Of course by having iBiblio on campus, the students themselves can have local access, which avoids the REAL cost of bandwidth if they had to use their Internet gateway to get to it. Frankly, 150Mbps is a drop in the UNC bucket, particularly compared with the massive traffic generated from their dorms.
iBiblio is one of the LEANEST organizations I've ever witnessed, (can you say student labor?). Many commercial IT departments could learn a thing or two. Besides, they pay their way in more appropriate methods than financial. Some of us were lured to the UNC Library School partly because of SunSite's reputation. Likewise, having iBiblio there keeps Paul Jones there, which makes for some very fortunate IS and LS students, which improves UNC's reputation...
I would ask Paul to talk about the value iBiblio brings to UNC and to North Carolina, value that could be replicated in other places by hosting similar systems. Likewise, is he aware of any up-and-comers DOING similar work in other places, places that might need some volunteer assistance, lobbying, or financial support?
Great advice. As someone who hires for a state agency, I agree. "Required" doesn't mean "required" if the applicant pool is small. The pools are bigger now than they used to be, but state jobs pay badly so we never get big pools. Give it a shot!
This is good advice. IANAL, but I went the arbitration route for a similar situation. My employer, a public television organization, had a disgruntled employee squatting on the.com matching our.org. (before his nonsense, we registered only ONE domain, but now we have to "protect" something like thirty six of the dratted things!)
Rather than stating a beef or otherwise making USE of the domain, the fool just put up a bad piece of porn (not even GOOD porn!) and an offer to sell the domain for $5,000 (we had twice offered to buy for something reasonable).
At that point, we started getting "what about the children!" calls blaming us for his nonsense. I had to agree that children deserved access to better porn than this guy was providing, or, failing that, access to everyone's favorite purple dinosaur through our legitimate site.
Our Atty sent a cease-and-desist letter, and got no response. I filed the arbitration and won. Wondered briefly about the ethics of taking a domain back from an individual, but it really wasn't as if he was trying to SAY anything, he just wanted to blackmail us into paying through the nose for the domain by trashing our reputation to the uninformed. Had he a clue, he could have won the arbitration by using the domain as a sounding-board for criticism of the organization, or other legitimate use. He just didn't bother to do that. He also didn't bother to challenge the dispute.
For reference, ours was not a registered trademark, if you read the UDRP creatively, there are other ways...
My very nice programmer husband, who believes that everyone is as honest as he, encountered a very similar (10 page) IP agreement in a recent job offer. Fortunately he brought it home to his sharklike evil wife.
In addition to all of the issues listed above, they included one clause that would allow them to contact any "prospective or future employer" to alert them to the existence of this agreement. In short, allowing them to blackmail my geek if he attempted to leave the company.
Another interesting tactic they used was to have section headers describing "company-owned proprietary information" while the paragraphs were far more general...buried in the small print was a statement to the effect that headers were not to be considered as interpretive of the content. If a document could be said to ooze slime, this one did.
Needless to say, the negotiations went badly and they refused to accept any of our proposed changes.
We were unimpressed with the "everyone here has already signed it" argument, since "everyone there" seemed to be a teenager. We pointed out that if they wanted to hire experience, they should expect it to not blindly sign things. Frankly, I know several gifted teenager coders who would know better than to sign such dreck!
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Of course by having iBiblio on campus, the students themselves can have local access, which avoids the REAL cost of bandwidth if they had to use their Internet gateway to get to it. Frankly, 150Mbps is a drop in the UNC bucket, particularly compared with the massive traffic generated from their dorms.
iBiblio is one of the LEANEST organizations I've ever witnessed, (can you say student labor?). Many commercial IT departments could learn a thing or two. Besides, they pay their way in more appropriate methods than financial. Some of us were lured to the UNC Library School partly because of SunSite's reputation. Likewise, having iBiblio there keeps Paul Jones there, which makes for some very fortunate IS and LS students, which improves UNC's reputation...
I would ask Paul to talk about the value iBiblio brings to UNC and to North Carolina, value that could be replicated in other places by hosting similar systems. Likewise, is he aware of any up-and-comers DOING similar work in other places, places that might need some volunteer assistance, lobbying, or financial support?
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Great advice. As someone who hires for a state agency, I agree. "Required" doesn't mean "required" if the applicant pool is small. The pools are bigger now than they used to be, but state jobs pay badly so we never get big pools. Give it a shot!
This is good advice. IANAL, but I went the arbitration route for a similar situation. My employer, a public television organization, had a disgruntled employee squatting on the .com matching our .org. (before his nonsense, we registered only ONE domain, but now we have to "protect" something like thirty six of the dratted things!)
Rather than stating a beef or otherwise making USE of the domain, the fool just put up a bad piece of porn (not even GOOD porn!) and an offer to sell the domain for $5,000 (we had twice offered to buy for something reasonable).
At that point, we started getting "what about the children!" calls blaming us for his nonsense. I had to agree that children deserved access to better porn than this guy was providing, or, failing that, access to everyone's favorite purple dinosaur through our legitimate site.
Our Atty sent a cease-and-desist letter, and got no response. I filed the arbitration and won. Wondered briefly about the ethics of taking a domain back from an individual, but it really wasn't as if he was trying to SAY anything, he just wanted to blackmail us into paying through the nose for the domain by trashing our reputation to the uninformed. Had he a clue, he could have won the arbitration by using the domain as a sounding-board for criticism of the organization, or other legitimate use. He just didn't bother to do that. He also didn't bother to challenge the dispute.
For reference, ours was not a registered trademark, if you read the UDRP creatively, there are other ways...
~~~~~~~~
My very nice programmer husband, who believes that everyone is as honest as he, encountered a very similar (10 page) IP agreement in a recent job offer. Fortunately he brought it home to his sharklike evil wife.
In addition to all of the issues listed above, they included one clause that would allow them to contact any "prospective or future employer" to alert them to the existence of this agreement. In short, allowing them to blackmail my geek if he attempted to leave the company.
Another interesting tactic they used was to have section headers describing "company-owned proprietary information" while the paragraphs were far more general...buried in the small print was a statement to the effect that headers were not to be considered as interpretive of the content. If a document could be said to ooze slime, this one did.
Needless to say, the negotiations went badly and they refused to accept any of our proposed changes.
We were unimpressed with the "everyone here has already signed it" argument, since "everyone there" seemed to be a teenager. We pointed out that if they wanted to hire experience, they should expect it to not blindly sign things. Frankly, I know several gifted teenager coders who would know better than to sign such dreck!
-araven
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