Thinking Out Loud, aka The Broad Gaze
Thoughts on the social impacts of communication policy and educational technology.
A bit more information about the New RIAA Video addressed earlier. It turns out that it was produced while working with Educause, the organization dedicated to the issue of education and technology and is also responsible for handling the .edu domain name. This is surprising to me, as one would have thought that there would have been greater thought and input into creating a balanced yet convincing piece. Someone could have at least checked their legal quote!
Here are a few story links:
In what appears to be little-reported in the U.S. media, the BBC reports:
A US businessman has been charged with offering broadcasts of Hezbollah’s al-Manar satellite television station to customers in the New York-area.
It appears from this report that this individual is being charged with “doing business with a terrorist entity” because of his rebroadcasting of Hezbollah news broadcasts. What is interesting about this is that the broadcasts are news (which may not be balanced, but certainly political speech), and that this is not an individual speaking but rather a business (and as a rebroadcast, it’s not the individual’s own speech). It’s also not immediately clear from the reports whether any money had been given to Hezbollah, or if the spreading of their messages was considered the offense. More charges are said to be pending, so there will certainly be more about this soon.
Edit: it looks as though some of the US media has picked up on it…just not my rss aggregator.
Can the Germans fix Wikipedia?
The wikipedia vandalism problem has pushed the model nearer to the point of restricting access to expert authors in a given area–a point that would make it like a regular encyclopedia.
From what I can tell, the system allows anyone (or perhaps logged in users) to edit a page, but then a “trusted” or “experienced” user reviews the changes and makes them live.
This change makes perfect sense.
Technically, it sounds a lot like Slashdot’s moderation system or Google’s PageRank (TM) system. Outside of the technological realm, it sounds quite a bit like how review works in publication or even the newsroom. Institutions (whether commercial or nonprofit) have a number of inherent factors which ensure content quality. Review processes, history, reputation, legal liability, and internal debate are all things which restrict institutional speech from being completely uninhibited. By mirroring this, in it’s own way, Wikipedia stands to potentially become more reputable while still capitalizing on the benefits of worldwide collaborative editing.
LawGeek: New RIAA “Scare” Video for college students
Here’s an interesting take on a video for college students recently released by the RIAA. Aside from the production quality (you would think they would have access to decent music), there are a number of points worth mentioning.
First, as the Law Geek says, “They claim that any kind of copying without permission is illegal.” This disregard for fair use defenses is typical, but I would argue that it is also a troubling attempt to sway public perceptions of the law (which are admittedly already not in line with the law) beyond the tenuous balance that copyright already attempts to create.
Second, the video quotes 17 USC 501, 506 as: “Federal law provides severe civl and criminal penalties for the unauthorized reproduction, distribution, rental, or digital transmission of copyrighted sound recordings.” This isn’t a quote from the law–I suspect it’s a quote from the new FBI warning on compact discs. When you use quotes and a cite, most often you take the words verbatim (this is not considered infringement).
Finally, the price paid for a downloaded song is consistently referred to as a “fee.” This is consistent with the view of many digital content providers that as one acquires a license for a copyrighted work, he or she never truly “buys” or “owns” it. I would argue that this goes against the public conception of how the majority of the public thinks about a piece of music that they pay for and “physically” have on their computer.