You Should Read This (But It Won’t Be On Tests)

I have been able to track down why I am having trouble using images on this blog for class.

I have used a blog as an educational tool in this class for over 10 years, but they’ve decided to “improve” the internet.

I believe I have a workaround for the rest of the semester. It’s a pain in the butt, and makes it take twice as long for me to do blog posts, but I guess this is life in 2020.

Here are the problems:

• I use Blogger for the class blog. Blogger is owned by Google. I use a third party editing tool to write posts, because frankly, Blogger isn’t actually very good at … um .. blogging. Anyway, here’s their policy since last July: “… Google has completely removed the ability for third-party apps to upload images to Blogger …”
• But that isn’t the only problem. Google has also blocked “mixed content”. This is a nerdy way of saying that if an image I like on a website isn’t coded properly, and I used it on my blog, Google will block it. They claim this is a security issue, but to me it seems like a content ownership issue (if you don’t want other to use your image, just code it improperly).

Let me be perfectly clear about this. The internet is global.

In the U.S. we have a doctrine called “Fair Use”. This is a form of permissible free speech that goes back to 1710 in common law, and which was formally codified in U.S. law in 1976.

In short, Fair Use says that you can use small bits of other peoples’ copyrighted work in your own work, with attribution but without their prior approval, for illustrative purposes, provided you’re not making money off their stuff. Basically, you can quote other people.

Other countries don’t like it when content creators do this on the internet.

No one admits this publicly, but other countries are threatening internet companies with fines if they make available in those countries webpages that would be covered by Fair Use in the U.S.

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I believe that using my workaround, you should be able to see the content I want you to see. However, if there are things that won’t load on your browser, let me know. This is a problem that mostly affects images.