Listics

Susan Crawford, with whom I do not always agree, has a post about GooglePrint today that speaks my mind.  Thank you Susan!

It goes something like this:  There’s a lawsuit against Google, (big surprise… deep pockets… lawyers appear like maggots on meat… no offense).  In order for Google (or any search service) in response to a query to provide fair use excerpts from a book, they must scan the whole book,thereby creating an "illegal copy."  No matter that it is a private copy not intended to be streamed to anyone.  The plaintiffs aver that this copy is illegal and compromises their rights as owners of the rights to the content.  Susan says,

The authors who are suing are claiming that they’d like to license

their works for online searching themselves — and they’re free to do
that.  They can simply ask Google not to include them in Google’s
pool.  Their claim is that that’s too much of a burden.  Phooey.

"Phooey" indeed.  Go read the whole thing.  Though written by a lawyer, except for the use of the word "dubitante," it’s really quite accessible prose.

Jeneane has a brilliant critique of eBay up now at Allied.

So eBay gets Skype and Google gets Vint.

Did eBay buy Skype, and why?  And how much?

Joe Sterling, making you as articulate as you wish you had been.

It has been brought to my attention that the CEO Hotty feature smacks of sexism and is at best "offensive" to those with finely tuned sexual-politics instrumentation.  As a USian equal opportunity offender, I invite nominations for the masculine version of the CEO Hotty, the CEO Stud Muffin.  Send as much detail as possible to fpaynter@gmail.com

["What do you think of the CEO Hotty thing?" I asked her.  "Sexist," she replied.  "Sexist perhaps," I said, "but certainly not in the least bit misogynistic."  Thanks to Alan Herrell, the head lemur for today’s entry.]

Kim Polese, "brighter than the sun the sharpest pencil in the box," is president, chief executive officer and co-founder of Marimba,
a leading provider of Internet infrastructure management solutions.  According to girlgeeks.com, Polese is a member of the board of directors of TechNet, a bipartisan coalition
of digital-economy executives focused on strengthening America’s leadership in the new economy. She is also an advisory board member of Women in Technology International. In addition, Polese is on the board of Do Something, a nonprofit organization that inspires, trains, funds and mobilizes young people to become leaders in their communities.

[If you would like to nominate a CEO Hotty to appear in this blog, send
a digitized picture and enough bio detail for our judges to sink their
teeth into to "CEO Hotties" c/o fpaynter@gmail.com]

Inaugurating a series of snapshots of CEO Hotties, today we present Victoria Hale.  It takes more than hair product, misting, and good bones to qualify as a Sandhill CEO Hotty.  Your work has to be meaningful too.  Victoria Hale is Founder, CEO, and Chairman of the Board of the Institute for OneWorld Health, a non-profit pharmaceutical company.

Interviewed by Anna Sarver in Synapse, the UCSF student paper, Dr. Hale had this to say about the inspiration for her company:

There is one underlying feature of the pharmaceutical sciences that is
after a while a bit annoying or disturbing, some people might even say
makes them angry, and that is that the industry discovers or does
research on so many more products or diagnostics than they’ll ever take
forward. There is a lot of initial work and abandonment of projects. I
really came to know this intimately at FDA. There are perfectly good
products but the key is that as you move along through late stage
research and development, increasingly you have marketing groups or
economic groups impacting the project and projects are routinely
abandoned because corporations or groups realize that there is not the
financial opportunity at the end of the road that you thought there was
or hoped there was or something has changed.

That means that there are a lot of compounds, we’ll call them drugs,
that are available that haven’t failed, they haven’t produced
toxicities. Some of them even have great efficacy in systems that
they’ve been tested in; there just wasn’t the financial justification
to move them forward. After watching that for so many years and arguing
with companies about not abandoning certain fields, certain orphan
diseases for instance, I decided that there was enough out there in the
infectious disease area, particularly in parasitology, to found a
company. There is enough of what you can call "low hanging fruit." I
decided as part of this that we had to be a non-profit organization;
otherwise we would err always towards the profitability option, which
is where everyone else was. We really needed a non-profit organization
that could accept these compounds, and have access to funding like
tax-free donations and funders like the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation.

[If you would like to nominate a CEO Hotty to appear in this blog, send a digitized picture and enough bio detail for our judges to sink their teeth into to "CEO Hotties" c/o fpaynter@gmail.com]