Category: Mass Communication Law

Ways to contol how we communicate online

Reading the news today, I came across a number of articles with one thing in common–they all in different ways (some new, some old) have the potential to impact how we communicate online:

  • Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic (Times): There are many places around the world that charge “by the byte” for internet access, and the U.S. typically hasn’t been one of them. In some ways this seems perfectly fair. Yet, as bandwidth hungry technologies like video, VOIP, and bittorrent distribution become increasingly common, moving away from a flat rate access charge could hinder their adoption. Thus pricing is one way that might impact how we communicate online
  • Verizon offers details of Usenet deletion: alt.* groups, others gone (CNet): In reaction to the state of New York’s request to restrict access to sites offering child pornography Verizon is taking out an entire hierarchy of newsgroups. Alt groups may be more likely to host offensive speech (ALT stands for ‘Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists’) but by no means do all of them host offending images. Here, refusing to host a resource (not quite the same as completely removing access) is the means for controlling communication.
  • France to block porn, terror, hate websites (Sydney Morning Herald via Slashdot): France will use the help of its citizens to flag porn, terror, and hate websites to possibly be blacklisted. This is an interesting combination of social control of speech (since the public is deciding what to block) and a technical complete access restriction. As Adam Liptak wrote a few days ago, “In the United States, that debate has been settled. Under the First Amendment, newspapers and magazines can say what they like about minorities and religions — even false, provocative or hateful things — without legal consequence.”
  • Training helps bloggers hone professionalism (AP via Wired): Finally, the law and what we know (or don’t know) about it have the power the power to control speech. Bloggers and other would-be online publishers attended a session to learn some of the ins and outs of libel and other media laws. One individual hoping to start an “ultra-local,” online newspaper was “so worried about the legal boundaries of writing online that he still hasn’t started the ultra-local news site.”
    I have a long list of questions here, perhaps most importantly: is this moving these bloggers over the line into the realm of “journalists?” Should the casual blogger (who doesn’t earn income from the speech on their blog) have to know the intricacies of these laws?

ACTA – under the radar

The first official meeting of the ACTA has concluded–almost completely unnoticed.  An EU page on the agreement hints at why there has been little news on the meetings:

Q: Why are you not pursuing this agreement through the G8, WTO, WIPO or other formal structure ?
A: We feel that the approach of a free-standing agreement gives us the most flexibility to pursue this project among interested countries. We fully support the important work of the G8, WTO, and WIPO, all of which touch on IPR enforcement. The membership and priorities of those organizations simply are not the most conducive to this kind of path breaking project.

“Flexibility” is a luxury of a non-transparent process.  The more voices at the table, or perhaps even the more people that know what is going on, the more complicated things can get. The “C” for “counterfeiting” also appears to me as somewhat deceptive. While a part of the treaty addresses a need (?) for border checks for counterfeit media (pirated DVDs), a number of ‘provisions to be included’ have leaked out. Here is a sampling:

  • Criminal Enforcement: ex officio authority to take action against infringers (i.e. authority to act without complaint by rights holders)
  • Civil Enforcement: Authority to do ex parte searches and other preliminary measures [ex parte means the searches could be carried out without any notice to the alleged infringer]
  • Internet Distribution and information technology: Procedures enabling rights holders who have given effective notification of a claimed infringement to expeditiously obtain information identifying the alleged infringer; and Remedies against circumvention of technological protection measures used by copyright owners and the trafficking of circumvention devices

These “strong copyright” rules, if agreed to in a treaty or other covert agreement have the potential to covertly find their way into our law. One doesn’t how how much faith to put into a document uploaded to wikileaks, but if it is genuine the public deserves to know about it [explicitly claiming fair use here].

Gaming civics – (almost) a Madison connection

I was preparing to teach next week’s “Quizzing and Gradebook” workshops on our course managment system, Learn@UW. Being a law geek, I thought a short quiz on civics would be an easy way to show off all of the quiz question types–until I saw this:

“Only one-third of Americans can name the three branches of government,” [Justice Sandra Day] O’Connor said, “but two-thirds can name a judge on American Idol.”

Hopefully my quiz won’t be too difficult for the participants, but the surprise in this story is the Madison connection.  Justice O’Connor is heading a project to develop a game called “Our Courts” to help seventh and eight graders learn about our judicial system, and she tapped Madison’s own James Gee (formerly of UW-Madison) to do it.

The game “lets students engage in real issues and real problems,” O’Connor said. It will allow them to “step into the shoes of a judge, a legislator, an executive — teach them how to think through and analyze problems, take action and voice opinions to their elected representatives.”

An early exercise in the game will likely deal with educating students about their First Amendment rights, using examples like Tinker v. Des Moines and the “Bong Hits For Jesus” case.

I love it! Having students step into existing problems is the best way to learn how the courts work–it’s exactly what we do in Intro to Mass Communication Law courses. Maybe the students who have played this game will do better on our hypothetical questions 🙂

.gov web sites should focus on RSS

Ars points to a paper that argues “Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data.”

I’m not as sure I agree with the part about pushing websites off to private entities (this sounds sort of like the function of the press), but timely feeds from the government should be a priority. The passage of laws and other rules can be very time-sensitive, and for the press/bloggers/academics/public to know just what the government is doing, adding a few feeds of interest would be an ideal way to stay in the loop.

This could become a hyper-transparent government (if the public is constantly giving feedback), but keeping an eye on things might be worth the cost of slowing some things down.