SIVACRACY.NET

Media Matters - Altercation: Slackerish Friday

Name: Siva Vaidhyanathan
Hometown: The Yankee fan section of Charlottesville, VA

Eric:

Admit it. You knew all along the Yankees were going to come back from a billion games behind Boston to scare the crap out of them and (still hoping) perhaps topple them from the AL East perch. At least you knew they would be a playoff team all along, right? All that whining about the NYTimes coverage had be a front for your incessant visions of Yankee greatness that would envelop your sports media world come October.

Now, I have been meaning to write to you about this Times baseball coverage thing. Look, it's just plain silly to even care what the Times does with its sports pages. Who the heck reads the Times for sports? It has had the worst sports section in America since Teddy Roosevelt tried to outlaw football. A section like that, with some of the dumbest sports columnists and most boring reporters can't possibly matter to anyone. Geez, most of the country (including, sadly, me) does not even get east coast night scores in their Times every morning. All the standings are a day behind in the national edition.

But let's try to understand the motivation of Times sports editors. We all know that journalists are trained to follow the best story, regardless of real-world implications or relevance. So what's the best story in New York from April through October? Better bike lanes on 9th Avenue? Floating swimming pools off the Brooklyn waterfront? No. It's the yearly turmoil and drama of the Yankees, the early-season domination by Boston, followed by the annual post-All-Star-Game Yankee surge, the questions about whether Joe Torre still has it (answer: damn right he does), the brilliant personnel moves by GM Brian Cashman, and the inevitable clutch heroics of one Derek Sanderson Jeter. We all knew those things were going to be part of the plot. Why not cover it better than the frustrating hiccups we are hearing from over in Queens?

Oh, and I am sorry and surprised about the prospect of seeing the Mets choke away a season-long lead to, ahem, Philadelphia. I sincerely thought that Willie Randolph would bring some of his Yankee character across the TriBoro Bridge. But, come to think of it, Joe Torre played for the Mets for years and that has not seemed to detract from his performance in the Bronx.

Down here in Virginia, I have had the worst time getting out-of-region games on television. Neither DirectTV (a Rupert Murdoch-owned nightmare with the worst customer service of any company in America -- even worse than USAir) nor DishNetwork (a better company with pathetic sports options) can get me either Red Sox (for the wife, of course) or Yankee games with any regularity. They both offer both NESN and YES, but -- get this -- black out the baseball games! As if there were any other reason to watch NESN or YES! I can't get Comcast Cable to serve my house because it is recent construction and their computers don't believe that my house exists.

So here I sit, an American, with money ready to spend, living in an age of hyper-fast digital communication, and I cannot get anybody to sell me all the services I want. I want to see the Patriots and the Bills every Sunday (I know: why would anyone WANT to see the Bills this year). I want my Texas Longhorns on Saturdays. I want to see the Yankees and/or Red Sox every night. I want to see The Simpsons every Sunday and The Office every Thursday.

DirectTV will get me NFL and MLB if I pay for the premium subscription packages. But it will not let me see any local channels or network feeds. I am not making this up. They blame the FCC. I don't really understand.

DishNetwork will get me local network channels, but it does not carry either the NFL or MLB packages.

And Comcast would get me the baseball and the local, but not the football. Well, that's if they could ever find my house.

Why won't these companies take my money?

Now, I know that with 45 million Americans living without health insurance and thousands of soldiers serving way too long over in Iraq I should hardly be whining about this situation, but do you see where I am going with this? The market does not provide because the FCC does not force the market to work. In too many areas of American life, especially in media, our government facilitates sweetheart deals, exclusive contracts, and fails to insist that utilities compete fairly. Broadcasting is bad. But mobile phone service is worse.

I hope the next administration takes media regulation seriously. There is much more at stake here than sports.

Meanwhile, at least the Yankees will clinch the division against Baltimore this weekend. I get all the crummy Orioles games down here. And I get all the games with that team with a W on their red caps from the league where they let pitchers hit. Sigh.

Oh, and as far as the Yankees' amazing season, to quote Stephen Colbert, I accept your apology.

Eric replies: I admit that I expected the Yankee "surge" deep down, just as I expected that Bush would escalate the war after the country voted in 2006 to end it. As goes Bush and the Republicans ... (In fact, I think the Yankee payroll would just about cover the escalation costs ...) As for the Mets, well, I am indeed without excuses. It's a great game when a team can brag, "Never before has a team that was up seven games with only 17 to go did not make it to the go**am playoffs."

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 3:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

He gives us a taste here.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Uh Oops: There Are No Words - Deadspin

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Zotero is free, open-source software that runs as a FireFox plugin. It does much of the work of bibliographic software like Endnote, but it's specifically for online research.

I have used it a little I am not sure I like it. I like the idea of it. But I need to use it more to get a sense of whether it will really serve me well in the long run.

What I love about Endnote is that it works with MS Word (which I hate) to embed formatted citations in my work. I don't think Zotero would let me do that. But over at my Google blog, someone mentioned that you can use Zotero with Google Docs to simulate footnotes.

Over at Inside Higher Ed Scott McLemee looks at how it works.

Still, it seems as if institutions that do not currently do so might want to offer tutorials on Zotero for faculty and students who may lack whatever gene makes for an intuitive grasp of software. Academic librarians are probably the best people to offer instruction. Aside from being digitally savvy, they may be the people at a university in the best position to appreciate the range of uses to which Zotero can be put. ...

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Truly stunning.

Glad I am a Yankee fan!

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There has been a lot of positive buzz about Amazon.com MP3 Downloads. It's great to see major labels figure out that digital rights management is just plain dumb.

But here is the catch: To get a song you have to agree to a "user agreement." I don't remember any other Amazon product including such a license. The license makes you click away your first sale rights, i.e. you can't distribute the file to your sister once you are bored with it. This is not too surprising. The Copyright Office already made it clear that we should not consider first sale to be relevant for digital works. Sucks. But true.

But more alarming, the contract you click with Amazon forbids you from mashing up the music into something new or better:

And what is the deal with the "Amazon Music Downloader?" If you buy just a song, you don't need it. You can just, well, download the song. But if you buy an album you MUST install the downloader.

Why must I install this mysterious software just to download MP3s? I suspect it's a way to embed metadata on the MP3 so that it is traceable later.

Anybody know what's up with it?

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Here. If after reading it you don't already understand why I am not including an excerpt in this post, go here. We will of course assume the blog's author obtained permission to post these photos, especially given that the blog runs advertisements.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

I like the last part, where the snake seems to be having dry heaves. Via Shakesville.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 8:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Verizon Wireless Statement on Text Messaging:

BASKING RIDGE, N.J., Sept. 27 /PRNewswire/ -- On Wednesday, September 26, Verizon Wireless received a letter from NARAL regarding the company's policy on text messaging. The following statement may be attributed to Jeffrey Nelson, spokesperson for Verizon Wireless.

"Verizon Wireless is proud to provide services such as text messaging, which are being harnessed by organizations and individuals communicating their diverse opinions about issues and topics. We have great respect for this free flow of ideas and will continue to protect the ability to communicate broadly through our messaging service."

You might have read in the NYTimes and elsewhere this morning that Verizon had banned NARAL from using its SMS subscription service to motivate members for action.

I am about to do a radio interview about this issue with Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

UPDATE: Here is the show I did this morning. Unfortunately, the text on the page makes it seem like I ENDORSED Verizon's censorship of NARAL! For the record, of course I did not.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Free downloads!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Election Central | Talking Points Memo | Poll: Dems Running Ahead In...Virginia!

Poll: Dems Running Ahead In...Virginia!
By Eric Kleefeld - September 25, 2007, 11:14AM

A new SurveyUSA poll shows that Virginia -- a state that hasn't gone Democratic for president since 1964 -- could be a Dem pick-up in 2008, with Republicans winning only one of nine match-ups:

Clinton (D) 50%, Giuliani (R) 44%
Clinton (D) 50%, Thompson (R) 43%
Clinton (D) 53%, Romney (R) 38%
Obama (D) 46%, Giuliani (R) 45%
Thompson (R) 47%, Obama (D) 45%
Obama (D) 50%, Romney (R) 38%
Edwards (D) 48%, Giuliani (R) 43%
Edwards (D) 49%, Thompson (R) 39%
Edwards (D) 52%, Romney (R) 33%

The margin of error is ±4.5%, so few of these leads are beyond the margin. It still says something, though, that polling here could even be close in the first place.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 3:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sue Teller Mashes It Up

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rather may be. But I think Jay is wrong about this.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 9:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Eric Boehlert reminds us that Rather got his facts right but got fired anyway:

1) The Republican-led CBS investigation failed to show that the documents in the CBS report were forgeries.

2) Relentless pressure from right-wing bloggers and pundits pushed the truth right out of the debate and made CBS bow.

3) Every major media organization (save the Boston Globe) used the meta-flap of the Rather story as cover to ignore the fact that the story was true: George W. Bush was a deserter from his Air National Guard service (which he had pulled strings to get so he could dodge the draft and let poor people do his fighting for him):

... The quick back story: Following his graduation from Yale University in 1968, at a time when nearly 350 U.S. troops were dying each week in Vietnam, Bush managed to vault to the top of a 500-person waiting list to land a coveted spot in the Texas Air National Guard. On his application where the form asked for "background qualifications of value to the Air Force," Bush wrote, "None." Despite a complete lack of aviation or ROTC experience, despite scoring in the 25th percentile on his pilot aptitude section -- the lowest allowed score for aspiring fliers -- and despite having been arrested twice for college pranks, as well as having four driving infractions, Bush was approved for an automatic commission as a second lieutenant and assigned to flight school.

But why do I bother with these silly facts? Everybody knows the Guard story is bogus. And everybody knows Dan Rather is crazy for suggesting otherwise.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 9:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Check out the LGBT-Friendly Campus Climate Index.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

From Inside Higher Ed:

... Those of us who work in books tend to see the early years of scholarly publishing as a kind of intellectual utopia. Universities subsidized not only the research and writing of books, but their publication, marketing, and — through library budgets — their purchase. Indeed, the viability of most university press books was largely assured on the basis of their library sales alone. It was an almost perfectly closed economic circle.

And then there was Reagan. With his election to the White House in 1980, Ronald Reagan — who as governor of California had led the charge against his own state university system — ushered in an ideology of tax cuts, reductions to government programs and private-sector gimmes that proved absolutely toxic to public universities. Some of the programmatic cuts came at the federal level: the research budgets of NOAA, NIST and the Department of Energy were slashed during his administration, for example, But these were hardly the main sources of government spending on higher education. The worse damage resulted from Reagan’s “federalist” devolution of spending burdens onto the states, the universities’ primary source of support. Program cuts and tuition increases became the norm — and continue to be so to this day. ...

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 3:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's a question for the man on the street: Who is the Librarian of Congress? Don't know? The answer is Cold Warrior James Billington! In contrast, I was amazed at the number of regular French citizens who had heard of the man who had famously led their national library, a diverse group which included engineers, waiters, mothers of autistic children, toy designers, hotel clerks, and grad students in computer science. I doubt such a diverse cross section of the American public would know the name of our librarian-in-chief.

I interviewed Jean-Noël Jeanneney, famed Google critic and former head of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in his unassuming offices at Europartenaires for the chapter on digital libraries for my upcoming Virtualpolitik book from MIT Press. Of course, I think it's an issue that more Americans should care about, given the monetary value, cultural capital, and life-or-death difference that information can make in our daily lives. If I had a film crew, I'd want to do a muckracking comparative documentary on the subject, à la Michael Moore's Sicko, rather than an academic book, to show why citizens of other countries are willing to devote more of their taxpayer dollars to digitization efforts and debate digitization choices.

For a man who once presided over the four looming ultra-modern towers of the BNF and its prison-like impersonal reading rooms, it was strange to sit down at a table with Jeanneney, after being let to his office past a kitchen, in a building full of modest flats near the city's main mosque.

The title of this posting comes from Jeanneney's definition of a "camel" as a "horse designed by committee." Known for his executive authority leading France's efforts to build a massive digital library and some might say his autocratic style, I found him to be a remarkably engaged and energetic participant, in which he comes off as much younger than his sixty-five years, in the debate about what Siva Vaidhyanathan has called "The Googlization of Everything." Jeanneney's own book on the subject, which appears in English under the title Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge, has also been translated into Arabic, Portuguese, Chinese, German, Japanese, and Spanish and will shortly be out in paperback. Ironically, I discovered that the very first hit on Google for the book is this one.

In short, Jeanneney argues that the Mountain View, California company is benefiting from "the philosophy of American capitalism" combined with oligarchical tendencies that date back to "old Greece" when "wealthy people" were in charge of "defining culture." In contrast, Jeanneney argues that consumers must pay for their culture somehow, a message that goes back to his time heading France's public broadcasting network, when he argued that "no radio is free," and that of the "two systems of financing culture" it was better to go with the publicly financed one in which metamedia is seen as part of the public interest.

It was an extended discussion about national resources, intellectual property, social media, the public good, and other fundamental questions about ethics and epistemology. At one point he gave me a copy of his rhetorically fascinating farewell letter to the staff of the BNF, entitled Lettre aux personnels de la Bibliothèque nationale de France au moment de leur dire adieu, a seventy-eight page printed document in which he tries to have the last word in a contentious debate about archival policies.

Although he's known as a Google-critic or as he says "not a Googlist," Jeanneney also admitted to relying on the search engine, like most academics, as Berkeley researcher Diane Harley has shown. He was not aware, however, that the BNF had a prominently displayed Google search interface on its web page, even during the time of his tenure, according to the Internet Archive. (See above.) He also said that there was a certain "ambivalence" created by the heroic narrative of the "birth of Google," although he believed that the limits of their idealism could be clearly seen just in schemes to alter page ranking to suit the highest bidder. Like Ted Nelson, earlier this week at the ACM Hypertext Conference, he also pointed to Google's mortality, and the fact that it was a "fragile giant." He even expresses some perverse gratitude toward the company, because he claimed that it encouraged Europe to mobilize.

As to the cultural politics of France, he had some choice words after his forced retirement from the BNF. He also said that it was too early in the Sarkozy administration to judge the strength of what he characterized as a "laziness of feeling" about strategic planning for mass digitization that he thought could be a feature of both the political right and left. He pointed out the irony of the scale of the cost, when the eight million euros he was requesting would be comparable to the cost os a "big apartment in the sixteenth district." (I stayed in the 17th during my visit.)

I asked him about his praise for the Library of Congress in his book, particularly of the American Memory Collection, which I find to be incoherent in its historical vision and riddled with troubling incursions of private interest, the most obvious of which is the archive devoted to Coca Cola advertisements, which was paid for by guess who. At this he indicated that I might me "more anti-American" than he was, although he explained that much of this was a rhetorical move aimed to assuage cultural conflicts between the two countries linked to the Iraq war. He also seemed less focused on the linguistic politics of the Internet in our interview, which was largely conducted in English, than I had expected, given that so much of the book was about resisting English hegemony.

Since I had just spoken with librarians at the British Library who demonstrated the machines involved in their corporate partnership with Microsoft, I asked him if he thought that the paradigm there was really as different from the Google model, as they had claimed. He seemed skeptical about Great Britain's commitment to digitization and warned of the danger of "seduction" by the private sector, although he felt that they had moved toward a greater European cultural identity in recent years. (And, just so you can feel like you've learned another piece of cocktail party trivia from this column, I will add in the fact that the head of the British Library in Lynn Brinley.)

Despite his ambitious digital information infrastructure-building goals, Jeanneney is skeptical about Internet utopianism. Later in the week, his essay in Le Débat about the concept of "gratuité" was slated to appear in which Jeanneney questions the ideology of "free culture." He has also been critical of Wikipedia of late: in Le Point in "Wikipédia, une encyclopédie pas si Net," which translates as "Wikipedia, a not so nice encyclopedia," he argued that that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" and that the notion of collective intelligence represented faith in a "mysterious alchemy" by which the sum of individuals would produce a superior rather than an average intellectual output.

To his credit, Jeanneney also recognized the importance of archiving "born digital" materials early on by using "les robots" to "augment," "harvest," and "collect" digital ephemera, which in the French case -- like many other countries -- first involved saving web pages relevant to the 2002 elections. He also said that he had bought materials from Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive to improve the nation's digital collections.

At the end of the nearly two-hour-long interview he showed me a framed print of one of the wonderful globes that the BNF has put on display, next to his current window on the world. If you speak French, you can check out the podcasts of Jeanneney's popular radio show, Concordance des temps, here, in which he brings on an historian to discuss then-and-now historical parallels on subjects such as high profile poisonings.

Posted by Liz Losh at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Where is this book going? (The Googlization of Everything):

In less than 10 years since the search engine first appeared and spread through word of mouth, Google.com has radically altered the rules of the game for at least six major industries: Advertising, software applications, geographic services, e-mail, publishing, and Web commerce itself. The company did this through a remarkable confluence of intellectual hubris and technical prowess.

But now, as we face the impending Googlization of everything, we should ask some hard questions about how Google is not only “creatively destroying” established players in various markets, but is also altering the very ways we see our world and ourselves.

If Google becomes the dominant way we navigate the Internet, and thus the primary lens through which we experience both the local and the global, then it will have remarkable power to set agendas and alter perceptions. Its biases are built into its algorithms. It knows more about us every day. We know almost nothing about it.

The company itself takes a technocratic approach to any larger ethical questions in its way: they are engineers. Every potential problem is either a bug in the system yet to be fixed or a feature in its efforts to provide better service. This attitude masks the fact that Google is not a neutral tool or flat plane of glass. It is an actor and a stakeholder in itself. And more importantly, as a publicly traded company, must act in its own short-term interest despite its altruistic proclamations.

Google has utterly infiltrated our culture. It is a ubiquitous brand, used as a noun and a verb everywhere from adolescent conversations to scripts for Sex and the City. Its stock price soared in value after its initial offering in 2004, although it has eroded by nearly 30 percent from its peak in the early months of 2006. Its revenue has more than doubled to $3 billion per year since the offering. Since the initial public offering Google has aggressively acquired other firms like the video-hosting site YouTube and the Internet advertising company DoubleClick. The core service of Google.com – its Web search engine – handles more than 50 percent of the Web search business in the United States and is growing at an impressive rate.

To preserve its status as the elite, venerated, and fast-moving technology company of the future, Google must do two things. It must continue to convince the world that it is the anti-Microsoft. And it must find more things to index and expose to the world.

Clearly, Google has to protect its brand by being seen as the good guy. And so far it has. The damage Google has done to the world is largely invisible. Google got big by keeping ads small. It carefully avoided pinching our marketing-saturated nervous systems and offered illusions of objectivity, precision, comprehensiveness, and democracy. After all, we are led to believe, Google search results are determined by peer-review, by us, not by an editorial team of geeks. So far, this method has worked wonderfully. Google is the hero of word-of-mouth marketing lore. Google guides me through the open Web, the space that Microsoft does not yet control. Yet Google must get bigger to satisfy its new stockholders. It must go new places and send its spiders crawling through un-indexed corners of human knowledge. Google’s mission statement includes the rather optimistic and humanistic phrase, “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” But Google co-founder Sergey Brin once offered a more ominous description of what Google might become: “The perfect search engine would be like the mind of God.” [Make more of this line about Google being like the mind of God. Brin’s comment suggests that the power of God would be available to all of us, whereas in truth we would be at its mercy.]

Criticisms and concerns notwithstanding, Google is a terribly impressive company. It is perhaps the best company for which to work in the entire world. Its employees get ample rewards, intellectual freedom, and daily perks like free massages. It has reached remarkable heights of wealth and income without polluting a river or crushing a child’s arm in a machine. It does not cause cancer or bullet wounds. And its products are generally lauded, and more importantly, used, by both technology experts and the general public. This has led to a general perception that Google can do no wrong as well as no evil. The only loud critics of Google so far have been representatives of industries that Google is shaking up and frustrated human rights and privacy advocates. But that list is growing as the list of criticisms of Google mounts.

This leads to an important question about the company’s future and our future with it: As Google engulfs more essential features of our daily lives, can it remain angelic and independent?

This book will examine the quality and scope of the various ventures and experiments that Google has launched in the past five years and the effects this growth has had on particular communities of knowledge producers.

I am asking four key questions in my examination of Google:

• The phenomenological: How does using Google alter our perceptions of the world? Are its search results accurate and appropriate? How is Google changing its search functions through human intervention? Are Google’s search algorithms inherently conservative, i.e. do they favor the establish and thus limit the dynamism of the Web? How will G affect what we know?

• The cultural and communal: How is Google’s ubiquity affecting the production and dissemination of cultural practice and knowledge? How will G affect what we make?

• The political: how has the corporation altered the rules and practices that govern other companies, institutions, and states? Will advertising ever be the same? Has Google exposed many of the core tenets of advertising to be unfounded? Will Google kill the Superbowl ad? How will G affect the ways that governments and organizations and corporations work?

• The global: how can Google’s technocratic libertarian ideology mesh with the conflicting notions of knowledge and propriety in distant far from Mountainview, California? Will Google’s relationship with the brutal government of the People’s Republic of China be its undoing? Will China change Google more than Google changes China? How will G change the world?

The case study that best demonstrates how Google is rewriting the rules is its Book Search project. Since 2004 Google has been scanning and indexing millions of books from more than 20 university libraries. This program has generated two high-profile lawsuits from publishers and authors' groups. In addition, it has initiated many conversations and debates about the future of print, research, reading, and learning. Google Book Search is significant because it is the first large-scale and comprehensive effort to offer a text-search function for books. Much like the commonly used Google Web search service, Google Book Search would locate the specific string of text that the user placed in a text search box on the Google page. Google Book Search generates and ranks a list of books that contain the search terms.

Since its debut, Google has been the subject of much hyperbole. Legal scholars such as Lawrence Lessig claim that Google Book Search will radically democratize information for every American -- not just academics. Authors like Cory Doctorow applaud Google Book Search for offering them platforms to connect interested readers to particular texts and thus avoid the obscurity of small books getting lost in the mass market. And techno-libertarians like Kevin Kelly have celebrated the transformative nature of electronic texts, arguing that Google Book Search will allow users to connect disparate pieces of information as they see fit, thus evading the tyranny of the book cover and library catalog. This research project would test these claims and get far beyond the particulars of the Book Search program. It would consider the ways that Google’s video hosting services (YouTube and Google Video) are generating legislative and legal action from both content providers such as Viacom and broadband providers like AT&T. Generally, it would consider the ways that Google alters our sense of what is important and trustworthy.

One of the great attractions of Google is that it appears to offer so many powerful services for “free,” that is, for no remuneration. But there is a non-monetary transaction at work between Google and its users. We get Web search, email, Blogger platforms, and YouTube videos. Google gets our habits and predilections so it can more efficiently target advertisements to us. Google’s core business is consumer profiling. It keeps dossiers on all of us. Yet we have no idea how substantial or accurate these digital portraits are. This project will generate a better sense of what is at stake in this “gift” transaction and will generate new theories of corporate surveillance that get beyond the trite “Panopticon” model.

Possible Chapter Outline

Introduction: ".. Like the Mind of God": What Google Wants from Us

Chapter One: "To Organize All the World's Information": From Harnessing Web 1.0 to Generating Web 3.0

Chapter Two: What if Big Ads Don't Work: How Google AdSense has Upended the Industry

Chapter Three: "Don't Be Evil:" Being the Anti-Microsoft

Chapter Four: Is Google a Library?

Chapter Five: Putting the "You" in "YouTube": Challenging Big Media

Chapter Six: The Dossier: How Google Exploits Your Private Information

Chapter Seven: Global Google: How India, China, and Europe are trying to Rein in Google

Chapter Eight: Google Earth: Viewing the World through the Google Lens

Conclusion: A Public Utility?: What we can and should do about Google

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Freedom Of Expression

This educational documentary brings to multimedia life the contents of Kembrew McLeod's book Freedom of Expression®. It was co-produced by Kembrew McLeod and Jeremy Smith -- the same team behind the Media Education Foundation's Money for Nothing: Behind the Business of Pop Music.

Sut Jhally | Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts and founder and Executive Director of the Media Education Foundation

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Los Angeles Times:

Uri Geller's YouTube takedown
The 1970s 'psychic' may be abusing copyright law to make embarrassing clips vanish.
By Kembrew McLeod

Kembrew McLeod is a University of Iowa communication professor and author of a book and director of a companion documentary, both titled "Freedom of Expression®: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property."

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 4:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here is one reason why:

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 4:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Giuliani and the fear card:

... Given the fact that Thompson, who alone among the candidates nearly matches him in the polls, appeared to be asleep for the entire week, Rudy was able to remind everyone both that he is the front-runner and also why he is the front-runner. By so vocally attacking the Democratic front-runner he is assuming the mantle of the Republican party in a manner that gives (admittedly crazy) credence to his notion that he is the only candidate in the race who can a) take it to the Democrats on their own turf, and b) protect America from the conspiracy of liberals, Clintonites and terrorists that would like to turn the nation over to al-Qaida just for the fun of it.

Apparently this kind of thing goes over with enough Republican primary voters and campaign contributors to keep the entire circus rolling toward what will be the strangest and in some ways scariest American presidential election in anyone's memory.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 4:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today The Institute for the Future of the Book launched my new blog, The Googlization of Everything.

Sivacracy will continue to host lively posts and discussions about all things Googlrific. But the Google blog will be the site of this compositional experiment. There will be lots of cross-postings. Please stay tuned to both.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 9:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Amen Brother

Via Bill Patry.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A short overview:

The entire lecture:

Prof. Pausch's homepage is here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 2:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since the Cherminsky controversy about academic freedom involves my home institution, I feel compelled to say something about the fiasco and faculty reactions to it as it unfolded, although I was in Europe during the worst of the blowback after Chancellor Michael Drake withdrew Cherminsky's appointment as Dean of UC Irvine's new law school, citing Cherminsky's liberal political opinions as a factor that would make him an unpalatable choice both in conservative Orange County and with the UC Regents who might be allies of the state's Republican governor. As we all know now, eventually the offer was restored so Cherminisky could move forward with his work as dean.

Of course, this isn't UCI's first scandal, and I often joke about teaching what could be a very entertaining course on institutional local politics that would include the fertility clinic scandal, the liver transplant scandal, and a host of other public embarrassments. Furthermore, despite his apparent bungling of the situation, I'll admit to being somewhat sympathetic to potential pressures from donors on Drake, but perhaps it's just because I sat next to him at a dinner in honor of Maxine Hong Kingston one time, and we made delightfully genial small talk over our nouvelle cuisine. In any case, I thought that Vice Provost Michael Clark (my former boss and current co-author) came off remarkably well in his pragmatic statement to the press.

"I think if we can put this back on track and Chemerinsky arrives and does what he needs to do — pull together an ideologically diverse and quality faculty — then this will all blow over and be behind us," Clark said on Saturday. "If not, I think there will be a lot of questions in people's minds about the university and we will just have to work hard to answer them."

As a rhetorician, I've been looking at Drake's official electronic communications, which are reproduced on his website, and at the faculty e-mails that filled the inboxes of individual departments. What's interesting to note is that many faculty members were often using mailing lists just to forward articles from the mainstream media rather than editorializing about the matter in their own voices in a virtual public forum. Through back-channels, I'm sure that people were much more direct about the gross violation of academic decorum that took place, but it seemed that the front channel was largely used for disseminating news and opinion pieces from print newspapers like the Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times. Blogs such as Brian Leiter's Law School Reports and Hugh Hewitt were cited occasionally, as was a PDF of a letter from SoCal attorney Dan Stormer declaring "I would not give a dime to this law school" and calling the university's actions "despicable" and characteristic of a "jellyfish," but print media that could be assumed to be more authoritative and credible seemed to have a greater role in these intradepartmental electronic communications.

Posted by Liz Losh at 1:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In honor of Siva's book, when I was in Paris, I couldn't help but admire this gallery show by Nicolas Rubenstein, "Mickey is Also a Rat," which plays with some of the copyright anxieties of the Disney corporation.

Of course, like all things that one admires in a storefront in Paris, the gallery was never actually open so I could go inside.

Thanks to Jean-Noël Jeanneney, former head of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and author of Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge and to officials from the French Ministry of Culture for making it a very worthwhile visit to the City of Light anyway.

Posted by Liz Losh at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

While in Manchester, England for the Hypertext 2007 Conference I had to take some illicit photos of the interior of the cathedral that has been a site of the intellectual property dispute between Sony -- as publisher of the videogame Resistance: Fall of Man -- and the Church of England, which is claiming ownership rights over the sacred space that was modeled in the game without their permission. A sign warns that "The images of the Cathedral remain the property of the Dean and Canons of Manchester."

There is some interesting analysis of the controversy by Ian Bogost here that demonstrates his knowledge of the edifice's long history of devastation and reconstruction, but I think Bogost wouldn't describe it as an "impressive monument" if he had traveled to the site in person to see the building's relatively modest real-life scale.

Note the comparative size of the people in the foreground.

Posted by Liz Losh at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

See AP article here, which notes:

... The blog wasn't noticed much at first. But about six months ago, things started picking up. "You know how it happens — one person links to you, then others do. Also, everyone has camera phones now," Keeley said in a phone interview. Earlier this week, she was linked on Yahoo!, which quadrupled her traffic for a couple days to about 2,000 hits — though her record is still about 3,000 in a day.

What draws people? The humor, but also partly, Keeley admits, a sense of superiority, at least grammatically speaking — something she tries to avoid herself. "I don't consider myself a prescriptivist or a pedant," she says (really). "So I'm open to critiques of my own language. I make plenty of mistakes myself." ...

It's a fun blog, but what really makes me laugh is the "legal" notice (quotations mine) at the bottom, which states:

You agree that when you send a Submission via email to this Website, you grant this website and its owners a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to use the work. We may use, copy, sublicense, adapt, transmit, distribute, publish, display or otherwise use it as we see fit, in our sole discretion. By making a Submission, you waive the right to make any claim against the blog, its owners or any of its respective parents, subsidiaries, affiliates, employees, agents, directors, officers and shareholders relating to the Submission, including, but not limited to, unfair competition, invasion of privacy, negligence, breach of implied contract or breach of confidentiality. Without limitation of the foregoing, we shall exclusively own all now-known or hereafter existing rights to the Submissions of every kind and nature throughout the universe and shall be entitled to unrestricted use of the Submission for any purpose whatsoever, commercial or otherwise, without any compensation to the provider of the Submission.

You understand that all information, data, text, software, music, sound, photographs, graphics, video, messages or other materials ("Content"), whether publicly posted or privately transmitted, are the sole responsibility of the person from which such Content originated. This means that you, and not us, are entirely responsible for all Content that you upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available to us. Under no circumstances will we be liable in any way for the Content, including, but not limited to, for any errors or omissions in any Content, or for any loss or damage of any kind incurred as a result of the use of any Content posted, emailed, transmitted or otherwise made available via the website.

Maybe I should start a Blog of Overwrought Disclaimers.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 6:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Columbia won't cancel Ahmadinejad speech."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

AAUP: Freedom in the Classroom (2007)

I. Introduction

The 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure affirms that "teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject." This affirmation was meant to codify understandings of academic freedom commonly accepted in 1940. In recent years these understandings have become controversial. Private groups have sought to regulate classroom instruction, advocating the adoption of statutes that would prohibit teachers from challenging deeply held student beliefs or that would require professors to maintain "diversity" or "balance" in their teaching.1 Committee A has established this subcommittee to assess arguments made in support of recent legislative efforts in this area. ...

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Freedom to Teach:

... Every time college professors enter their classrooms — any one of the thousands of classrooms on the thousands of campuses across the United States — they know they are presiding over an extraordinary and potentially volatile space. Not all classrooms are charged with drama, of course; some contain students sitting in remote corners of the lecture hall, catching up on some much-needed sleep. But classrooms that depend on student discussion, commentary, and debate are quite another thing — and seasoned teachers know what every inexperienced teacher dreads: Class discussion can go in any direction whatsoever. Students can pick up on a professor’s analogy — for example, my slightly facetious comparison of Silas Lapham to the Beverly Hillbillies, or my more serious comparision between two characters’ discussion of American literary figures and our own sense of the “canon” of American directors — and run with it anywhere they like; every day, they bring to the classroom their own analogies, obsessions, fully-formed arguments, and passing concerns, as well as the ideas that just popped into their heads a few minutes ago. And in response, professors can pick up on students’ responses and take them wherever on the syllabus — or wherever in the world — seems most pedagogically promising.

This is so common and ordinary a feature of college classrooms that it should need no defense. Quite literally, it should go without saying that college classrooms are places where students and professors can pursue illuminating analogies, develop trains of thought, play devil’s advocate, and make connections between past and present.

But, for reasons well known to readers of Inside Higher Ed, these things no longer go without saying. Conservative ideologues (whose names escape me at the moment) have tried, in recent years, to redefine “academic freedom” as a shield that protects conservative students from the opinions and convictions of their professors; they have introduced bills in state legislatures that would mandate “intellectual diversity” in college courses and curricula — presumably to give conservative interpretations of The Rise of Silas Lapham and White Noise a fair hearing, or perhaps to require the assignment of texts more congenial to the conservative world view. And these initiatives have spawned a minor cottage industry of Student Protection Plans, as state legislators craft bills that would make it illegal for professors to challenge students’ cherished beliefs, or require professors to “respect” students’ determination to defend their opinions, however misinformed these might be.

In response, the American Association of University Professors’ Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure has drafted a 5500-word statement on “Freedom in the Classroom,” explaining just what it means that — as the AAUP 1940 Statement of Principles says — “Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject.” The document will be published in the forthcoming issue of Academe, and it is — in the humble opinion of this longtime AAUP member (who had no hand in its composition) — as clear and as compelling a defense of academic freedom in the classroom as one could wish.

The statement takes up the right’s four most prominent complaints about professors’ classroom demeanor: “(1) instructors ‘indoctrinate’ rather than educate; (2) instructors fail fairly to present conflicting views on contentious subjects, thereby depriving students of educationally essential ‘diversity’ or ‘balance’; (3) instructors are intolerant of students’ religious, political, or socioeconomic views, thereby creating a hostile atmosphere inimical to learning; and (4) instructors persistently interject material, especially of a political or ideological character, irrelevant to the subject of instruction.” In its discussion of “indoctrination,” for example, the statement argues that: “It is not indoctrination for an economist to say to his students that in his view the creation of markets is the most effective means for promoting growth in underdeveloped nations, or for a biologist to assert his belief that evolution occurs through punctuated equilibriums rather than through continuous processes. Indoctrination occurs only when instructors dogmatically insist on the truth of such propositions by refusing to accord their students the opportunity to contest them. Vigorously to assert a proposition or a viewpoint, however controversial, is to engage in argumentation and discussion — an engagement that lies at the core of academic freedom.” ...

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

TNR Online:

Chemerinsky, Summers, and Academic Freedom
California Dreamin'
by Eric Rauchway
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 09.20.07

When the University of California Regents rescinded former Harvard president Lawrence Summers's invitation to speak at a Board dinner this month, it was too easy to link Summers with Erwin Chemerinsky: Just days before, the University of California at Irvine had rescinded Chemerinsky's invitation to serve as dean of their new law school. While the two cases share some common elements--in both, the officials reneged under pressure on commitments presumably made in good faith and for good reasons--the superficial similarities conceal deep differences. In the Chemerinsky case, UC threatened Chemerinsky's academic freedom; in the Summers case, UC threatened mine--and that of everyone else who teaches here. ...

Right on.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 2:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Buffalo Sabres TV Ratings:

The Winter Classic - 42,000 Tickets Sold in 25 Minutes

That's right. Hockey. New Years Day. Outside. In Buffalo.

Damn. I wish I could be there. At Ralph Wilson Stadium at that time of year you have to drink your beer in one long gulp lest it freeze up on you.

Heaven. Heaven.

Go Sabres.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 4:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Threat Level - Wired Blogs:

... In advance of a government Town Hall in November focusing on the privacy threats online behavioral advertising, online data collection and what standards should govern them, Google, one of the net's largest data collectors, suggests that the forum also talk about how online advertising funds free, high-quality content and how online advertising contributes to the nation's small businesses.

"Simply put, advertising is information, and relevant advertising is information that is useful to consumers," wrote Alan Davidson, Google's senior policy counsel. "It is also the case that online advertising promotes freer, more robust, and more diverse speech."

The old "advertising as free speech" move has never had much currency either in First Amendment law or public opinion.

What would Lady Bird Johnson say?

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 4:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Michael Geist writes:
My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, Ottawa Citizen version, homepage version) focuses on the growing attention paid to counterfeiting and the use of misleading data as part of the debate. The RCMP has been the single most prominent source for claims about the impact of counterfeiting in Canada since its 2005 Economic Crime Report pegged the counterfeiting cost at between $10 to 30 billion dollars annually. The $30 billion figure has assumed a life of its own with groups lobbying for tougher anti-counterfeiting measures regularly raising it as evidence of the dire need for Canadian action. U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins cited the figure in a March 2007 speech critical of Canadian law, while the Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network, Canada's leading anti-counterfeiting lobby, reported in April that the "RCMP estimates that the cost to the Canadian economy from counterfeiting and piracy is in the billions."

In fact, the OECD report concluded that while counterfeiting was an issue in all economies, it is most common in economies "where informal, open-air markets predominate." This suggests that far from being a hot-bed of counterfeiting, Canada is rarely the source of counterfeit products and it consumes far less than many other countries worldwide. ...

Go to Geist's blog for the entire post, complete with supporting links, other interesting stuff to read, and a "casual friday" photo of the man in his header.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Over the weekend I spent a lot of time late at night enjoying watching my New York Yankees taking two of three games against Melissa's team, the Boston Red Sox. Don't worry. Our marriage has been through more heated pennant races and playoff meetings.

On Friday night ESPN scanned the crowd for famous people and found Adrian Grenier of Entourage seated with a group of friends in the seats above the Green Monster in left field at Fenway. As he smiled and waved at the camera, I spotted an even more attractive man seated just to his right.

Is it? Yes. It has to be. It's my pal Henry Jenkins of MIT!

So I quickly dropped a line to Henry asking him if he had joined the Entourage.

He had! It turns out that Grenier's documentary company was in Cambridge interviewing Noam Chomsky about something or other (universal grammar, perhaps?). He invited Noam and Henry to join them at Fenway.

Pretty cool, huh?

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 4:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That's what Sally Field actually said in her Emmy acceptance speech. Here's the Foxified version:

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Posted by Ann Bartow at 8:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the LA Times:

The all-you-can-eat packages of voice, video and Internet services offered by phone and cable companies may be convenient, but they represent a potentially significant threat to people's privacy.

It also says AT&T compiles info on "viewing, game, recording and other navigation choices that you and those in your household make" when using the company's TV services. ...

Posted by Ann Bartow at 7:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There are plenty of reasons to criticize Osama Bin Laden, but there have to be better ways to do it than this:

I don't gainsay the danger or destructive power of the man. I still remember Rick Hertzberg's quote just after 9/11 that the attacks were as brilliant as they were evil. (This is from memory: so I may have the precise words wrong. But he well captured the way in which the horror and evil of the attacks were matched by their diabolical ingeniusness.) But as an articulator of a vision, an expounder of "Islamofascism," or whatever the new trademarked word is now, he's about as coherent and comprehensible as a 9th tier blogger or one of those whacks sitting on a stoop in Union Square talking about fascism and Texas oil barons before they get overcome by the shakes or decide to start collecting more aluminum cans.

Making fun of "lesser" bloggers, and street people isn't cool. Plus he's muddling up trademark law.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

From this article in the NYT:

Every summer for the last four years, e-mail security company Proofpoint has surveyed large companies about their Internet security anxieties and the measures they are taking to protect themselves. The findings, of course, are intended to validate the demand for Proofpoint’s own security products, but they are interesting nevertheless.

An e-mail today could be evidence tomorrow: Finally, 20 percent of companies in the survey said they were ordered during the course of a legal or regulatory proceeding to produce employee e-mail. Of companies with over 20,000 employees, that number went up to 29.1 percent.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 3:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Every naming act can be commodified! From the WaPo:

... Ever since Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus published "Species Plantarum" in 1753 and the 10th edition of "Systema Naturae" five years later, certain rules have governed how plants and animals get their official names. They are always in Latin and consist of two parts: The first specifies the genus; the second, the name of the particular species.

The rules say nothing about selling naming rights. So after Mark Erdmann, a senior adviser for Conservation International's Indonesia marine program, and consultant Gerald Allen discovered two new species of sharks last year, Erdmann thought, why not auction off the right to name the creatures they had found? ...

I critiqued naming practices in this article and I cringe at the prospect of newly discovered species being named after corporations, though I admit smirking a little when I read about the fact that "in 2005, entomologists Quentin Wheeler and Kelly B. Miller named three slime-mold beetles Agathidium bushi, Agathidium cheneyi and Agathidium rumsfeldi, after President Bush, Vice President Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld," although this was spun as an honor.

(NB: Thanks to Frank Pasquale!)

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm not a fan of Britney Spears' music, and the details of her personal life don't generally interest me, but it's been sad to see some of the recent nasty criticisms of her in the media, which seem a little unfair. Obviously I'm not the only person who feels that way, as one fan made a video to explain her lackluster dancing at the recent VMA as a result of her boots:

I'm not sure I buy the premise of the video but I love that somebody made it, and is circulating it on the Internets.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

University-Press Leader Quit Publishers' Panel Over Anti-Open-Access Campaign:

At least one top university-press director spoke out against the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine, or Prism, a controversial new anti-open-access campaign sponsored by the Association of American Publishers, before it went public.

Another university-press leader, Stephen Bourne, chief executive officer of Cambridge University Press, has also made clear his displeasure about Prism. In an e-mail message to The Chronicle, he wrote that Cambridge "has in no way been involved in, or consulted on, the Prism initiative." He added that "Prism's message is oversimplistic and ill-judged, with the unwelcome consequence of creating tension between the publishing community and the proponents of open access." --- Jennifer Howard

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 9:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here is an excerpt of this moving Huff Po post bySteven Rosenbaum:

... I knew it was too early to know the answers. But the raw material that would become history had drawn me into 9/11 and I knew I wasn't getting out.

I knew we'd used his song without permission, and I expected that the band would be unhappy. But I was wrong. ...

Watch the video here. If you are an emotional mushball like me, have a tissue ready.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Read Detained, Not Arrested at The Language Log.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An aggregator that is pretty much as you'd expect. Via Out of the Jungle.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 1:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

First Monday Podcast:

This month: September 2007
Siva Vaidhyanathan

First Monday Chief Editor Ed Valauskas discusses the future of libraries in the digital age, teaching, and gumbo.

If you don't know First Monday, you should. It's an amazing open academic Web journal. Many non-academics read it and contribute to it. It's one of my favorite publications, period.

Hope y'all like the podcast!

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Read her post here. Her previous posts have been compiled into two books: this one and this one.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 7:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Center for Intellectual Property:

Join the Center for Intellectual Property at UMUC for its 2007-2008 asynchronous online workshop series! Explore the intellectual property issues facing higher education in today's rapidly changing digital environment. Enjoy the convenience of the asynchronous online workshop format. Log in and participate at times that work for your schedule—no travel required.

Building a Community that Values Academic Integrity
Dates: February 25-March 7, 2008
Registration Deadline: February 22, 2008
(Early Registration Deadline: February 8, 2008)
Moderators: Gary Pavela, MA, JD
Director of Judicial Programs, University of Maryland College Park
Kimberly Bonner, JD
Executive Director, Center for Intellectual Property, UMUC

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yes I know, a little explanation and context would be helpful, but for now check out this, this, this, this and this.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 8:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A big victory: Golan v. Gonzales:

The 10th Circuit decided our appeal in Golan v. Gonzales today. In a unanimous vote, the Court held that the "traditional contours of copyright protection" described in Eldred as the trigger for First Amendment review extend beyond the two "traditional First Amendment safeguards" mentioned by the Court in that case. It thus remanded the case to the District Court to evaluate section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (“URAA”) under the First Amendment, which removed material from the public domain.

This is a very big victory. The government had argued in this case, and in related cases, that the only First Amendment review of a copyright act possible was if Congress changed either fair use or erased the idea/expression dichotomy. We, by contrast, have argued consistently that in addition to those two, Eldred requires First Amendment review when Congress changes the "traditional contours of copyright protection." In Golan, the issue is a statute that removes work from the public domain. In a related case now on cert to the Supreme Court, Kahle v. Gonzales, the issue is Congress's change from an opt-in system of copyright to an opt-out system of copyright. That too, we have argued, is a change in a "traditional contour of copyright protection." Under the 10th Circuit's rule, it should merit 1st Amendment review as well.

Here is the background on the case:

Golan v. Gonzales

The CIS filed this suit on behalf of a University of Denver, Colorado conductor and others, seeking to have the CTEA and the Uruguay Round Agreements Act declared unconstitutional. The suit challenges Congress’s ability to reclassify works that have already passed into the public domain as copyrighted, thereby giving ownership back to private entities.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wonder what in the world the post title is all about? See The Language Log, via Reclusive Leftist.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 1:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

NSFW. Via Nancy McC.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 1:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Read: "Viacom hits me with copyright infringement for posting on YouTube a video that Viacom made by infringing on my own copyright!" Once you have the basic facts down as Knight presents them, see this, this and this.
The first link is sympathetic toward Knight, while the second two opiners are less so; they propound the view that being "transformative" is a critical element of fair use.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You may have seen this NYT article, "Before Models Can Turn Around, Knockoffs Fly." It documents the push by elite members of the fashion industry to obtain copyright protection, or possibly formulate a new sui generis (stand alone) form of intellectual property protection for clothing. Counterfeiting, the direct copying of labels, company names and logos, is already illegal by virtue of trademark law. Selling knockoffs, however, which may appear very similar to high fashion items but do not bear false source indicators, are generally legal. As the NYT article puts it: "The cut or details of a garment cannot be copyrighted under existing law, although logos and original prints can be protected."

Over at Counterfeit Chic, Susan Scafidi gives her take on the issue. She finds knockoffs problematic, and is in favor of adding or reformulating intellectual property laws to offer broader legally enforceable monopolies over fashion designs. I disagree with her about this, but I admire the passion and intelligence she brings to her position, and I appreciate her view that one of the reasons intellectual property protection regimes have excluded clothing items and certain kinds of artistic creativity may be related to the close association between fashion and women.

I tend to be in agreement with many of the points raised by Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman, who published an article entitled How Copyright Law Could Kill The Fashion Industry in TRN, based on their lengthy law review article on the same topic. But, their focus is not on gender issues, let alone feminism. I understand that some of the beneficiaries of enhanced IP protections would be female designers. In my view, however, facilitating exclusionary acts by designers will be detrimental to far more women than it helps. Trademark law already allows elite designers to charge wealthy purchasers thousands of dollars for single items of clothing without legal competition from counterfeiters. Knockoffs allow less wealthy and/or less trademark conscious women to participate in acts of cultural fashionability based on their personal style preferences. Foreclosing avenues of fashion related self expression, conformist though it may sometimes seem, strikes me as contrary to egalitarian goals of feminism.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

My buddy Todd Gitlin has a new book coming out this month called The Bulldozer and the Big Tent. Over on TPM Cafe, Todd and others will be discussing the future of liberalism and the prospects for a democratic (and Democratic) revival. Don't miss it.

By Todd Gitlin

-------

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 3:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Google "Gmail: A Behind the Scenes Video" that promotes their Gmail application by making a pitch to the audience's emotions and exploiting the international and inter-generational dynamics of the web for commercial purposes has a troubling side to its feel-good visual rhetoric.

Because these amateur filmmakers are highlighting the logo of a corporate product, how is this different from having the video volunteers hand off a McDonald's "M" in each cut? What if these volunteers were shown passing a pair of handcuffs to publicize Amnesty International or a set of dogtags to ask that the soldiers in Iraq be brought home? Would their collective labor be better spent?

Posted by Liz Losh at 5:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thanks to Dennis Jerz for posting this awesome compilation of cinematic examples of the "Wilhelm Scream."

Now, who owns the copyright on the scream or how did it come to be considered in the public domain?

Posted by Liz Losh at 4:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)