Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

The fair use defense to copyright infringement was codified for the first time in section 107 of the 1976 Act . Fair use was not a novel proposition in 1976, however, as federal courts had been using a common law form of the doctrine since the 1840s (an English version of fair use appeared much earlier). The Act codified this common law doctrine with little modification. Under section 107, the fair use of a copyrighted work is not copyright infringement, even if such use technically violates section 106. While fair use explicitly applies to use of copyrighted work for criticism, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research purposes, the defense is not limited to these areas. The Act gives four factors to be considered to determine whether a particular use is a fair use: the purpose and character of the use (commercial or educational, transformative or reproductive); the nature of the copyrighted work (fictional or factual, the degree of creativity); the amount and substantiality ...

Cyrus Shepard reports on the Moz Blog that this year, for the first time, the  Moz Data Science Team measured the correlation between Google +1s and higher rankings. They discovered that after Page Authority, a URL's number of Google +1s is more highly correlated with search rankings than any other factor. In fact, “the correlation of Google +1s beat out other well known metrics including linking root domains, Facebook shares, and even keyword usage.” In addition, Searchmetrics, another firm, used a slightly different methodology and found Google +1s to be the highest-correlated factor they studied.  They also make some recommendations about how to use Google+ to optimize SEO. Included in these are to follow great people, comment on posts, and share great content, making longer Google+ posts, as well as adding the  rel="author" meta tag to your website or blog. Another important factor is to post public.  Posts shared privately don't pass the same juice as publ...

  This subject comes up repeatedly, and because I have a number of liberal friends who challenge me on it from time to time, I thought it would be appropriate to summarize my views again. First and foremost, I do not base my pro-life stance on religion. I am about the most unreligious person you will ever meet. I'm not an atheist, but my beliefs in a Supreme Being certainly didn't come from attending church or synagogue. They came from science . Science - that is biomedical science - tells us that once the very first cell-division takes place in a fertilized ovum, it meets all the scientific qualifications for a developing human life. Period. You don't need to wait until it develops a heartbeat. In the very first hour, it's a developing human being completely distinct from the mother, with it's own DNA. Therefore, as caring human beings, we must provide it with the same protections and rights as any other human being. To me, this renders all these progressive li...

The insanity of American foreign policy is on display everywhere in the world. When you go to war against anyone, especially against extreme cultures and nations, you must bomb Dresden into smoking ruins, or you cannot win the war. You must drop The Bomb on Hiroshima, or the price will be a Pyrrhic victory at best. Just as in a personal fight against an armed mugger, you must fight for your life and when your opponent goes down, make sure he stays down, by whatever means are necessary -- or you will simply die. In the struggle against Muslim extremism and against extremist cultures overseas, we have, instead, as Republicans, conservatives, Democrats and liberals, abandoned most of The Constitution and denied most of our own right and freedoms in the name of "security." When you go to war, there are some enemies who must be utterly destroyed. Americans no longer have the stomach to destroy their enemies. They no longer even have the stomach to fight for their own freedom....

None of the Founding Fathers were atheists. Most of the Founders were Deists, which is to say they thought the universe had a creator, but that he does not concern himself with the daily lives of humans, and does not directly communicate with humans, either by revelation or by sacred books. They spoke often of God, but this was not the God of the bible. They did not deny that there was a person called Jesus, and praised him for his benevolent teachings, but they flatly denied his divinity. If the U.S. was founded on the Christian religion, the Constitution would clearly say so -- but it does not. Nowhere does the Constitution say: "The United States is a Christian Nation", or anything even close to that. In fact, the words "Jesus Christ, Christianity, Bible, Creator, Divine, and God" are never mentioned in the Constitution -- not even once. When the Founders wrote the nation's Constitution, they specified that "no religious test shall ever be required as a...

  A new, peer reviewed study published in “Energy And Environment” comes to the conclusion that global temperatures have actually been dropping since 1986 .  This conclusion, at best, obliterates the claims that there is a global warming consensus. The  “Meteosat Derived Planetary Temperature Trend  –  1982-2006” study took satellite derived temperature data from 1986-2006 that was collected using a European satellite system which measures thermal infrared radiation (similar to those red to blue heat maps that weather.com uses.)  “The amazing finding of the present study is that we do not observe global warming in the period 1982-2006, but significant cooling. What could be the cause? The satellite data are from a reliable origin supported by the European meteorological community. Their accurate calibration has received due attention and efforts from Eumetsat. Our processing of these data has been simple and straight forward, involving only noon and midni...

Everyone has their own individual style on social media. Here is mine, in a nutshell, for whatever it may be worth to you: First, my life is an open book, so virtually everything I post is public. The other reason I do this is because I think I have a message to deliver, and I want to be able to broadcast it effectively to a large audience. For circle management, I really only have two main circles -- "friends" - which is where everyone goes initially, and "close friends", which is a circle you earn your way into. More on this in a bit. When somebody circles me (which happens anywhere between 10 and 20 times a day), if time permits, I check your profile. A complete profile, with a photo of a real person, and at least a couple of posts so I can figure you out, will generally get me to circle you back. To get into my "close friends" circle - which is the only one I am really interested in, because that is the only one of my circles that has the notificat...

Despite religious rhetoric to the contrary, morals, ethics and laws do not necessarily derive from the Bible. In a group, there are selective pressures that tend to keep people in line. If a member of your tribe is killing other members of your tribe, then the tribesmen will not trust him, and will either kill him, or force him to leave the tribe (banishment), thus making it very difficult for the murderer to pass his genetic/ideological values to the next generation. This is just an example, but there are many more. There is no need for God to sit at the ethical bar; society does that for us as an emergent property of living in large groups. Religion provides ethical laws given by someone else which are followed out of faith. There is nothing wrong with that. Organized religion can be a powerful force for good. One test of a good ethic is to switch the roles of the individuals and see if the situation is still fair. Another important realization is that there are many valid ways peop...

With the 1964 discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation—predicted by Big Bang theorists in the 1940s—the Big Bang theory became the preeminent cosmological model. The question was no longer, did the universe have a beginning? The question became, how did it happen? As more and more astrophysicists focused their attention on what happened in the first few moments, months and years of the universe, some Christians became upset that the new theoretical models didn't match up with their interpretation of Genesis  ( the Jewish account of creation is similar). Just as many astrophysicists felt that the expanding universe theory was a ploy to inject religion into science, many Christians have come to feel that the Big Bang is an effort to undermine the biblical account of creation. Other Christians, however, feel that the Big Bang is indeed consistent with the Bible’s account and they welcome such compelling evidence for the creation of the universe. The Big Bang wasn't a ...

Where are the policies that will actually help Americans at the bottom regain the dignity of real, value-creating jobs, Mr. Obama? Again and again, you have offered a higher minimum wage as a solution. Yet as the overwhelming majority of economists have argued for decades, the minimum wage actually harms the poorest workers — those with the weakest grip on their jobs. Same with education: cheaper student loans aren't going to help the bottom quintile. Despite Pell Grants and other aid, only one in three children from the bottom quintile go to college—and just 11% graduate. You could go to bat for real education reforms that drive social and economic mobility, Mr. president. But you haven't. You won two elections with what seemed to be sincere promises to fight for people. That should include fighting for people at the bottom, even if the best policies for doing so contradict your progressive-liberal policy dogma. The American dream, which you so often mention in your speeche...