Category: Mass Communication Law

3 Strikes and we’ll download more

Record industry: ignore that French piracy study!.

A recent study of 2,000 residents of a French town found that more admitted to downloading copyrighted music and video than before the 3 strikes law.

I’ve been writing lately (for my diss) about how laws are most often communicated by non-official sources, like the recording industry.  This type of information dissemination often comes with the spin or coloring of whomever is doing the speaking.  This story is a great example of how that process might backfire.

Lessig chat hit with automatic censorship

Bogus Copyright Claim Silences Yet Another Larry Lessig YouTube Presentation | Techdirt.

Lessig recently gave a “webside chat” on the usual issues of copyright and fair use that was posted to YouTube.  The video included clips of music that is covered under copyright, but in this context appear to be fair use. The details aren’t immediately clear, but it seems that Google’s automatic copyright filters stripped the audio track from the video (though it is now available again — with a link to purchase the music featured in the video).

This is an incredibly timely coincidence with my last post about the censorship of digital speech. In this case, there wasn’t even a button to push–an automatic filter indiscriminately altered what Lessig had to say.

The democratization of web publishing, I believe, is an inherently good thing. It would be shameful if speech gets quashed because of a business extending its power over any medium it touches.

Techdirt isn’t usually a source I like to cite, but when Lessig tweets a story about himself, you know it must be legit.

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.