Author: john

YouTube revolution, and on another note, Craigslist classified standards

Wired 14.12: You Tube vs. Boob Tube

Wired has a great article on how YouTube is shaping the future of video…both in moving video entertainment to a more user-created model (which the author calls “monkeyvision” but others have called “semiotic democracy” or “rip/mix culture”), and in terms of how the current media model might try to embrace this new phenomenon. I like this piece because it talks about many of the concepts I’ve been thinking of in a humorous way. The one aspect touched on only briefly is the role of copyright in this new form of creation. Tensions between the rights of both owners of original content and owners of (sometimes “mixed”) content uploaded to YouTube might not survive through deals and the safe harbor clause alone.

Judge rules for Craigslist in discriminatory housing ads case &
Craigslist ruling: Why the EFF is right to be pissed

On a largely unrelated note (except in the loss of control over law on the Internet), a Federal appellate court ruled that Craigslist need not police itself for violations of the Fair Housing Act. Discrimination in classified housing ads holds the esteemed position of being one of the few circumstances when the law leans towards telling a newspaper what it cannot print (Pittsburgh Press Co. v. Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations). More on this in the future.

Stanley Fish on Higher Ed

Stanley Fish – Think Again – A Closing Argument for Now – Opinion – TimesSelect
(note: you may need a subscription for this one)
Fish has achieved notariety within my field of Mass Communication Law for an article titled “There’s no such thing as the First Amendment, and it’s a good thing too.” Much like the above linked post, he argues that politics is tied up in nearly every aspect of life. He argues that the First Amendment is a “political prize” which might get applied differently, depending on who is in power, and because of this fact there is no point in looking for any unifying or underlying principles.

However, Fish makes a surprising clarification here by stating that everything can’t be scrutinized as political. He states that this argument:

…should alert us to the fact that by stretching the notion of the political to include everything, we have fudged distinctions that will return in force the moment some simple questions are posed. Is the political act (if you want to think of it that way) of teaching one author rather than another really the same as the political act of campaigning for one candidate rather than another?

In the context of college education, Fish argues in a previous post that instructors should simply “do their job.” This is simply two things:

1) to introduce students to materials they didn’t know a whole lot about, and 2) to equip them with the skills that will enable them, first, to analyze and evaluate those materials and, second, to perform independent research, should they choose to do so, after the semester is over.

In many ways, I think he’s right. Exposure to new and diverse materials as well as learning critical skills are a large part of the college experience. However, the one thing missing from this picture (which perhaps appears between the lines) is stimulating intellectual and moral development (a la Piaget and Kohlberg). Helping students to critically evaluate materials and to both understand and appreciate different points of view is what college is (academically) all about.

Fish concludes that searching for truth in teaching must be academic truth, rather than truth generally. If I’m reading him correctly, I believe that he is saying that we need to teach the “truths” that I referred to above–research methods and critical skills. The problem with moving away from “academizing” political issues is that it becomes difficult to moderate discussions of controversial issues. While we can’t erase politics (especially in issues of media policy), we can do our best to give all sides a fair explanation to equip students with the tools they need to make up their own minds.

MySpace Global Competition

MySpace Aims for a Global Audience, and Finds Some Stiff Competition – New York Times

This article has grown a bit stale, but I couldn’t let it pass by. The trouble that MySpace faces in expanding worldwide shows that for a social network website to be successful, it must have both a good design and win in terms of network effects.

I am a MySpace user, and to editorialize for a moment, I think that its design stinks.
While many (myself included) gripe about the poorly thought out interface, one thing that many hold out as MySpace’s primary strength is how it lets every user customize their own page. Unfortunately, this is done entirely through css editing, which is onerous to both the casual user who isn’t familiar with programming and the css coder who is used to standard markup (here are two great examples of improving both MySpace’s home page and the profile page).

I would argue that MySpace got where it is today by benefit of network effects. Much like the telephone, which wasn’t completely useful until everyone got one, the value in MySpace comes from all of your friends having a page. In some ways, it’s like an online party where everyone is invited–if all of your friends are there, it’s only natural to try it out.

However, in the global marketplace there are existing social networking sites (like Cyworld) which already have an established user-base. If MySpace doesn’t have some compelling design or feature to draw these users to their product (even to be used concurrently with another), there’s little chance that it will catch on. Unfortunately, I’ve read elsewhere that MySpace is reluctant to engage in any common standards which would allow social networking sites to communicate with each other. My guess is this their realization of the importance of network effects and the problems of bad design.

A Recent Copyright Discussion

Someone on an e-mail list asked for opinions on the legality of a program called “Tunebite,” which allows one to strip the rights management limitations from a number of music file formats. What was interesting about the conversation was the wide variations in interpretations of the law. One poster was satisfied with the fact that Tunebite’s website states that the program’s functionality was legal, while another found that Apple’s licensing agreement (the company referred to by example) must be followed under all circumstances.

My take was that using a program like this is legally questionable, but ultimately amounts to an individual decision about risk/benefit. I’m not aware of decisions explicitly stating whether a license agreement trumps all other copyright arguments like fair use, first sale, etc. (the click-wrap and the DeCSS cases approach these issues, but don’t address them directly).

However, the truly interesting thing in my mind is the wide disparity in ways that the individuals participating in this conversation were constructing the law of copyright–and doing so in ways that impact their actions and compliance with the law. Dialogs such as this (and this one I just came across while reading the news) might be argued to impact on how we all see and understand the law.