Sued for $1 billion

Have been reading articles about the $1 billion suit. Brings back a question that's been repeatedly playing in my mind...

Is it legal for any entity to profit by showcasing another’s work, when the entity from whom the material originates gains nothing from it?

In what scenarios is it perfectly legal? When's it sketchy? When's it a definite no-no?

Omniscient Google - Part 2

Google is one of my obsessions.

Anything about Google interests me - be it good or bad. In one of my earlier posts, Omniscient Google - Doesn't it bother you?, I expressed some of my concerns.

Of late, I'm reading 'The Search - How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture'. J.Battelle lends words to my thoughts when he writes thus...



"In essence, we have taken much of our once-ephemeral and quotidian lives - our daily habits of whom we talk to, what we look for, what we buy - and made those actions eternal. It is as if each of us, every day, is tracing a picture of Joycean complexity - recording the mundane and extraordinary course of our lives - via our interactions with the Internet, be they through our personal computers, our telephones, or our music players, and our interactions with businesses, either online or in the store ...
...
... Through companies likes Google and the results they serve, an individual's digital identity is immortalized and can be retrieved upon demand. ...
...
As we move our data to the servers at Amazon.com, Hotmail.com, Yahoo.com, and Gmail.com, we are making an implicit bargain, one that the public at large is either entirely content with, or, more likely, one that most have not taken much to heart.

That bargain is this: we trust you to not do evil things with our information. We trust that you will keep it secure, free from unlawful government or private search and seizure, and under our control at all times. We understand that you might use our data in aggregate to provide us better and more useful services, but we trust that you will not identify individuals personally through our data, not use our personal data in a manner that would violate our own sense of privacy and freedom.

That's a pretty large helping of trust we're asking companies to ladle onto their corporate plate. And I'm not sure either we or they are entirely sure what to do with the implication of such a transfer."

Tusker @ Bhadra Wildlife Reserve

Date : 10-Feb-2007

River Tern Lodge -- Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary

Over the weekend, six of us college friends had been to Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary and stayed overnight at the River Tern Jungle Lodge, which is about 4 kms away from the sanctuary. The lodge pampers your senses with both man-made luxury and the scenic beauty of the Bhadra river on whose banks it is built. Each cottage (named after a bird species) overlooks the river and offers a soothing view of the river which lulls you with the sound it makes as it constantly cleanses the rocks that line its banks. In the pitch dark and deathly silence of the night - when the moon is nowhere to be seen and all the tiny noisome creatures seem asleep - the sound of River Bhadra's gentle waves lapping the surface of the smooth-worn rocks seems no less than that of angry sea-waves crashing and tearing into the rocks that dare to offer the slightest resistance in their paths. At once it is both serene and disturbing, depending on your thoughts and moods.

Omniscient Google - Doesn't it bother you?

Sometimes I worry about Google. It knows close to everything about me ever since I've switched to Gmail exclusively for all my emails and also use Orkut, Blogger, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. I don't know how useful one individual's information is to Google. If I had just as much information about any one person - friend / foe / stranger - I can't estimate it's worth and don't know how I would use it either. Yet, the fact remains that Google still has a major portion of the dope on my life. And that's quite unsettling!

--
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It is the mark of an educated mind
to be able to entertain a thought
without accepting it.

-- Aristotle
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