New York Times

The terms of service on many websites are so wordy and so legalistic that users may not understand -- or even be aware of -- the intellectual property rights that they cede when they check the “agree” box to set up an account, according to a new study from researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The Georgia Tech study reviewed 30 popular social networking and creative community sites that encourage people to share material, examining the rights to use work that were claimed in the sites’ terms of service agreements. Sites examined in the study included: Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Flickr, IMDB, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Remix64 and Fanfiction. Of course, people who wish to see their creative work published need to permit certain uses -- like authorizing a site to publicly post their content. But users may be surprised to learn about other permission they must grant in order to use a site.

For instance, the study reported that 11 of the sites required users to agree that the sites could license their content to a third party. Yet users are unlikely to understand what they are agreeing to because terms of service agreements tend to be daunting in length and readability. The Georgia Tech researchers calculated that it would take someone nearly eight hours to read the agreements on the 30 sites in the study, at an average adult pace of 250 words per minute.

The California Senate voted down a state measure that would require smarter antitheft security on smartphones.

The bill, introduced by State Senator Mark Leno and sponsored by George Gascón, San Francisco’s district attorney, would have required a so-called kill switch -- which would render a smartphone useless after it was stolen -- on all smartphones sold in California. The proposal needed 21 votes to pass in the 40-member chamber.

After debate at the Capitol, in Sacramento, it fell two votes short of passing, with a final count of 19 to 17 in favor.

One concern raised by some senators who opposed the bill was that businesses might feel that California was being overly strict about regulating technology, which could discourage tech companies from doing business there. The measure could be brought up for reconsideration again before the end of May.

[Commentary] The best way to think about Aereo, the company at the center of this week’s Supreme Court battle over the future of computing, is as an example of legal performance art.

Aereo is based entirely on a legalistic leap of faith: If it’s legal to set up an antenna and record a TV show at your own house, which it is, shouldn’t it also be legal to rent an antenna and server space at a big data center, and then stream the show over the Internet to your computer, tablet or set-top box?

It’s a clever argument, one that highlights the extreme lengths that tech companies go to in order to avoid copyright restrictions. The argument is designed to show off the similarities between Aereo and more traditional cloud services like Dropbox -- services that the Supreme Court would have to strive mightily to separate out of any ruling against Aereo.

But for all its cleverness, Aereo is also a gimmick. Aereo is a for-pay, middleman service whose sole function is to let you stream TV shows that are already freely available over the air. For consumers, the best outcome of this case is for Aereo to win, and then scare broadcasters into streaming their content directly to users, either for free or for a lower price than Aereo charges.

[Commentary] Is America on the cusp of a broadband revolution? You might get that impression from AT&T’s announcement that it is considering providing Internet service of up to 1 gigabit, or 1 billion bits, a second to 21 metropolitan areas including Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The company’s plans sound impressive and ambitious. But if you happen to live in the cities AT&T is talking about, you might want to keep your Champagne on ice. Even if the company were ready to start laying new fiber-optic lines tomorrow, it would take many months of digging before it would be in a position to provide super-fast broadband connections.

A better way to understand what AT&T is doing is to look at it as a salvo in the company’s war of words with Google. Neither company will necessarily get around to expanding in all of the cities they’ve mentioned, however. Meanwhile, cable companies have been trying to consolidate control of the market.

Most Americans currently have few choices for high-capacity Internet service; nearly 60 percent of households buy broadband from their local cable companies, according to the Leichtman Research Group. It would be great if competition between Google Fiber and AT&T ended up providing Americans with more choices. But it would be naïve to believe that a broadband revolution is coming as long as a handful of cable companies dominate this important market.

[Commentary] In every modern society, the people who hold the levers of state power control the deployment of vast riches; every decision about a change in the tax code or the issuance of oil drilling licenses is worth billions to someone.

The potential beneficiaries of those policies have every incentive in the world to try to influence the decisions.

Influence peddling is the mechanism by which those hoping to sway politicians ultimately reward those politicians. Whether it is ethical or unethical, legal or illegal, depends on what particular compromises a given country has come to accept.

China has had a system in which the understanding is that legal authorities will take a don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach to family members of high political officials making vast sums. The prosecution of Zhou’s family is a frontal assault on that understanding of what is official corruption.

In the United States, the basic compact has been this: If you take financial benefits from a private interest that seeks to influence policy while in office, it is probably illegal. It’s the same if a close family member does it.

The influence games are different in Washington and Beijing, of course. And not all corruption is created equal; it matters whether a particular variety of official corruption drags down a country’s economy. At the worst extreme, a country where public officials at all levels demand constant bribes as a matter of course will not be a very hospitable environment for business.

But as the Columbia economist Ray Fisman has argued, so long as corruption is predictable and manageable, it can coexist with speedy economic growth (Indonesia under Suharto and China over the last few decades are prime examples). And China has greater state control over more of the economy, and little transparency around who is profiting from that control and why. That is a breeding ground for potential corruption on a scale unknown in the United States.

The Supreme Court seemed to have conflicting impulses in considering a request from television broadcasters to shut down Aereo, an Internet start-up that the broadcasters say threatens the economic viability of their businesses.

On the one hand, most of the Justices seemed to think that the service was too clever by half. “Your technological model,” Chief Justice John Roberts Jr told Aereo’s lawyer, “is based solely on circumventing legal prohibitions that you don’t want to comply with.”

But Justice Stephen Breyer, echoing sentiments of other members of the court, said “what disturbs me on the other side is, I don’t understand what a decision” against Aereo “should mean for other technologies,” notably cloud computing.

The Justices seemed keenly aware that their ruling would have vast implications for the broadcast industry and for technical innovations involving cloud computing.

The Digital Public Library of America, a project aimed at providing free online access to the nation’s cultural repositories, has tripled in size to more than seven million items from more than 1,300 institutions since it opened in 2013.

The noncommercial effort, which is based in the Boston Public Library, gained steam following a 2011 federal court ruling that derailed Google’s plan to build the world’s largest digital library. It does not own any of the items in its catalog, but instead allows users to access them both through its own website and through various regional service hubs.

The library’s holdings, which come from institutions ranging from the Smithsonian and the New York Public Library to the Minnesota Streetcar Museum and the Montana Memory Project, include items in more than 400 languages, the project’s executive director, Dan Cohen, said in an interview. They can be accessed by various search tools, including a map that allows users to search for items by state.

Justice John Paul Stevens, who turned 94 recently, is a mild man with an even temperament. He has a reverence for the Supreme Court, on which he served for almost 35 years until his retirement in 2010, and he is fond of his former colleagues.

But there was a hint of anger in some of his remarks when I went to see him last week in his Supreme Court chambers. He said the court had made a disastrous wrong turn in its recent string of campaign finance rulings.

“The voter is less important than the man who provides money to the candidate,” he said. “It’s really wrong.”

He talked about what he called a telling flaw in the opening sentence of last month’s big campaign finance ruling. He filled in some new details about the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that led to the Citizens United decision. And he called for a constitutional amendment to address what he said was the grave threat to American democracy caused by the torrent of money in politics.

[Commentary] The New York Times published an article about an Arab citizen of Israel -- a 23-year-old journalist and Palestinian rights advocate -- who was detained by Israeli authorities.

The man, Majd Kayyal, was initially not allowed a lawyer, and he was interrogated for five days on suspicion that he was being recruited by a “hostile organization” after he visited Lebanon. He was released but ordered to be kept under house arrest.

The Times article mentions a court-imposed gag order that was lifted. What it doesn’t mention is that The Times, too, is subject to such gag orders.

According to its bureau chief in Jerusalem, Jodi Rudoren, that is true. The Times is “indeed, bound by gag orders,” Rudoren said. She said that the situation is analogous to abiding by traffic rules or any other laws of the land, and that two of her predecessors in the bureau chief position affirmed to her that The Times has been subject to gag orders in the past.

In the case of article about Kayyal, Rudoren said, “We probably would have written a modest story or brief about this arrest earlier if there had not been a gag order.”

Waiting a day or two until the gag order was lifted may have done no great harm. Still, I find it troubling that The Times is in the position of waiting for government clearance before deciding to publish.

If the law makes that situation unavoidable, a little transparency would go a long way. Either in a sentence within an article or a short editor’s note, The Times can, and should, tell its readers what’s going on.

[Sullivan is the fifth public editor appointed by The New York Times.]

How many people need to use your product before it’s a success? That’s a question European tech companies from Dublin to Dubrovnik routinely ask themselves as they look to move beyond their small local markets to reach bigger audiences.