Thomas knocks newspapers and cynicism

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Justice Clarence Thomas is interviewed by Brian Lamb on Q&A this week. It’s a pretty good wide-rangin interview that’s worth a listen. Despite the recent press about him, he seems like a centered person. A couple of things he said were interesting to me:

  1. He’s a big fan of Churchill. The main reason is Churchill’s resilience. Thomas says, “If you quite, you run, you hide, you get negative. You get cynical. You’ve given up. Churchill didn’t do that.”
  2. He doesn’t read newspapers. LAMB: “How much do you read the newspapers?” THOMAS: “Oh, I don’t. I don’t. I don’t think it’s a good use of my time.” I know how this sort of thing was used against George Bush, but I think it’s pretty refreshing. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t read, and newspapers are hardly the most useful way to stay informed.

Oct 10, 2007 | Comment | Tags: , ,

TimesSelect now free for .edu

I wrote a while back that the New York Times had cut the price of its TimesSelect premium online content in half for university faculty and students. Today comes word that it’s free. It’s nominally just for current students, but as long as you have a .edu e-mail address you can get the free subscription. Click here to start the sign-up. Just got mine. Ah Brooks and Dowd, I can read you once again. Hat tip Joe Adamson.

Mar 14, 2007 | Comment | Tags: , ,

Search, cache, and copyright

Google has lost its copyright appeal against Belgian newspaper publishers. There seem to be conflicting reports about what exactly Google was found liable for. Here’s the WSJ:

A Belgian court ruled Tuesday that Internet search engine Google Inc. violated Belgian copyright law when it published snippets and links to Belgian newspapers on its Web site without permission.

And here’s the AP:

A Brussels court ruled in favor of Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing 18 mostly French-language newspapers that complained the search engine’s “cached” links offered free access to archived articles that the papers usually sell on a subscription basis.

Snippets and entire cached pages are very different things. But whatever the case, what this case highlights is how unsettled copyright law is as it applies to search engines (and I’ll limit myself to just the U.S.). As for snippets, sure, there’s Kelly v. Arriba Soft, which found that indexing photographs and displaying their thumbnails is a fair use. But that’s just one circuit’s opinion, which is very persuasive, but not controlling in other circuits. Then there’s Perfect 10 v. Google, which cuts in the opposite direction.

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Feb 13, 2007 | Comment | Tags: , , , ,

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