Category: Legal-Troubles
September 27, 2010, 01:30 PM ET
To Ban or Not? Gossip Web Sites Still Pose Troubling Questions for Colleges
Just when you thought college gossip sites like JuicyCampus had disappeared, more college students are posting salacious, unsubstantiated gossip about their peers on a similar Web site called CollegeACB. (The initials stand for Anonymous Confession Board.) Colleges are again pondering two questions: whether they should ban the site, and whether doing so is a freedom-of-speech violation.
Peter Frank, CollegeACB’s creator and a Wesleyan University student, told The Chronicle in an e-mail that the site got more than 10 million page views from 250,000 unique users so far in September. Viewership has shot up fivefold since JuicyCampus shut down 19 months ago, according to figures Mr. Frank gave to the Wesleyan student newspaper.
That kind of heavy student use was too much for Millsaps College.
Millsaps blocked access to the site a month ago after student leaders suggested a review of the...
Read MoreApril 23, 2010, 02:00 PM ET
College Fights to Get Off Web Site's 'Most Dangerous' List
One college wants off of a Web site ranking the most dangerous colleges in the country, although representatives for the site say they have no plans to remove it.
Hobart and William Smith Colleges, in Geneva, N.Y., is ranked 44th on the list of 100 most dangerous American colleges at American School Search. The institution sent the Web site a letter demanding that it be removed and filed for a subpoena in New York State Supreme Court to get the identity of the site's owner.
Robert Flowers, the college's vice president for student affairs, said in an e-mail message to The Chronicle that they've obtained that subpoena and "if we are unsuccessful in achieving a resolution through conversation with the owner(s), we will move to refile the complaint in the appropriate jurisdiction."
American School Search posts a breakdown of crimes that occurred on institutions' campuses in recent years, ...
Read MoreApril 7, 2010, 12:34 AM ET
Visual Artists Plan to Sue Google Over Digital-Library Project
In another potential setback for the vast digital library planned by Google, several groups representing photographers and other visual artists plan to file a federal lawsuit against the company on Wednesday, alleging that its efforts to digitize millions of library books amounts to a large-scale infringement of their copyrights, The New York Times reported.
Google has reached a potential settlement with authors and publishers who sued on similar grounds in 2005, but a federal judge has not yet signed off on it. Possibly prolonging the lengthy proceedings, the U.S. Department of Justice has recently filed court papers saying the settlement still needs work.
The photographers' groups in the new lawsuit had sought to intervene in the settlement with authors and publishers, but were rejected. The pending settlement agreement largely excludes photographs and other visual works.
Read MoreMarch 22, 2010, 02:19 PM ET
Student Punished for Facebook Group Starts $10-Million Lawsuit
A Ryerson University engineering student punished for his Facebook study group has started a $10-million class-action lawsuit against the Toronto institution.
Chris Avenir faced 147 counts of academic misconduct two years ago for his Facebook group, which let engineering students "discuss/post solutions" to homework problems. The course stipulated that students had to conduct independent work. Mr. Avenir faced expulsion, but a faculty committee ruled he should instead receive a zero for one assignment and a disciplinary note in his file.
A statement of claim filed on Mr. Avenir's behalf says that students enrolled at Ryerson have been denied the right to have a lawyer present at disciplinary hearings. According to the document, the university violated its policy requiring that all hearings comply with the Statutory Powers Procedure Act, which guarantees a right to legal counsel. The
Read MoreMarch 3, 2010, 04:30 PM ET
UCLA Will Resume Streaming Video After Legal Dispute
The University of California at Los Angeles has restored its streaming video service about two months after temporarily suspending the service amid complaints from an educational-media trade group.
The Association for Information and Media Equipment told UCLA in the fall that the university had violated copyright laws by letting instructors use the videos, some of which were full-length productions. UCLA decided that beginning this semester it would suspend the password-protected video-streaming service, available only to students in specific classes.
UCLA announced Wednesday that it will restart streaming of instructional content. The university hopes material will be back up by the spring quarter, which begins March 29. L. Amy Blum, senior campus counsel for UCLA, says the university wants to take steps to ensure that faculty members explicitly say why they are using the copyrighted...
Read MoreFebruary 2, 2010, 03:15 PM ET
UCLA Pulls Videos From Course Sites After Copyright Challenge
The University of California at Los Angeles has stopped posting copyrighted videos on course Web sites after complaints from an educational-media trade group, leaving other colleges worried about repercussions.
The Association for Information and Media Equipment contacted the university in the fall, alleging that it had violated copyright laws by letting instructors use the videos, which were accessible only to students then enrolled in specific courses. The university temporarily stopped using online videos beginning this semester and is negotiating with the trade group.
Current copyright laws allow "fair use" exceptions for teaching and research, and one specific exception in copyright law lets instructors use legally made audiovisual material in face-to-face teaching activities. The university argues that posting the material to password-protected sites falls under these exceptions ...
Read MoreOctober 19, 2009, 03:00 PM ET
After Latest Loss in Patent Case, Blackboard Looks to the Supreme Court
Blackboard Inc. plans to ask the Supreme Court to review its patent battle with its rival Desire2Learn after a federal appeals court last week denied the company's request to have a larger panel of the court reconsider the case.
The company will soon file its request for consideration by the nation's highest court, said Matthew Small, Blackboard's general counsel, in an interview Monday, though he acknowledged that "it is very unlikely that any case is ever heard by the Supreme Court."
"I think we have a very good reason to ask for the decision to be reheard," he added. But he declined to give specifics, noting only that "it would be inappropriate for me to characterize a future legal pleading here."
He played down the latest ruling and the company's request for Supreme Court consideration, noting that Blackboard officials have long said they would fight the case until all possible...
Read MoreSeptember 29, 2009, 12:00 PM ET
Bucknell U. Investigates Letters Saying That Students Owe for Downloads
More than 300 students at Bucknell University got hit with letters from a collection agency last week charging that they had illegally downloaded material from Cayman Academic Resources and must pay $500 "to settle this matter."
Several of the students who got the letter contacted university officials and said that they had never heard of the company and that they did not do the downloading. Now Jason Friedberg, chief of public safety for the university, suspects that the letters were part of a scam. He contacted the collection agency, Advanced Collection Services, which told him it is now having trouble contacting the client and plans to rescind the letters.
When The Chronicle called Advanced Collection Services today, a woman who answered refused to answer questions about the incident and hung up abruptly. Messages to other employees of the company were not returned.
The Chronicle...
Read MoreAugust 3, 2009, 02:00 PM ET
Students Reach Settlement in Turnitin Suit
A two-year battle over copyright infringement between four students and Turnitin, a commerical plagiarism-detection service, came to an apparent end last Friday in a settlement that prohibits either party from taking further legal action.
The high-school students first sued iParadigms, Turnitin's parent company, in 2007 for copyright infringement, saying the company took their papers against their will and then made a profit from them.The students' high schools required them to use the service, which scans papers for plagiarism and then adds them to its database, which students argued could easily be hacked.
But the students and their lawyers were handed two decisions against them -- first from the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., in March 2008 and again this April from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
The Chronicle reported in March 2008 that the...
Read MoreApril 28, 2009, 01:47 PM ET
The Internet Archive Cannot Join Google Suit, Judge Says
The federal judge in charge of the Google Book Search settlement has shot down the Internet Archive’s request to join the case, Publishers Weekly reported today. The archive had hoped to take advantage of the copyright-liability protections built into the settlement for its own book-digitizing work, and it still may file an amicus brief by the court’s May 5 deadline for objections and comments, according to the report. —Jennifer Howard
Each day on Wired Campus, The Chronicle's technology reporters highlight key IT developments and put them in perspective.