Company’s terms of service require customers “not to make negative comments.”
Source: 1-star Yelp review says “Gordy” the pet fish was overfed, attracts $1M lawsuit | Ars Technica
Tag: Facebook
Apartment complex demands tenants give Facebook “like” within 5 days | Ars Technica
Tenants are disliking the “Facebook addendum” posted on their doors last week.
Source: Apartment complex demands tenants give Facebook “like” within 5 days | Ars Technica
Disney drops—then doubles down on—DMCA claim over Star Wars figure pic | Ars Technica
Man who took photos of a $6.94 Walmart action figure gets banned from Facebook.
Source: Disney drops—then doubles down on—DMCA claim over Star Wars figure pic | Ars Technica
Lucasfilm Uses DMCA to Kill Star Wars Toy Picture – TorrentFreak
Star Wars: The Force Awakens has gone into an early and bizarre anti-piracy overdrive. Earlier this week a fansite posted an image of a ‘Rey’ action figure legally bought in Walmart but it was taken down by Facebook and Twitter following a DMCA notice. Meanwhile, webhosts are facing threats of legal action.
Source: Lucasfilm Uses DMCA to Kill Star Wars Toy Picture – TorrentFreak
Spanish Police Park In Handicapped Spot, Fine Person Who Caught Them For ‘Impugning Their Honor’ | Techdirt
A Spanish woman has been fined €800 (£570) under the country’s controversial new gagging law for posting a photograph of a police car parked illegally in a disabled bay.
The unnamed woman, a resident of Petrer in Alicante, south-east Spain, posted the photo on her Facebook page with the comment “Park where you bloody well please and you won’t even be fined”.
The police tracked her down within 48 hours and fined her.
Want to harvest Facebook data? Get a mobile number and off you go • The Register
This is actually quite good advice:
“Assume that everything you post online will be available to the worst possible entities to cause you maximum grief,” he said.
Source: Want to harvest Facebook data? Get a mobile number and off you go • The Register
News Corp. Makes Copyright Claim Over News Corp’s Live Video Stream Of The GOP Debate | Techdirt
In short, Fox News issued a copyright takedown to YouTube over Sky News’ streaming the debate. While that might sound perfectly reasonable, it seems worth pointing out that both Fox News and Sky News are owned by the same company: News Corp.. Yes, News Corp. effectively DMCA’d itself. Because that’s how copyright works.
Source: News Corp. Makes Copyright Claim Over News Corp’s Live Video Stream Of The GOP Debate | Techdirt
The Hidden Cost of JPay’s Prison Email Service
JPay, a company that provides digital communications systems to corrections facilities in at least 19 states, is charging inmates and their families an unusual fee to stay in touch: the intellectual property rights to everything sent through its network.
The corrections industry is undergoing a technological renaissance when it comes to inmate communication, with prison contractors offering increasingly sophisticated digital services, such as email and video visitation. These companies promise safer and more efficient alternatives to traditional snail mail and in-person visits, but they come at a high price for prisoners and their families, who may be unaware of the extent of the fees and surcharges until they get the bill.
With JPay, though, there’s an extra charge that won’t show up on any credit card statement: the user’s rights to their letters, pictures, videos, and other forms of creative expression.
As Bloomberg reported, JPay aims to be the “Apple of the U.S. Prison System,” offering an array of digital services to inmates, including video visitation, money transfers, and multimedia tablets that inmates can use to listen to music or read books. The company also offers a telecommunications system that allows inmates to send and receive emails (including “videograms”) from their tablets or from kiosks within corrections facilities.
These services aren’t cheap, of course, but many users won’t realize they are handing over more than money. When an inmate or their family member on the outside uses JPay, they agree to a lengthy Terms of Service contract that contains this buried clause:
You … acknowledge that JPay owns all of the content, including any text, data, information, images, or other material, that you transmit through the Service.
In other words, JPay is leveraging its exclusive access to prisoner communications to claim rights over anything they or their friends and family transmit.
Texas admonishes judge for posting Facebook updates about her trials
The State Commission on Judicial Conduct ordered Michelle Slaughter, a Galveston County judge, to enroll in a four-hour class on the “proper and ethical use of social media by judges.” The panel concluded that the judge’s posts cast “reasonable doubt” on her impartiality.
At the beginning of a high-profile trial last year in which a father was accused of keeping his nine-year-old son in a six-foot by eight-foot wooden box, the judge instructed jurors not to discuss the case against defendant David Wieseckel with “anyone.”“Again, this is by any means of communication. So no texting, e-mailing, talking person to person or on the phone or on Facebook. Any of that is absolutely forbidden,” the judge told jurors.
But Slaughter didn’t take her own advice, leading to her removal from the case and a mistrial. The defendant eventual was acquitted of unlawful-restraint-of-a-child charges.
The judge told local media Friday that her Facebook posts about the “Boy in the Box” case and others were unbiased.
“I will always conduct my proceedings in a fair and impartial way. The Commission’s opinion appears to unduly restrict transparency and openness in government and in our judiciary,” she told the Houston Chronicle. “Everything I posted was publicly available information.”
Turkish Censorship Order Targets Single Blog Post, Ends Up Blocking Access To 60 Million WordPress Sites
Last week, a Turkish court ordered an access ban on a single post in the vast sea of more than 60 million individual blogs on WordPress. But for many users, that meant their Internet service providers blocked WordPress entirely.
A lawyer and Turkish Pirate Party member tracked down the root of the sudden ban on all of WordPress: a court order seeking to block a single blog post written by a professor accusing another professor of plagiarism. This post apparently led to several defamation lawsuits and the lawsuits led to a court order basically saying that if blocking the single post proved too difficult, fuck it, block the entire domain.
It is the second sentence in the order, however, that caused the complete ban of WordPress in the country. “If the access to the single page cannot be possible due to technical reasons,” it reads, “block access to wordpress.com.”
