When I first left America, I disliked and felt disillusioned with the country.<p>I've now spent more of my adult life outside the States than in the U.S., and I've also come to the opinion that the U.S. is one of the most amazing places in the world.<p>Sometimes it's hard to point to exactly why America is so amazing. And the answer, maybe, is on display here.<p>An undergraduate student at an elite university just innovatively, publicly, aggressively pushed back against the Dean.<p>He cited his values and reasoning for doing so. He took care to make sure his work wouldn't damage their physical resources or break the letter of the law. And then he openly acknowledges they could punish him, and welcomes the attempt.<p>And it's not really even a big deal. It's just standard being-an-American stuff.<p>All kinds of bad things in the States. And sometimes the spirit of defiance can get tired or come across overbearing. But it's really cool that it's a regular, run of the mill occurrence for people to push back against norms and restrictions in American society without any fear of long-term repercussions.<p>It's also really, really, really weird. Seriously, stop and reflect on this for a moment. I spend a lot of time in Asia, and doing this in just about any Asian country would ruin a lot of your life prospects.<p>And for us, it's just a matter of course. How strange. And wonderful.
Very cool, I love this approach as it is very similar to how my (now defunct) unedditreddit app worked and how a clever app called socialfixer for facebook works. Two thoughts.<p>1. You are not unblockable. My app was removed from the chrome app store after reddit complained, no review process, no appeals, good luck even communicating with google. Installing an app not from the appstore is almost impossible for a non-savvy user. I suggest looking at a firefox app, their app story is much more democratic.<p>2. I think this fight is important because a lot of companies/organizations seem to be trying to establish the precedent that they own their website experience end to end, from database to the pixels on your screen. That idea taken to the extreme will lead to computers become opaque devices ala a TV, rather than the hackable playground they are now.<p><a href="http://socialfixer.com/blog/2013/10/05/facebook-requires-social-fixer-browser-extension-to-remove-key-features/?r" rel="nofollow">http://socialfixer.com/blog/2013/10/05/facebook-requires-soc...</a>
An interesting and apparently well executed effort. But, to be honest, your arguments reek of ignorance.<p>> This is an unfortunate outcome, since Yale’s copyright assertion muddles the argument that Yale’s actions violate Peter and Harry’s freedom of speech.<p>No it doesn't. Whatever Yale's responsibilities in the freedom-of-speech realm may be, they are entirely ethical in nature, as <i>freedom of speech</i> in the legal sense refers only to what <i>governments</i> may not suppress. Holding the copyright to something does not in any way affect ones responsibility to behave ethically.<p>> If Yale grants students access to data, the university does not have the right to specify exactly how students must view the data.<p>Under U.S. law they may very well have the right; I wouldn't know. What you may have demonstrated is that they do not have the <i>ability</i>.<p>May I suggest that you do not couch your arguments in terms of fallacious claims about freedom of speech. Rather, talk about <i>academic freedom</i>, a principle -- though not a legal one -- that Yale ostensibly seeks to uphold.
Recent discussions seem to indicate that 14-21 y/o are reducing their participation in social media, becoming more discerning over how they use brain bandwidth, and generally simplifying their lives overall.<p>I know this is a bit OT, and I apologize, but his website (and others from his age group) reflects this thinking. Straight, simple, and to the point. On to the next thing.<p>It rejects a great many things about how we experience the web today and seems to confirm a trend that his group wants clutter-free access to correct information using tools and technology they are familiar with.<p>They don't want to be told by Yale that this is how "your" course catalog works, or by WP that this is how "your" blog works, or by FB that this is how "your" profile works, etc.<p>They are saying, "we'll show you how we want it to work."<p>You'd think the administration at Yale would recognize a "sit-in" when they saw one.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. The extension:<p>> (3) not scraping or collecting Yale’s data<p>Yet in the code[0], there's a function called getRatingsForCourse() that makes an ajax call to url: "<a href="https://ybb.yale.edu/courses/"" rel="nofollow">https://ybb.yale.edu/courses/"</a> + id. How is this not scraping? Am I missing something here?<p>[0]: <a href="https://github.com/seanhaufler/banned-bluebook/blob/master/extension/inject.js" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/seanhaufler/banned-bluebook/blob/master/e...</a>
Pretty smart move on this guy's part, as it's a win-win situation for him. If they kick him out, the positive attention he gets for fighting the man will just enable him to start working 4 or 5 months early.
Make it a userscript instead of a Chrome extension and then Google can't block it from their store because it will be distributed openly.<p><a href="http://http://userscripts.org/" rel="nofollow">http://http://userscripts.org/</a><p><a href="http://userscripts.org/about/installing" rel="nofollow">http://userscripts.org/about/installing</a>
Really clever response to clearly decouple the copyright issue from the freedom of speech issue. I'm curious to see how the university will react to this.
Evaluations hurt the professors' feelings and pride, so they are not published. Politics is probably the only area in which evaluations (a.k.a. votes, surveys, news articles/comments) are published.
<i>Yale’s copyright assertion muddles the argument that Yale’s actions violate Peter and Harry’s freedom of speech</i><p>This misguided appeal to freedom of speech does not strengthen his argument.
"If Yale censors this piece of software or punishes the software developer, it would clearly characterize Yale as an institution where having authority over students trumps freedom of speech."<p>I'm inclined to say that events in the last decade or so have made it more clear that pretty much all educational institutions everywhere have always been about making sure their authority over students trumps freedom of speech. Or rather, freedom of speech is only allowed on things that the administration approves of.
I partially agree with the university's reasoning on this; displaying course ratings like it's a food menu is disencouraging thought, not something you expect from an academic environment, and it can't have a good outcome regarding course selection. They just should have found a better way to combat that instead of brute force.
I wonder whether organizations today are really so dumb that they need some education before making public knee-jerk reactions. Regardless of the rights or wrongs of the case, (and most of the readers don't understand or care) Yale would avoided all the bad publicity if they had just let the whole thing slide.
I admire the courage and stance of Sean Haufler on this.<p>But out of curiosity, looking at his profile, why would someone who had an internship at Google and worked at FourSquare would need a CS(!!) and Economics(???) degree from Yale?<p>I might understand the <i>Economics</i> part, what about the <i>CS</i> part???
I was most surprised by the professor who defended the school's ban on the new website. I always pegged Yale as a pretty Liberal college, so I was surprised at the professor's decision to support the school.
I would play up the extension as an accessibility enhancement, and cite the ADA and accessibility guidelines. This makes the point about the users' 'right to transform data' more clearly -- access and transformation is about usability, and usability is a legal right.<p>The administration will greatly fear an ADA action, or arguments that come even close to them, while drawing parallels. Students crying 'Freedom!' is old hat, and will get a less effective response.
How did this make it onto Hacker News? Squabbles like this happen at every university (or at least the ones I have been to). Universities are often quite conservative places with a tendency to restrict student activity beyond what is sensible and students often fight back.<p>This is a run of the mill occurrence.
> Yale also told Harry and Peter that the CourseTable website infringed upon the school’s copyrighted course data. It appears to be true; CourseTable hosted Yale’s course descriptions and student evaluations, or, if not the exact evaluations, they at least hosted derivations of them.<p>It doesn't appear to be true at all! I'd argue very strongly that these are not creative works, and have zero commercial value, I don't believe they are eligale for copyright protection in the first place. This kind of muddled thinking that anything anyone writes down is magically covered by copyright needs to be resisted.
Yale acknowledges you're effort: "Just this weekend, we learned of a tool that replicates YBB+'s efforts without violating Yale’s appropriate use policy, and that leapfrogs over the hardest questions before us. What we now see is that we need to review our policies and practices." --Dean Mary Miller's response (Jan. 20)
<a href="http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/open-letter-yale-community-dean-mary-miller" rel="nofollow">http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/open-letter-yale-communi...</a>?
As long as Google doesn't ban the extension from the Chrome Store and doesn't completely block installing 3rd party extensions to Chrome in schools or something.<p>I actually don't find that unlikely these days. They've already started to make it hard to install it from other sources. I could see them "sweetening the deal" for ChromeOS/Chrome in schools to not be able to install external extensions at all.
This is really awesome, we've been building similar solutions to our course websites at McGill. However, the administration does not seem to care yet (that might be due to the low adoption) about the different unofficial APIs and sites. The idea of adding course ratings / workload descriptions is really good we might have to implement a similar system on our end.
"If Yale grants students access to data, the university does not have the right to specify exactly how students must view the data."<p>I disagree strongly with this statement. If the data is owned by Yale, they do in fact have the right to specify exactly how students must view the data.<p>Although it's frustrating to see copyright holders doing illogical or inefficient things with their copyrighted data, it is their right to determine the method and mechanism by which their data is consumed. Just because it is _possible_ to transform their data into a mashup, doesn't mean it's legal, ethical, or permissible. It doesn't matter if this transformation happens entirely within a viewer's computer, or if it happens on another server - if the copyright holder doesn't want their data to be transformed that way, it is their right.
>The story does not end here, however, since there’s a way to distinguish the freedom of speech issue from the copyright claims.<p>Except Yale is a private school. The 1st amendment only protects people's speech from government sanction.
Copyright on course description. Nice, that's nice. How do supposedly smart people not get the very simple idea that open is good in academics (and in general but let's not get carried away).
School owns the data. But students are the data consumers, and hence have a right to control how it's presented and consumed. And students are also customers. What is the school afraid of.
He should have had his pal over at Harvard upload it. Why give the administration power over you? Relying on the goodness of executives is big gamble, imho.
The Dean’s response is such a typical academia response. It showcases the hypocrisy of these institutions and the fiefdom of a bureaucrat.<p>Too many academic institutions claim they are all about learning and growing and leadership, until you do something they disapprove of in the slightest way, usually because it rocks their boat in the slightest way. We’ve seen how Stalin-esque they act when they don’t get their way, time and time again with varying degrees of force. From the UC Davis pepper spray incident to the MIT Aaron Swartz incident. This might not be on the same level (yet), but it’s the principle. A series of reasonable actions being met with disproportionate bullshit responses.<p>Teach them a lesson about learning, growing, and leadership. Don’t surrender and don’t give in. Do absolutely everything within the bounds of the law to fuck up their desired outcome on the principle of their actions. That’s what they are trying to do to you and the YBB+ devs. So take away all of their power and continue. Circumvent all of their censorship. You or some scholarship are paying far too much to this institution to have it behave like this.<p>Quite frankly, I’m surprised someone at Yale noticed and decided to make this an incident. Most universities are usually too distracted by the disproportionate effort they invest in their football or basketball teams over academic programs, or are too busy ensuring book publisher monopolies and price gouging, but those are problems for another day.