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Thursday, February 24, 2005 |
Blog of record.
Blog of record: I know there are some university journalism students who are among the seven readers of this weblog. I have some assigned reading for you so that one day, you can say, "I was there." The conversation taking place now on Jeff Jarvis' weblog between Jeff and Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times is one of those events we'll all be looking back on and using words like "seminal" to recall it. (Here is an archive of the entire exchange.)
I raised the "Mcluhan" name yesterday in a jestful post, but today, I'm serious when I say there is something Mcluhanesque about Keller choosing an A-List blogger's blog as his platform for this disucssion. To my university student readers: this is what Mcluhan meant with that whole "the medium is the message" stuff. That this coversation is taking place on a weblog called BuzzMachine.com is as important as the conversation itself.
Keller (who, remember, is responding to a smack-down challenge a courteous invitation from Jeff) is displaying a mastery of conversational media while he and Jeff are having an adult and civil exchange. This is big...and you were there and a part of it.
[rexblog: Rex Hammock's Weblog]
2:33:31 PM 
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What's Up With WIPO? (Donna Wentworth).
As regular Copyfight readers know, the fact that the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is considering the so-called Development Agenda is the biggest and best news copyfighters worldwide have heard for years. The big question here: Will WIPO unlock its considerable power to help humanity by pursuing a range of initiatives that reflect such notions as "balance," "innovation" and "access"? Or will it remain mired in an "IP uber alles" philosophy that considers any and all "strengthening" of intellectual property rights to be the proper fulfillment of its mission?
The latest developments are promising: WIPO has agreed to a number of meetings in April where the Development Agenda will be discussed. Lately, however, some non-government organizations (NGOs) have started to worry that they will be excluded from the meetings because WIPO hasn't yet accredited them. It's a unique moment in WIPO history, and hashing through the pros and cons of the agenda will require the perspectives and expertise of organizations that are focused on public interest and development issues. Yet there's no guarantee that these groups will be accredited and their voices heard.
Yesterday, David Tannenbaum of the Union for the Public Domain published a terrific post over @ LawMeme that provides insights on the situation from CPTech's Jamie Love. Love is working to gather details from WIPO about the process for admitting NGOs to ensure that people who have vital experience and authority in these matters will not be excluded. If you care about the direction of intellectual property law and policy, the post is a must-read/must-link/must-republish. It's important that the public knows what's happening here. Let's shed some light. [Copyfight]
12:08:15 PM
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Human Rights Watch weighing in on the news from Iran: Blogger Sentenced to 14 Years in Prison: Government Broadens Its Crackdown on Freedom of Expression
The Iranian government sentenced the prominent blogger Arash Cigarchi to 14 years in prison for expressing his opinions on the Internet and in the international press, marking a new low for freedom of expression in Iran, Human Rights Watch said today.
 The Iranian government is sending a message to its critics: keep silent or face years in prison.  Widney Brown,
deputy program director of Human Rights Watch
Cigarchi’s trial violated international standards for fair trials. It was held behind closed doors and in absence of his lawyer; it is not known if Cigarchi himself was even present. Since his arrest over a month ago, he has not been allowed to meet with his lawyer.
. . .
Cigarchi’s sentence comes on the heels of a systematic crackdown on freedom of speech in Iran. The Iranian authorities have targeted bloggers and internet journalists, arresting dozens in the past year.
On February 5 a cleric in the city of Qom who wrote social and political commentary on his blog, Mojtaba Lotfi, was sentenced to three years and 10 months imprisonment by the Special Court for the Clergy. A widely-read political blogger, Mojtaba Saminezhad, was initially detained on November 1 and held for 88 days in solitary confinement, where he was tortured. He was released on January 27 but was detained again on February 13 after his bail was set at 1 billion Iranian rial (or $127,000).
12:08:09 PM
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How far is too far?. As we noted yesterday, the conservative political lobbying group USA Next has hired some of the brainpower behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to create advertisements smearing the AARP, which USA Next sees as a "roadblock" in the way of George W. Bush's plans for Social Security. [Salon.com]
6:46:13 AM
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Public library lends out book-filled iPod Shuffles.
 We know that small-town libraries have shed their image as fusty repositories of moldering encyclopedias and are now high-tech temples of e-learning, but we were still impressed to find out that at least one library has come up with a novel way to get teens into libraries: put audiobooks onto iPod Shuffles. We have it on good word that the South Huntington Public Library in Suffolk County, New York, is doing just that. They apparently have a handful of Shuffles, pre-loaded with books, and are planning to add more. Given the ongoing Shuffle shortage (even Apple’s online store has a two-week delay on shipping them), we’re surprised that the library has any at all to share; let’s hope for their sake that borrowers don’t “forget” to return them.
[Via WWWAC]
[unmediated]
6:46:07 AM
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Local Christian college eliminates tuition, raises enrollment. When a St. Louis Christian College official uttered on Monday morning the words that had been rumored for weeks - "free tuition" - the 80 or so people sitting in the school's chapel erupted into cheers and thunderous applause. A few enthusiastic students were so moved that they rose to their feet and high-fived one another. [The Journal]
6:40:28 AM
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Streamrippers: The Next Gray Target?.
All the fuss over ripping Napster streams has exposed, in the words of Eric Hellweg writing in the M.I.T. Technology Review, the “soft underbelly of the subscription music business model.” While very few normal consumers will attempt the learning curve required to rip off napster during its 14-day trial. But the discussion over that publicized scheme is illuminating the larger issue of legal streamrippers—stand-alone programs that record audio streaming through the computer, creating non-copy-protected files in the process. Three examples of such programs are in fairly wide circulation: Streamripper, which operates most often as a Winamp plug-in; TotalRecorder, a commercial application; and Replay Music, another commercial app. Each of these utilities operates legally, in a gray area of copyright law that leverages personal-use rights and hinges on the 1984 Betamax Ruling that sanctified VCRs as having substantial non-infringing uses.
According to Hellweg’s article, no executive of a subscription service will comment on streamrippers. Reportedly, employees of these services love ‘em (the rippers). Nobody seems to know whether they are legal—that will have to be established by court precedent. The upcoming Supreme Court case could impact all this mightily, especially if Betamax 1984 is modified. [unmediated]
6:39:46 AM
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Bruce Schneier on ChoicePoint:
The ChoicePoint fiasco has been news for over a week now, and there are only a few things I can add. For those who haven't been following along, ChoicePoint mistakenly sold personal credit reports for about 145,000 Americans to criminals.
This story would have never been made public if it were not for SB 1386, a California law requiring companies to notify California residents if any of a specific set of personal information is leaked.
ChoicePoint's behavior is a textbook example of how to be a bad corporate citizen. The information leakage occurred in October, and it didn't tell any victims until February. First, ChoicePoint notified 30,000 Californians and said that it would not notify anyone who lived outside California (since the law didn't require it). Finally, after public outcry, it announced that it would notify everyone affected.
. . .
ChoicePoint protects its data, but only to the extent that it values it. The hundreds of millions of people in ChoicePoint's databases are not ChoicePoint's customers. They have no power to switch credit agencies. They have no economic pressure that they can bring to bear on the problem. Maybe they should rename the company "NoChoicePoint."
The upshot of this is that ChoicePoint doesn't bear the costs of identity theft, so ChoicePoint doesn't take those costs into account when figuring out how much money to spend on data security. In economic terms, it's an "externality."
The point of regulation is to make externalities internal. SB 1386 did that to some extent, since ChoicePoint now must figure the cost of public humiliation when they decide how much money to spend on security. But the actual cost of ChoicePoint's security failure is much, much greater.
. . . [Schneier on Security]
6:39:26 AM
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