Tim
Armstrong, currently a DC appellate lawyer and HLS LLM ‘05 (and other
good things), has blogged what he heard this morning. Earlier, he called in to the Berkman fellows’ meeting to give us the report
out, which didn’t sound half-bad. Let the tea-leaf-reading begin
(or continue…). Also see SCOTUS blog and Copyfight for the most extensive coverage out there so far. (Updated).
The Blog Maverick has announced that he will fund Grokster’s defense in MGM v. Grokster. (We agree, on the merits.) He writes:
“We are a digital company that is platform agnostic. Bits are bits.
We dont care how they are distributed, just that they are. We want our
content to get to the customer in the way the customer wants to receive
it, when they want to receive it, at a price that is of value to them.
Simple business.
Unless Grokster loses to MGM in front of the Supreme Court. If
Grokster loses, technological innovation might not die, but it will
have such a significant price tag associated with it, it will be the
domain of the big corporations only.
It wont be a good day when high school entrepreneurs have to
get a fairness opinion from a technology oriented law firm to confirm
that big music or movie studios wont sue you because they can come up
with an angle that makes a judge believe the technology might impact
the music business. (Emphasis mine.) It
will be a sad day when American corporations start to hold their US
digital innovations and inventions overseas to protect them from the
RIAA, moving important jobs overseas with them.
Thats what is ahead of us if Grokster loses. Thats what happens if
the RIAA is able to convince the Supreme Court of the USA that rather
than the truth, which is , Software doesnt steal content, people steal
content, they convince them that if it can impact the music business,
it should be outlawed because somehow it will. It doesnt matter that
the RIAA has been wrong about innovations and the perceived threat to
their industry, EVERY SINGLE TIME. It just matters that they can spend
more then everyone else on lawyers. Thats not the way it should be.”
Hoder is
pointing to the second blog entry of a candidate for the presidency in Iran,
who, Hoder contends, appears to be taking blogging seriously.
Pointers to three articles today worth the read:
* NYTimes lead business story: “The Future of the Thirty-Second Spot”:
The focus is mostly on traditional TV and cable advertising, as it
reviews the status of the venerable 30-second spot. But the gist
of the article is that it’s clear that advertisers are demanding
greater targeting and that they are moving to networks that allow it,
along with a better relationships with the audience.
* Knowledge@Wharton’s piece, “Blogs, everyone?
Weblogs are here to stay, but where are they headed?” Terrific
profs. Dan Hunter and Kevin Werbach offer their take on the future of
weblogs, which, in Dan’s words, represent the “rise of amateur content.”
* Google, Copyright, Trademark, and the French lawsuits.
It’s a helpful reminder of 1) the differences in the legal regimes
around the world, especially the French and 2) that the business models
that are thriving today are heavily dependent upon specific
interpretations of a series of legal regimes that are, truthfully,
still very much in flux.
Our Digital Media Project is hosting what I hope will be a fun, joyful
event on creativity in the digital space. It’s called Signal or Noise II
and will be held here on the Harvard Law School campus on April
8. We promise that it will be more about art and generativity and
creativity than it will be about the dry aspects of the law. The
conference revolves around three themes:
1. Is all art derivative? Is the borrowing that goes on now
in an old tradition or is it somehow different? Is the
distinction between new and derivative meaningful?
2. New technologies are enabling new genres and new business models, as
well as having an impact on existing ones. What are the changes,
and will overall creativity benefit?
3. Artists have a spectrum of reactions to downstream uses of
their work. Some believe they should have the exclusive right to
make use of them, for commercial purposes or otherwise, while others
want the ability to refuse certain uses, and still others encourage
reuse for any purpose by anyone. Understanding what drives these
reactions can help to define what rights and interests society should
provide to them.
Please sign up here. As per tradition, the event will end with Food For Thought dinners around Cambridge with notables from the online media space as discussion leaders.
I did a panel today with Rebecca MacKinnon in Our Nation’s Capital, in
which she told the story of the recent bulletin board system crack-down
in China. She mentioned the Isaac Mao version of the story, as told at Global Voices.
I was also struck by Rebecca’s notation that the protest that ensued
was recorded in images by citizen journalists — memorialized at flickr, tag = smth — but no one in the MSM. Pretty striking.
Separately, though inspired by the same set of facts: the BBS example
is yet another story that suggests to me that we at the OpenNet
Initiative should continuously seek to expand the types of enumeration
and analysis that we conduct.
Rebecca MacKinnon has a follow-up piece to the Web-Cred conference in The Nation.
Today we at the ONI released our study of internet filtering in the United Arab Emirates. More to come over the next few months. The Executive Summary:
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) seeks to establish itself as an economic and technological leader in the Middle East, encourages Internet use for this reason, and yet blocks its citizens from accessing a substantial number of Web sites. The UAE government extensively blocks content that it considers objectionable for religious and cultural reasons, though not, apparently, material related to political dissent. The state’s policy-makers have sought to resolve this tension by instituting an Internet filtering system based upon the SmartFilter commercial blocking service. Of the 8713 URLs that the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) tested in UAE, we found 1347 blocked (15.4%). Compared to most other countries in the world, UAE’s filtering is extensive.
The news media, the sole Internet service provider (ISP), and Internet-based content providers in the UAE all face stringent legal controls on expression and access to information. The sole ISP, Etisalat, is owned by the state, which makes filtering a substantially easier proposition than if many private ISPs served the state’s citizens. These protective measures, carried out through filtering processes and other forms of enforcement, are geared toward protecting political, moral, and religious values of the UAE and have considerable popular support. According to one survey, more than half of UAE’s citizens agree that Internet censorship is an effective measure to protect family members from objectionable content.
The UAE uses the SmartFilter filtering software to block nearly all pornography, gambling, religious conversion, and illegal drugs sites tested. The state also blocks access to all sites in the Israeli top-level domain. ONI’s testing of the UAE filtering regime also found blocking of sites on the Bahai faith, Middle East-oriented gay and lesbian issues, and English-language (though not Arabic-language) dating sites. While our results did not indicate that UAE uses its filtering system to block political sites, or news and media sources, we conclude that the state’s broad content controls unintentionally block information unrelated to UAE’s stated goals. The imprecision of the UAE filtering regime underscores the difficulty of extensive technical filtering of Internet content.
Prof. Daniel Solove is the speaker today in the Berkman Center’s Tuesday lunch series, talking about his new book, The Digital Person. He’s got 16 easy steps to a much better privacy regime posted to SSRN (with EPIC’s Chris Hoofnagle). And he’ll be back here at 4:30 p.m. to sign copies of his book.
Inspired by David Weinberger and others, I’ve posted a Disclosures page which I will update periodically and which I will keep linked up near the top of the list on my blogroll on every page of the site (software willing!).
