You can only assume the person who unleashed the lawyers really didn’t think it through, or consider the benefits, or was aware of something like OzWeather and its BOM integration.

Open data and free access would be beneficial to all parties, but RailCorp’s reaction comes from an old mentality. It was common for companies to protect ideas and secret receipts from competitors. “What if they find out about our new idea? They will steal it!” – that kind of thinking.
Information protection is important today too but in much more cases people already have and are working on same ideas. It is pointless to protect what is known.

It still sounds odd and is counterintuitive for many that sharing ideas and efforts does actually bring in more benefits than keeping ideas to themselves. Open source movement is one example. Another good example is “Goldcorp Challenge” – when a mining company opened all it’s geological data to the world.
Mining industry is a very secretive industry and geological data is carefully guarded resource.

What RailCorp guards here? Timetables?! Yeah… right…

Ning is a great free service but people need to be aware that they may be trusting their material to an unaccountable sheriff. On the subject of security on Ning, for instance, we have your claim that Bartlett-Brown left her network public and her assertion that she did not. If she is correct that is a security question that needs an answer.

The BoM is very impressive in this regard. IMO their publicly accessible weather data offerings are the best in the world. They ensure timeliness and accuracy in third party offerings simply by imposing the condition that republished data includes issue times and expiry times where appropriate.

Provocative post. However, I see that you left out the most important aspect of what I wrote to you in my note below:

“As I’m sure you can imagine, we go to great lengths to keep Ning a safe environment for all of our Network Creators and Members and we take reports of illegal content very seriously. Our first priority when we are made aware of these types of images on a social network on Ning is to remove access to the content and investigate the social network it appears on.”

Thanks,

Jason

Hi Jack,

Thanks for contacting us about this. I’m responsible for all of our Network Creator and Member-facing activity at Ning and wanted to reach out to you personally on this.

As I’m sure you can imagine, we go to great lengths to keep Ning a safe environment for all of our Network Creators and Members and we take reports of illegal content very seriously. Our first priority when we are made aware of these types of images on a social network on Ning is to remove access to the content and investigate the social network it appears on. Once we have investigated a social network and determine what the issue is, we take the appropriate actions as dictated by law. In Anne’s case, we disabled access to her social network as soon as we were notified of the illegal content. When we reviewed her social network, it became clear that the illegal content came from someone who had infiltrated Anne’s social network rather than Anne herself. Once we were able to determine this, we worked with her to get her social networks up and running again as soon as possible. As you can see from the email thread that Anne forwarded you, the entire process from when Anne first contacted us to when we completed the investigation and restored access to all of her social networks took less than 12 hours. Also, I wanted to clarify one question you raise in your note. We reported the person who was the source of the illegal content to the authorities, not Anne herself.

These issues can be difficult and quite sensitive. We are constantly refining our processes around this type of activity so that we can efficiently investigate, report, and ultimately eliminate this type of content from Ning quickly while minimizing the effect on members that have nothing to do with this activity. In response to our experience with Anne, we’ve actually changed our policy so that going forward, we would only disable the member suspected of illegal activity rather than the entire network itself.

I hope this answers your questions. If you have any further questions, please let me know, I’d be happy to arrange a call to discuss.

Thanks,

Jason

I’d just like to point out that it was 48hrs I was offline – from when I reported it to customer service. I had actually been trying to reset my password and access Ning for a couple of days before that!

The entire experience has certainly been an important lesson for anyone using services like these for anything other than lightweight social networking – the potential for compromised data and privacy are critical concerns that need to be evaluated.

Thanks for changing your policies Ning!
Anne BB