Archive for the ‘Legal’ Category
|Wikileaks Decrypted
Monday, December 6th, 2010
Everywhere I go, everywhere I read, eat, train or work, Wikileaks is the center of most conversation.
The world is divided in those who believe Wikileaks is a public service aiming for more transparency and those who believe Wikileaks is a dangerous anarchist movement.
I support the latter and will explain why.
Liberty, democracy, journalism vs privacy, diplomacy, and equilibrium.
Unfortunately it’s not that simple. Let’s rewind time. Wikileaks stole classified information from US Intelligence by hacking into access-restricted computers or calling for US employees to steal files. This action by itself is definitely a crime. And no one can contest that so far.
I find it amazing some seem surprised US is running a diplomatic ballet. They do LIKE ALL OTHER COUNTRIES ON THIS PLANET.
It would be childish to think other democracies are not using the exact same modus operandi. Collecting and reporting info is the oldest form of Intelligence countries have put together way back in the days of Romans, Egyptians and Greeks.
Wikileaks targets specifically the United States of America.
Why? I think we should legitimately ask ourselves this question.
In a quest for ‘open transparency’ wouldn’t it be fair to get classified cables from all the parties involved?
But Wikileaks is obviously not interested in stealing German, Russian, Chinese or Iranian classified information. In fact Wikileaks has never unveiled any ‘secrets’ about any other country but US.
Their tweets are clearly showing their motivation:
Actually the whole stream is anti-American. How pleasant for the free world…
Like other terrorists, Wikileaks is relying on US infrastructure to relay their heinous message- Amazon, Paypal, EyeDNS. Here comes Dumb and Dumber screaming for boycott against those companies who stopped providing support to Wikileaks. Pathetic…
“Obama and Clinton must resign”. Maybe they should; but not for any of those ‘embarrassing’ cables. Just because they failed to protect sensitive information from going public.
Martin Varsavsky wrote a short piece on how Wikileaks has taught us a lesson. If it’s private – keep it private. I cannot agree more. Countries will increase their level of security and the whole Wikileaks plan for transparency goes flushed down the drain. Bravo.
What’s Wikileaks next target? Take a wild guess? Bank of America. Yes, another stolen hard-drive (thank God it’s not an iPhone- Jobs would have sent Apple Police) from a high ranked executive-which violates, corporate and personal privacy, bank secrecy and 100’s of common laws. Oh, and yet another American symbol. But that is for the greater good argues the hypocrite humanitarian.
No one was hurt.
Julian Assange claims no one was hurt in the process. Is this his perspective? Your perspective? Or the perspective of thousands of diplomats, ambassadors and consuls around the planet being “invited” to provide explanations and apologies?
If I post a picture of you naked it won’t kill you. It won’t hurt me either but will it hurt you?
All other countries are picking whatever they need from Wikileaks to serve their local political careers.
Segolene Royal likes the way Sarkozy is painted by US diplomats.
Antonio Di Pietro enjoys every word describing Silvio Berlusconi.
Netanyahu likes to read embarrassing cables regarding Ehud Barak for a reason.
Censorship of the uncensored documents.
Only a small portion of documents has been published. Why not all? What is the logic of sorting messages when you claim transparency? Is Wikileaks releasing documents in filtered manners? Is there a negotiation behind the scenes on the release of those documents?
We know absolutely nothing about Wikileaks, their founders and the organization. And yet, every frustrated anti-American is ready to embrace their cause to Satanize a great country.
Here in America, we have this thing called the First Amendment, which allows people to express what they think in political and social speech.
It doesn’t mean you can steal classified information, publish it, and then hide yourself behind a convenient Amendment of a Constitution you are not part of.
You should know US administration is the only one to declassify Diplomatic Cables on regular basis as stated in The Freedom Of Information Act [PDF] . You can also find the archives online here from Georges Washington University.
Time will tell if Wikileaks intentions are nobles or not. But I strongly believe Wikileaks is conveniently irresponsible and damaging to the World.
Let’s hear your opinion.
Tags: 1st amendment, cables, clinton, diplomatic, freedom, julian assange, obama, wikileaks
Posted in Economy, Election, Legal, Politics, Uncategorized, World | 8 Comments »
Google Imaginary Open Letter to FCC – One year later
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010
Today Google announced the integration of Google Voice into Gmail allowing users to place and receive phone calls from their computer from any place in the world to the US for FREE.
Since the acquisition of GrandCentral by Google, Craig Walker and his team have been working hard to make the world a better place for communication.
One of the targets is to make Google Voice accessible to all users (meaning outside the scope of Google) with an horizontal approach ranging from Mobile phones to Web based applications and device dependent applications as well. Google Voice has been available for Blackberry and Android phones for over a year. But they never could make it to the iPhone. The application went live for a few hours before Apple’s executives decided to remove it from the app store raising a Valley drama on Twitter and Facebook.
Google asked the FCC to look into Apple’s motivation, Apple replied, FCC sent a few letters, AT&T denied any implications…bottom line: nothing happened. In a world where technology is evolving around time, FCC has failed to do its job.
Worse, I believe FCC integrity is challenged by its dependance to regulatory fees mainly paid by carriers and manufacturers e.g. AT&T and Apple. I see an urgent need to reform FCC processes to adapt to 21st century technology pace.
Here is an imaginary open letter from Google to FCC regarding Apple’s Rejection of the Google Voice for iPhone Application.
Tags: android, Apple, att, Blackberry, carriers, craig walker, google, google voice, iPhone
Posted in android, Apple, Blackberry, Gmail, google, iPhone, Legal, TechCrunch, Technology, Telecom | 1 Comment »
Photo published in Travel+Leisure but wait til you read this
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
We just had 2 days of intense debate over some shared content on my Posterous page when this email hits my inbox:
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: XXX XXXX <yyyyyyyy@aexp.com>
Date: Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 4:04 PM
Subject: Laduree
To: xxxxxxx@gmail.com
Hi Florian,
Please send me an invoice for $250 for your image of Laduree that ran a quarter page in our September issue. The story name is “Airline Food.”
Thanks,
Jessica
–
XXXX XXXXX
Associate Photo Editor
Travel + Leisure
1120 Avenue of the Americas, 9th floor
New York, NY 10036
www.travelandleisure.com
September 09 issue must have been published and sent for printing late August. I guess my picture of Ladurée macarons in Paris airport was picked up on Flickr. Even though my privacy and permission policy is stated on each picture no one contacted me on behalf of the magazine.
Nonetheless the picture was taken, cropped, published and printed without my permission. Out from the blue and a month after the fact I receive an email asking for a $250 invoice. hmmm talking about journalistic ethics and moral this is legend.
Why $250, why not $20 or $5000? I don’t get it. 
Wild guess is someone at Travel Leisure is following my Twitter stream and decided to make a move avoiding any bad publicity. Further down you will see they had nothing to fear.
100′s of my pics end up on the web everyday. Most of the reprints are on blogs, some ad supported some not. Recently I noticed an increase of my photos used on commercial news related site and papers. It’s very difficult if not impossible to track photos published in newspapers or magazines. On websites I can use some tools based on tags, keywords, search and events but usually viewers are prompt to alert me.
Below few examples of reprinted pics/videos on commercial websites posted without permission:
http://www.cafebabel.com/eng/article/29690/bernard-madoff-fraud-europe-victims-banks.html
http://varl.jp/i-see-stock/wordpress-plugin-photo-dropper
http://www.portaldenoticias.com/videos/yt-u4MaQ-LOFnw
http://www.nowpublic.com/tech-biz/diggs-kevin-rose-weve-got-be-more-relevant (no credit given – here is original pic)
Schmap.com (check pic of Ritz Carlton in Key Biscayne on right column)
and countless French, US newspapers and magazines.
I receive requests on regular basis asking for permission to reprint my photos. Honestly I don’t have the time and energy to deal with that. A couple of travel guides asked me for reprint rights offering money which I promptly granted for FREE.
One picture in particular caught public attention causing tens of emails.
Question: how many pics are used without permission in conventional press? Maybe NYT has the answer.
Now here is my position : you can use, copy, reprint, publish, distribute, share any of my original material – pictures, videos or texts with no limitation. I’m just asking you give me proper credit. You do not have to link to the original, you do not have to ask me permission. You do not have to pay anything. I would appreciate being notified of published images, texts or videos as an act of courtesy but you don’t have to if you don’t want to.
You can’t steal what is given freely. I call this sharing, not piracy.
PS: my reply to Travel+Leisure was obviously consistent with this post. No money involved, no permission needed.
Tags: flickr, laduree, leisure, magazines, permission, pircay, publication, rights, Travel
Posted in Art, Content, Legal, Photography, Pikchur, Travel | 7 Comments »
The Death Of Arrogance
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
I’d like to start this post with a statement: I’m not a journalist, I’m not a professional blogger, I don’t get paid – directly or indirectly – to write, I don’t have any ads on my Posterous or my blog. I’m just a nobody with a big mouth. Finally English is not my native language.
Yesterday a debate started on Twitter after I shared an article taken from Yahoo! Finance and posted in extenso on my Posterous page.
For those – like Charles Arthur- who do not know the way Posterous works, here is a small tutorial.
You surf the web – find an interesting post and want to SHARE it.
Then once you press the Share on Posterous button you have :
Et voila – content is shared and all credits are given to the original source here:
Basically Posterous sharing ie Digg, Techmeme, Google Reader is identical as a ReTweet of valuable content.
Now back to yesterday’s incident.
I shared the following: http://florianseroussi.posterous.com/ten-big-companies-that-are-veering-toward-ban reproducing EXACTLY what was posted on Yahoo! Finance page. Exactly. Giving credit to Yahoo! and Business Insider as per the original post.
You will note that Yahoo! has a generic link to Business Insider but not to the original BI article.
Charles Arthur then asked why didn’t I link the original Business Insider post. Tried to explain how I used Posterous add-on to share content but Charles didn’t know anything about Posterous.
Mike Butcher – Techcrunch UK editor- jumped on the bandwagon without checking the facts thinking I simply reproduced a paid content without giving any credits. Once Mike understood his mistake he blamed me for not finding the original post and manually adding a link to the Yahoo! re-post. It was simply a ridiculous claim but I searched the internet, found the link and added it to my shared content credit to appease boiling journo blood. As someone mentioned to me via DM – Mike Butcher was much more eloquent to defend the right to publish stolen documents on Techcrunch aka Twittergate. Journalist bullshit duty I guess.
Charles Arthur lost the plot, comparing cars, free content, source code and who knows what all together. Within hours- Charles tone went from arrogant to sarcastic to insulting.
Ilicco Elias tried to minimize the incident but Guardian editor was not ready to give up so easily.
My buddy Paul Walsh came to the rescue with a fair statement:
Charles still on a roll threatens to sue me and foresees a class action against Posterous starting soon (ahem)…
At last in a final act of bravery Arthur decided to block me and called me stupid after I mentioned The Guardian.co.uk had lost over £24M.
Mr Arthur – as the tech editor of The Guardian who do not have a clue what Posterous is – you should have a much more humble attitude.
Journalists – your current business model is SINKING. You are dying slowly with 20th century principles. Wake up! Look around. You do not have the monopole of information and sharing. We – your readers- have the ability to share, produce and rate content the same way you do. The only value added you can provide is by doing a better job – not by shutting us down.
Note: I didn’t want to go on the legal approach of copyright et al on this post. I’m not an attorney and IP laws (international laws should I say) are too complicated for a blog post. Yahoo! quickly replied to my email and stated they are not involved as no logo or Yahoo! material has been shared.
Hopefully Charles Arthur will use last pence of The Guardian to start a worldwide class action against Google and Posterous to prove his point and whatever the outcome shall be – we will burn in golden letters on The Guardian’s headstone : The Death Of Arrogance.
UPDATE Sept 24 : After an email exchange with Charles Arthur I have modified the Posterous post to an excerpt only – adding another link to Business Insider [there are now 2 links, one on header and one on footer]. It would be interesting to know the conversation rate between hits on my Posterous to links onto BI but my guess is we will never know.
Tags: charles arthur, copyright, ilicco, journalism, mike butcher, paul walsh, posterous, TechCrunch, the guardian, twittergate
Posted in Content, Economy, Legal, London, Newspapers, Social Media, TechCrunch, Technology | 91 Comments »
