I don't think commentators who decried Yale's hypocrisy were claiming that Yale violated the first amendment rights of the students. They were saying that the same people who fought vociferously for scores of years to secure their freedom of expression were quite quick to trample it when exercised by non-PhDs. I think this is a valid criticism.
citation?
I'm only asking because that's not the case in most of Europe.
Re: Europe: the European Convention on Human Rights says, in Article 10: "Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises."
All of the members of the European Union are signatories to the ECHR.
Also, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union says, in Article 11:
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.
2. The freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." (attributed to Aristotle)
(I'm just trying to show you that there are limits on what you can say without legal trouble and what you cannot say without legal trouble: it all depends on where you put the cursor and how the limits are enforced. But to point out the existence of limits in order to demonstrate the absence of something is flawed.)
BTW, one comment: Holocaust denial is illegal in France. But to be clear, holocaust denial means refuting the facts established by the international Nuremberg tribunal. So it's not like a completely open category. Now, whether it's efficient is another matter…
"If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."
-- US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
The best advice I can give is to ensure you have open-minded faculty members at your back. If you have professors you feel you can talk to, I would try to have a casual conversation with them as soon as you can. Their advice and backing will be invaluable, if and when a formal situation arises.
In the US, under at-will employment, an employee "can be dismissed by an employer...without having to establish 'just cause' for termination..." [1]
If you'd prefer a different standard because this rule sounds harsh against employees, think for a moment from a company's standpoint: If you know the law won't make it easy for you fire someone, you'll be really picky about who you hire, how you hire them, and how many people you hire.
I think at-will employment helps everyone by making the job market more liquid and reducing the size of the class of "unemployable" people.
Fair enough to say 'that these show bigger issues with the company and you'd be better off elsewhere' but it doesn't stop companies like these existing and minimising the cost to them isn't something I particularly support.
P.S. I think the reply to your comment by lvs has some good thoughts.
Copyright doesn't protect from reuse of data, it's there to protect a particular artistic expression, a particular form if you like. I don't think the USA have anything akin to the European database rights?
Presumably that assertion is based on caselaw as I see nothing in the Directive itself that says that. A substantial investment - but note that can be qualitative and/or quantative - is in Art7(1)¹ however.
If your assertion is true then databases could be simply compiled by an offshoot company in order to meet the requirements.
¹ -- http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...
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Sometimes, however, that's a spurious distinction. This is one of those times.
https://www.cs.uaf.edu/~chappell/misc/freesp.html
i'm a bit busy atm so i haven't had a chance to review the short post but it could provide some insight into his opinion.
For the record, I found that memo to be very significant and also quite reassuring. However, it exhibits the same kind of terminological muddled-ness that I was talking about in my earlier comment.
Or maybe it does. Yale is a private organization. The University of Alaska (whose president wrote the memo you linked to) is an avatar of sorts of the government of the state of Alaska. In what sense is such an institution restrained by constitutional limitations on government? This seems to be a surprisingly poorly settled question in U.S. law.
Agreed. Very muddled thinking, indeed.
It sure sounds like there is nearly a contractual obligation by Yale to provide data a certain way. Whatever agreement made this possible could get undermined. Then NO data will be made available and poor Yale students can go back to just lists of courses.
They could have created a business around it. They could have attained departmental, IT, and/or administrative backing... along with all the improvements to access, support, and coverage that can bring.
What looks better? We got shut down right out of the gate for having no idea how to go about securing our venture or... We brought our technical acumen to the right eyes and ears and sold ourselves to the king-makers in our little world.
This is a dress-rehearsal for investors. What these kids proved was they want to be more Pirate Bay than Facebook. More pejorative hacker than Hacker News hacker.
The university went from "awful system implemented 20 years ago by Sungard" to "awful system implemented 1 year ago by Sungard". Don't pretend this YBB+ app, created by students, had any chance of being accepted by the university. Furthermore, it is a joke to claim futility and waste of talent for these men who built this website, created out of a real-world (first-world) problem and proven to serve user demands.
> This is an unfortunate outcome, since Yale’s copyright assertion muddles the argument that Yale’s actions violate Peter and Harry’s freedom of speech.
No it doesn't. Whatever Yale's responsibilities in the freedom-of-speech realm may be, they are entirely ethical in nature, as freedom of speech in the legal sense refers only to what governments may not suppress. Holding the copyright to something does not in any way affect ones responsibility to behave ethically.
> If Yale grants students access to data, the university does not have the right to specify exactly how students must view the data.
Under U.S. law they may very well have the right; I wouldn't know. What you may have demonstrated is that they do not have the ability.
May I suggest that you do not couch your arguments in terms of fallacious claims about freedom of speech. Rather, talk about academic freedom, a principle -- though not a legal one -- that Yale ostensibly seeks to uphold.