How the First Amendment Works
Stanley Fish continues his analysis of Citizens’ United by (not unsurprisingly) explaining that 99% of his first column did not attempt to take a side–rather he was explaining the intractable differences in the 2 camp’s visions of the First Amendment.
This time around, he moves to teach some of the core First Amendment issues, mainly to point out the cases under which the Court has seen fit to regulate speech (and why we need to do so, even though “Congress shall make no law”).
If you missed media law class, and want to know a few tidbits of how our courts have constructed First Amendment jurisprudence, give it a read. If you’re hungry for more, I can recommend some books in comments.
White House Makes Full Copyright Claim on Photos | The Moderate Voice (via Slashdot)
I had no idea that the White House was posting pictures to Flickr — how cool is that! As this story explains, however, they have begun asserting that only news organizations can use the images. This runs directly against existing policy.
When you think about it, using a president’s image without consent is nothing new. The producers of the president emblazoned coins, plates, and t-shirts advertised on TV make plenty of cash without ever asking permission.
Perhaps the difference is, now the photos are so readily available in their full (original!) size glory. Perhaps now it’s too easy or tempting for advertisers to use the image of a popular president. That doesn’t give the White House any excuse to break either the policy on photos or the well established (lack of) copyright for government works.
How to Get Our Democracy Back. (via the Nation)
Lawrence Lessig writes a great argument tying the grassroots drive of the Obama campaign to how we might start to fight corruption in Congress. He lists a number of reasons people find for this corruption, but forgets an important one: politicians need money to advertise on television during their campaigns.
It’s for this reason that I have a really difficult time supporting the solution he proposes–publicly financed elections. I don’t think its fair that taxpayers hard-earned dollars go straight into the pockets of media companies, even if it does alleviate some of the influence of big-money donors. Public financing isn’t necessarily a bad idea; there are just other things that would need to be fixed at the same time for it to be a truly effective and just solution.
FT.com / UK – A fight over freedom at Apple’s core.
Jonathan Zittrain cuts right to the heart of the iPad openness issue. This might be a good one to pass to friends.
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Two important alternative voices on the Internet, Wikileaks and P2P.net, have both announced that they need to temporarily shut their doors. With server costs in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, one can assume that advertising and donations didn’t quite bring in enough to keep things running.
This is an important reminder that speech online is not free–especially if you have something interesting or important to say. I’d argue that, these are perfect arguments for Internet Neutrality. If providers were allowed to shift to a scheme where they can charge sites like this extra for access, one can only imagine how many other ideas might be chilled.
Who knew that, in an age of thinking about how we might fund newspapers, we might also need to think about how alternative voices are funded online as well.
