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Building An Uncensorable Course Guide At Yale
Former Googler and Foursquare employee Sean Haufler is now a student at Yale studying CS and Economics, but he hasn't put away his real-world software skills for academia. When two other Yale students named Harry Yu and Peter Xu were threatened with the school's punishment committee for designing a site that extends and improves the presentation of data from the school-controlled course selection guide (the Yale Bluebook [available only at Yale]), Haufler decided to create a similar site which he hopes will force the school's hand to either allow or deny this kind of data-mashing presentation. He acknowledges that there are legitimate questions about copyright, but Haufler's site treads lightly in a way that Yu and Xus did not: "Banned Bluebook never stores data on any servers. It never talks to any non-Yale servers. Moreover, since my software is smarter at caching data locally than the official Yale course website, I expect that students using this extension will consume less bandwidth over time than students without it. Don’t believe me? You can read the source code. No data ever leaves Yale’s control. Trademarks, copyright infringement, and data security are non-issues. It's 100% kosher." And if the school disagrees? "If Yale denies this right, I'll see you at the punishment committee." Of note: the Yale Bluebook site itself grew out of an independent student project, but was later acquired by the school. Update: 01/20 00:26 GMT by T : Correction: Unlike Yu and Xu, Haufler's approach is not a full-fledged separate site, but rather a Chrome extension that presents the data from Yale's own site differently, rather than at any point re-hosting it. Mea culpa.
It's not a replacement website, it's actually just a Chrome extension that appears to helpfully mangle the official website.
Nobody likes a smartass. Not even at Yale.
Seriously, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that making an improved X has a side effect of making original X look shit and everyone associated with creating it look stupid.
Except, of course, if X is Coca Cola.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You see nothing of this sort in the summary because the summary is wrong. If you'd read TFA, you would've found out it is *not* a site, as stated by the summary, but rather a browser extension. Since it doesn't reside on any central server but rather in the browser of each individual student, it is indeed effectively uncensorable. However, it should be breakable: if Yale changes their website so that the extension no longer matches it and thus cannot scrape it, it should break.
Yale was censoring coursetable in the name of copyright since it used Yale's copyrighted text. They did this because they didn't like the way coursetable presented the data.
Sean Haufler made a clever hack which is a Chrome extension which displays data from the Yale websites in the same useful format as coursetable but does not require setting up a web site. It just mashes up text and data from Yale servers and presents it nicely in Chrome. It also seems to use some local storage which should decrease bandwidth demands.
Uncensorable since it's not a web site, runs entirely on the users browser and only accesses official Yale data (which students are allowed to access).
Nice hack.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
This allows students to access the official Yale website and retrieve data that they officially have access to using their browser. I see nothing that could be called copyright infringement of any sort.
It does mangle up the presentation of the data into a more useful format but that is all done by the user on their browser.
Is there something that says that I don't have the right to view websites the way I want?
What about AdBlock, NoScript and Ghostery? They alter web pages under my control on my browser?
I get to view copyrighted web pages they way I want.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
completely different legal concept perhaps, but increasingly copyright law is being used to censor unwanted discussion
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I am guessing that the motivation has more to do with a couple of profs complaining that their courses were not being taken, or their reputations were demeaned because the averages sucked.
Certainly anybody can do the averages, but the time to gather the data and complete the calculation for every one of the courses a student would be considering is probably not something the average student will do. But if it is simply a click away, then all students will do it, and some professors will suffer as the ratings make them look bad.
copyright, which is a completely different issue.
It's about Yale's misuse of copyright to censor. You cannot copyright raw data. You can only copyright the representation of that data. This has been proven time and again by court cases where phone book publishers tried suing online phone directories and lost. Cookbook publishers were also smacked down by courts because recipes themselves are mere data and instructions and thus not copyrightable. Sweat of the brow isn't enough to apply copyright.
YBB+ wasn't a copyright infringement in any way, shape, or form. If YBB+ had copied the layout and the graphics of the Yale page, then Yale would have been entirely correct. However, that's not the case. The data representation was /better/ and didn't copy YBB.
It's censorship when you pretend that you're on the right side of the law and you use that to intimidate someone into taking down his stuff.
You, sir, are the one who doesn't understand copyright.
--
BMO
Do most universities over-react as Yale did -- or did the guy possibly just choose the wrong school for someone that isn't content to wait around for someone else to do things for him?
When Iwas a Berkeley undergrad in the late 90s, students creating new services or improving existing ones (without breaking rules against cheating or similar, of course) at Berkeley seemed far more likely to be praised than punished. That might be because the school still had mostof its Internet services handled by EECS majors hired for work-study jobs rather than paying outside companies to do the work (as is common now), or because it openly wanted students that felt driven to use their abilities/talents to improve the world around them. I have no idea whether Cal is still like that, however.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
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