Many of its lawsuits arise, not from articles posted by a website's proprietors, but from comments and forum posts by the site's readers. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a website enjoys effective immunity from civil copyright liability for user content, provided they, promptly remove infringing material at the request of a rightsholder. That's how sites like YouTube are able to exist, and... Continue reading »

Go check out this talk with Fred Destin from Atlas Venture about how entrepreneurs can make sense of the VC investment process. He's interviewed by Andrew Warner at Mixergy. To save time, scan the text transcript at the bottom of the page.

I went to the Entrepreneurs Round Table last night, organized by Shirley Lin. The first speaker was a lawyer from Pilsbury, Michael Heuga. He had 6 main points that I thought were interesting enough to share

1. Contamination of IP. Did you come up with it at work? Did you use their hardware to make it (copiers/computers/fax/etc)? Did you work on it during... Continue reading »

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams

Although Cloudspace works mostly with startups (which are small almost by definition), this principle is worth commenting on as a general rule. As startups grow in size, this rule becomes increasingly relevant.

The people who make the best decisions are the ones who are closest to the causes and effects of that decision. If you're... Continue reading »

Why Patch?

Sometimes you just have to do it live! Sometimes a fix is so crucial that you head directly to the production server, edit the code, save the file, and restart the server. It's not an ideal situation but it happens. Most of the time, the fix is pretty small and you can just go to your local repository after things are fixed on... Continue reading »

88% of a sample of Gen Y-ers voiced support for a law that would require websites to delete captured information. Sixty-two percent of them wanted the right to know everything a website knows about them.

From Do You Trust Your Social Network? at HBR

I was recently helping a developer test a feature using cucumber.  He was using mostly webrat steps and basic Rails features like dynamic finder methods. He knew that he could use local variables in steps but didn't know he could use instance variables to simplify the process of finding all of the objects he needed... Continue reading »