WorldChanging wrote up a chat with Berkman fellow Ethan Zuckerman on all manner of good topics — digital democracy, Africa, weblogs. They also pick up on Ethan’s essay on Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower, a riff and critique of Jim Moore’s Second Superpower essay of last year.
Wendy Seltzer points to the extraordinary story of Amazon telling J.D. Lasica that a review of Dan Gillmor’s popular We the Media
is not publishable: “While we appreciate your opinions on the subject,
the intent of customer reviews is to assist our customers in making an
informed purchase decision. We provide our customer reviews section for
you to comment on the merits of the book and the author’s writing
style. We ask that you not use it as a place for discourse on the
subject matter.”
Jim Moore raises a good question about how to handle a situation when capable, informed, presumably reasonable people disagree on a life-and-death topic.
JZ has the lead op-ed this morning in the Boston Globe on the Google IPO. The last three paragraphs read:
“…Google’s embrace of top-down decision making — fiercely protecting the company against shareholder influence while accepting broad-based investment — exposes a genuine wedge within the company’s ethos that parallels the paradox of its own technology. Google’s core “PageRank” search technology [JP: check out the article (PDF) by Brin and Page for more on how it works] is bottom-up, ranking sites according to how individual websites link to one another, but Google reserves the right to tweak results top-down to account for outside pressure (such as governments demanding filtering) or whim. And unlike its Dutch auction, some of Google’s most intriguing experimental new services, ranging from the Orkut social network to its controversial Gmail service, operate as elite invitation-only affairs that favor the well-connected over the merely enthused.
If Google is to lay claim to prominence not only in Web search, but also in handling the public’s e-mail and indexing and unifying its hard drives — in essence, knowing everything we know online and serving as the gatekeeper to that which we don’t know — it will want to go to extraordinary lengths to be open about how its technologies work, to be responsive to public concerns, and to ensure some approximation of that admittedly elusive level playing field for those vying to be featured in its searches and users of its services. In other words, it will not want to behave like a normal company.
This, too, demonstrates that our expectations for normal companies need an overhaul. Thanks to Google’s desire to align profits with the valuation of the investing public whose imagination and loyalty it has largely captured, a Silicon Valley 6-year-old’s opening roar has rattled Wall Street. But as the IPO’s opening bell fades, the clash between Google’s contradictory egalitarian and elitist impulses are certain to make it a volatile investment as soon as next week, not to mention for years to come.”
Update: SiliconValley.com’s John Paczkowski puts JZ’s op-ed in context, as does Cynthia Webb of the Washington Post.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the opinion that said that Grokster and Morpheus were not liable for the contributory and vicarious copyright infringement of those using their software (including use of the Kazaa technology but not absolving Kazaa the company), reversing the apparent trend to the contrary in the Aimster and Napster opinions.
The Court is concise in its holding (and introduction): “This appeal presents the question of whether distributors of peer-to-peer file-sharing computer networking software may be held contributorily or vicariously liable for copyright infringements by users. Under the circumstances presented by this case, we conclude that the defendants are not liable for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement and affirm the district court’s partial grant of summary judgment.”
As an aside, I was interested to see the Court cite to Yochai Benkler’s excellent paper on peer production, generally cited for other propositions, in fn. 2, page 11732: “This [the Court’s statement in the opinion’s text] is an extremely simplistic overview of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. There are a number of more complete descriptions available. See, e.g., Yochai Benkler, Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm, 112 Yale L.J. 369, 396-400 (2002); …”
The United States Congressional Budget Office has released a report on what it perceives to be the key issues in the digital media crisis. The methodology is primarily an economic analysis of various options before the Congress for helping to resolve the problem. The report comes down on the side of using DRMs as the most efficient means of resolution. The closest thing to a clear recommendation reads: “potential efficiency gains can be realized by applying advances in digital technology to legal markets for creative works.” The report is generally dismissive of alternative compensation proposals. (The report does include a few citations to work related to our faculty and the Digital Media Project.)
Consider whether this is the future of the Net you have in mind: “By the time the royalty-setting process is completed, moreover, the Internet may be sufficiently regulated to enable strict copyright enforcement and, in particular, the emergence of private-sector licensing and royalty-collection agencies. Indeed, the Internet today remains a relatively unregulated environment, and as it is integrated into business and household use, it may well become subject to greater control and monitoring.”
The conclusion to the legislative solutions section (as well as the summary) notes: “When considering any legislative option for revising copyright law–whether one of those discussed in this paper or some other option–it is important to be mindful of the possibility that a modification to copyright law could well have unintended consequences. Any revisions that are undertaken, therefore, require careful deliberation.”
Andrew Orlowski of the Register has more.
This morning, New Hampshire Public Radio is doing a show on Google from 9 - 10 a.m. EST on The Exchange with Laura Knoy. Call in to 800-892-6477 and talk to us!
The Open Net Initiative — a joint effort between the University of Toronto, the University of Cambridge, and several of us at the Berkman Center at HLS — today released a bulletin about the Internet content filtering practices in Iran. “In total, we tested 1,076 unique web pages and were blocked at least once from accessing 439 of these pages (41%), with 425 pages (39%) inaccessible in the majority of tests.” Our testing showed that many of these blocks fell in the pornography or politics content categories. “Over 80% of the pages categorized as either sexual or political/religious/social within the blacklist were blocked during our testing, suggesting few situations where previously blocked pages were later made accessible in those particular categories.” Please read the full bulletin for more detail.
This week and last, the Campaign Institute is running a non-partisan training
here on campus at Harvard for people who plan to go work on campaigns
of various sorts. Right now, Jerry Brown is speaking about his
experiences over 30 years in politics. Later today, I’ll do a
session on using internet technologies in political campaigns
(consistent with the theme of our Internet & Society Conference on
Politics planned for December 10, 2004; and as mentioned here).
During this session and last week’s session, fifty great young
activists have been learning about the strategies and tactics of
campaigning. Most important, they seem to be forming a network of
people interested in getting involved in political campaigns (albeit
for various parties). It’s heartening to be here with them.
Jim Moore’s Passion of the Present offers two ideas of what one can do about the Sudan crisis:
“There are many things we can do. Two come to mind immediately (please invent and share more!)
The first is to do more research on the activities and interests of the
Genocide Bloc nations in regard to Sudan. China, Pakistan, Saudi
Arabia, and Egypt. For example, I’d like to build on the work of Ingrid
Jones and others who have been digging up information about oil
interests in Sudan. And I hope to enlist in our process Nobel Peace
Prize winner Bobby Muller and his new “this is rumor control”
web-based, open source intelligence project, with its network of
intelligence agents.
The second is to increase the volume of public outcry. We have already
established a reasonable base of awareness in the US and the UK.
Newspaper editorials, increasing radio and TV coverage, and the widely
noted protests and celebrity arrests at the Sudanese embassy in
Washington, D.C. But we are apparently not being heard at the level
required to mobilize effective government action.”
