck air through their teeth and say that “it’s a massive job that’s going to take yonks to do properly”. Trevor told us (and I believed!) that entrepreneurs in the digital space should work hard to condition their lawyers to do stuff fast. Deals, documents, you name it – get them standardised, worked up and flung out. Why? Because faster is better, dammit.

Treat your legal team as part of the business

I found this point very interesting. David Drummond – the most senior legal dude at Google, though that’s not his official title – was Google’s first outside counsel and worked with Larry Page and Sergey Brin to incorporate the company and secure its initial rounds of financing. When he was taken on as a part of the Google team he was their solicitor and adviser. This, according to Trevor, immediately changed the way the legal function worked within Google. Instead of seeing Legal as a separate department or (as is often the case in businesses I work with) a barrier to all the cool things you want to do, the legal function should be brought into the business. This worked well for Google and David played a big role in shaping the company with them.

Develop a collegiate, open, honest environment

At Google people are encouraged to speak their minds. It was refreshing to hear this open, honest spiel in the legal context. Trevor tells us that being honest about why you want (or don’t want, as the case may be) something to happen is really good for your legal people to know. So, for instance, if you want a deal to go through so that you can get a bonus or hit a target then tell it like it is.

Focus on the basic stuff

This is good common sense advice. Focus on the stuff that actually matters, the basic stuff and not the what if or maybe stuff. Trevor told us the Google server story. Possibly apocryphal, it makes the point well. Way back (which in fact is just ten years ago) when Google was a fledgling company in a garage their first server sat on a cradle made of Lego. As the server got bigger, so they added more Lego to a bigger cradle. One day, one of the guys went out the buy Lego to build more cradle and instead returned with generic, non-branded Lego-like stuff. Naturally, the copycat Lego wasn’t as strong as the real deal and on one fateful day, this below-par Lego made Google crash. They learned their ‘focus on the basic stuff’ lesson there and then and promptly went out and bought their first ever server rack, replaced the racks with plywood as they grew and made what can only be described as a fire hazard, complete mess and piece of digital history. Here’s a film of the server as an installation at the Computer History Museum.

For those of you who are starting a company, have little money and are concerning yourselves with copyrights and crawls etc. Trevor says: “The amount of sleep I would lose worrying about copyrights is directly proportional to the amount of money I’m making.”

The second part of the chat was all about things Google didn’t do so well. Unfortunately we only got one point in because at this stage, the audience was all aflutter with ideas and questions.

Scale is a challenge

Google scaled really well on the technology side of things. In fact, they scaled so well that the legal function struggle to keep up. Trevor’s advice is to approach every aspect of the business with the same plans for scaling as you do the tech side of things. On the legal front that means standardising as much as possible and getting all the standard contracts written and in the bag.

Since Bootlaw fell into group conversation at this point, it’s probably best for me to simply share my highlights of this conversation with you. They’re good, I promise.

1. The quality of user contracts = zero (pretty much). Within four hours of surfing the web, the average Joe would be tied to about 400 agreements of some kind. There’s no way that would stand up in court.
2. If you have the requirement for people to accept terms on your site make sure that a) the have done something i.e. clicked accept, b) show them the contract they’re accepting and c) give them the opportunity to print a copy.
3. Consumer bodies in most countries would protect users from a company trying to impose unreasonable T+Cs. If you’re wondering why there was such a big hoo ha about the recent Facebook privacy terms changing, apparently it wasn’t that big a deal and if anything, the lesson there is that’s just not the way to converse with your users (hope you’re reading this Facebook).
4. Crawling – is it legal? It depends. The thing is that technology moves so fast (because faster is better, remember?) and the law, well, not so much. So while we’re all out there steaming ahead, the law is still in the 60s or something. In the States there is a thing called Fair Use which is a 4-step test to establish whether there’s been fair use of content online. In Europe there is no Fair Use thing yet. Instead, the principle underpinning it is one of implied consent. For instance, if your site hasn’t been built to block robots from crawling content then one could argue that you’ve effectively consented to the crawl. The implied consent thing was taken to court by Lawrence Lessig (the legend who founded Creative Commons). This is not the place to go into it, so if you’re interested in finding out more, go here.
5. What about data protection across borders? Again, the laws protecting data are different in different parts of the world, but the principles, you’ll be pleased to know, are the same. In the US there’s Safe Harbour. In Europe there’s The Data Protection Act. And the basic thrust of it is that if you’re moving data to a company in the US, make sure they work according to Safe Harbour principles. Done.

So there you have it folks. Bootlaw 5, if you liked this post you should try to come to Bootlaw 6. See you there.

Traveling life’s byways and highways

Is oftentimes a circuitous route

Then comes the time

To stop and rest

Put your feet up and not give a hoot.

I am home now.

The peace that comes from within is shining forth.

This time, the light in the window

For the weary traveler is

Shining, brightly, nightly.

That light is shining for me.

It beckons.

It calls.

It guides me

Safely.

Home.

I am home.

Safe in the arms of the Master.

My life no longer a disaster.

I am filled.

I am no longer defiled.

Reconsecrated.

I am that

Precious child.

I am now safely home.

Dags att lägga sig framför teven och kolla på film. Det blir en drama av Danielle Steel som heter Safe Harbour, bla så är Melissa Gilbert en av huvudrollerna. Ni vet hon som var med i Lilla Huset På Prärien

  Ophélie Mackenzie och hennes dotter Pip har under året som gått förlorat både make och son i en tragisk olycka. Ophélie kan inte acceptera detta och har förlorat all tro på framtiden. För att komma bort från San Francisco och alla minnen beger de sig över sommaren till den lugna ön Safe Harbour. En eftermiddag på stranden möter Pip konstnären Matt som erbjuder sig att lära henne att måla. Matt kan inte undgå att se hur vacker hennes mor Ophélia är. Till en början har Ophelia svårt för Matts sällskap, men allteftersom tiden går inser hon hur mycket glädje han skapar i deras liv.

Memories, dreams of images past.
Etched on my mind and scattered
like red poppies in the corn.
Each flower a gem,transitory, musings, random,
proclaiming the truth in a child’s eyes.
Unblemished chronicle, sweet, unspoiled;
Recalled at will.
A haven.

Musings, random, involuntarily sparked
by the rekindling of
transitory sensations caught in
a wisp of air;
or light reflected, stirring patterns unseen
since childhood. Shimmering,
teasing ghosts from the cobwebs of time.
Another world.

Moments, precious time encapsulated
and locked away; hidden
until the mysteries of my mind
unravel a pathway
leading me, begging me enter
through fragmented windows.
I glimpse a young me, in a pristine world.
Safe harbour.

Marauders, uninvited, try to corrupt,
sabotage and shatter my serenity.
A child’s vision is precious,
untainted, pure and honest.
My adult mind, divested of it’s sweet naivety
is prey to reassessment.
Widen parameters, reframe the picture.
Real world.

Mangled perceptions, raped and confused,
conspire to disappoint me;
leave me anguished and hurt.
I retreat to my haven,
ship waiting in harbour, and sail away
with the breeze of quiet longing.
An escape from reality, childlike and fleeting.
But so precious!

©DF2007