john – Page 25 – Thinking Out Loud, aka The Broad Gaze

Those darn networked jurors

Wisconsin has become one of the first states to offer guidelines that judges can use to instruct jurors. I haven’t been able to find the guidelines online, but their announcement included another interesting tidbit.

The instruction does not, of course, help judges who are dealing with journalists and citizen bloggers in court. Live blogging during trials has raised concerns in Wisconsin and elsewhere. In mid January, a Florida judge ordered a Jacksonville newspaper reporter to stop blogging during a high-profile murder trial because the judge found the typing to be distracting the jury.

If trials are truly open to the public, what legitimate concern can their be for reporting on the judicial process?

via Wisconsin Court System – The Third Branch.

ACTA and ISP immunity

World, get ready for the DMCA: ACTA’s Internet chapter leaks (Ars)

Ars offers an interesting interpretation of the leaked ACTA documents. They point out that it would be a globalization of what is already pretty established American law: ISPs are not liable for the infringing content of their subscribers, so long as they take the allegedly offending material offline. This would be a departure of the law of other countries.

Canadian law professor Michael Geist notes that the current draft would mean big changes for Canada. To take one example, Canada currently has no “takedown” law. Rather than “notice-and-takedown,” many ISPs rely on “notice-and-notice”â€”they pass notices along to the subscriber in question, but take no other action. But even this is not currently required by law.

What’s more, this would make bringing change to American law even more difficult. There have been plenty of cases where “notice and takedown” has not worked that well. Making it the default around the world wouldn’t be a good thing for us or them.

Copyright Reform Act tries fixing fair use with seven words

In addition to “criticism” and “news reporting” and the rest of the items in the fair use preamble, the CRA proposes the addition of three more: “incidental uses, non-consumptive uses, and personal, non-commercial uses.”

This would be huge.

Most valuable -digital- asset

AppleInsider | NYT execs struggle over iPad edition subscription pricing – rumor.

Here’s an interesting rumor about debates over the electronic subscription model at the Times.Â Most interestingly:

The news follows another recent report that some publishers are skeptical of Apple’s iPad business model, which sees the company giving 70 percent of revenue to content providers, but not sharing any personal information about subscribers. Those in the publishing world, particularly in newspapers, view that information — called “their most valuable asset” — as crucial for selling advertising.

This is an important distinction between print and digital.Â Newspapers know their audience well enough to tell advertisers about the demographics of their readers.Â This is why you see all of the “high end” ads in the Times. If they don’t have access to this information, it could have grave implications for the funding model of free and low-cost online journalism.