The idea for the network came out of CMLP's work over the last 3 years helping online journalists understand their legal rights and responsibilities. During this time period, we've published and updated our legal guide and legal threats database, blogged on topics of interest to online publishers, partnered with like-minded organizations on a variety of educational projects, and filed amicus briefs in cases with significant implications for online speech. While we are proud of the impact we've had and the success of the CMLP website, we also recognize that many online journalists and bloggers need more than generally applicable legal information--they need their own lawyers to tackle their own individualized legal issues.

The new Online Media Legal Network aims to fill this need by making it as easy as possible for online publishers to find legal help.  If you know of anyone that could use our help, please direct them to the OMLN website.  Conversely, if you are a lawyer and you want to help, please sign up!

More info on the launch is available here.

I left the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Association Summit of newspaper publishers and ad managers Thursday just as two executives from the Associated Press were winding up their presentation on the new AP News Registry.

The new initiative, announced in July, contains two key components:

• All AP stories will be released online wrapped in a new microsoformat that includes rights info, who created it, etc.

• The wrapper also will carry a built-in "digital beacon," or tracker, to monitor use of the content by others to track usage and compliance. (As I understand this, the content is not encrypted but carries a lightweight bug technology.)

As a social media consultant and journalist who spoke at the summit just an hour earlier, I asked whether the dialogue and AP's plans were public information, and Kevin Walsh, AP's Kevin Walsh, Vice President of Marketing, responded, "It is now."

AP's plans were met with the predicable negative reaction in the blogosphere (see, for example, the comments at bottom of this article). But AP should be credited with its transparency during this process, and from what I heard at the summit, its plans make a lot of sense. Thousands of sites are unfairly piggybacking off the work of journalists, and if newspapers and news organizations like the AP are to survive, there has to be a mechanism for compensation.

As an internal AP document titled Protect, Point, Pay - An Associated Press Plan for Reclaiming News put it: "The evidence is everywhere: original news content is being scraped, syndicated and monetized without fair compensation to those who produce report and verify it."

Fair use won't be easy to define

It's a topic I have some familiarity with, having written Darknet and reported on Hollywood studios and media companies' reluctance to embrace their digital future. At the time I wrote the book, there was widespread music file sharing (there still is) but also an increasing recognition that the original Napster was misguided and the music industry needed to devise legitimate forms of compensation for the artists. (Apple's iTunes and Rhapsody are among the companies still trying to create a frictionless business model.)

My view on the new AP initiative is similar: Some reuse of AP's content is socially and legally acceptable, but there needs to be limits. What will matter, in the end, is how this plan will be carried out by AP and the cooperative's members. If they go too far and claim "all rights reserved" around the first two sentences of every AP article, the blowback will be enormous. Fair use exists, and in the past the AP has paid too little heed to those concerns — even though AP reporters rely on the same fair use doctrine in their reports nearly every day. (For example, I didn't get the AP's permission to use the graphic at the top of this post.)

Todd B. Martin, AP's Vice President, Technology Development, reassured the publishers in the room that the intent of the news registry isn't to go after every blogger who borrows a snippet of an AP news story.

Instead, Martin said, "We're not going to stop a blogger from cut and pasting an article. But we are giving you visibility into the 20,000 other domains where your content appeared and the top users and where it was monetized. So you can get a list of the top 100 [infringing] sites with over 100,000 views, and then facilitate business development opportunities" with the sites in question. The registry, Martin said, would help create new business opportunities and products and also buttress more rigorous legal enforcement of the AP's intellectual property.

That business development, presumably, would go something like this: You're taking our content without authorization. Sign up for a subscription, remove it, or face the legal consequences. It sounds as though AP will be creating a new category of subscribers that falls short of a standard membership subscription.

I asked the first question: When a blogger or third-party publisher reproduces part of an AP story on his own site or blog, how much borrowing is permissible? What is the cutoff point between fair use and a trigger mechanism that requires a subscription payment?

"We're focused on removing the ambiguity around the use of our content," Martin responded. "The registry will help you decide whether that use is permitted or whether it's a business development opportunity" requiring payment.

Which, of course, doesn't answer the question at all. For a simple reason: There is no bright line. But I do agree with AP on this: There is a line at some point. It comes down to context: reasonable lightweight borrowing vs. patterns of appropriating reportage and photographs for profit. It appears AP and its members will take things on a case-by-case basis until some conventions and rules of the road are established.

Recently in his MediaShift blog, Mark Glaser did a brilliant job of exposing the unscrupulous practice of sites like Gawker and site scrapers that reuse copyrighted material without authorization, payment or transforming it in a significant way: Using the 'Steal-O-Meter' to Gauge if Stories Steal or Promote.

It's a conversation we've avoided for a long, long time.

Since the code is under a GPL3, doesn't MSNBC.com have to also keep it under the same license if modified? Or can they take the code base since Everyblock is a web-based service?

We at Gotham Gazette had been wondering just about the same thing, albeit for different reasons. We're working on our final Knight-funded game and the programmer we're working with thinks the GPL is too restrictive which got us wondering what it would look like to release source code according to the terms of our agreement with Knight but also allow our programmer (who's hardly getting rich off of this development project) to use the code under a different, less viral license.

And, James Vasile at Hacker Visions has an answer. It is a complex answer, and worth a read. Loosely? The holder of the copyright is not necessarily bound by the license a project was released under.

A breaking-news example is the ugly case of Lori Drew, in which a federal judge is in the process of rescuing us from a prosecutor whose legal theories would have created criminals of just about everyone who ever signed up for just about anything online. The judge said last week he's overturning a jury verdict that prosecutors won by abusing the law while appealing to emotion.

The case is ugly not only because of the law-enforcement overreach, however. It started that way because of Drew's actions. She was a ringleader in a cruel online hoax against a teenaged girl in Missouri, Megan Meier, that may well have contributed to the girl's suicide. (See the Citizen Media Law Project's compendium for details.)

Boiling it down, Drew, whose daughter was fighting with Meier, and several others created a bogus MySpace account for a fictitious teenaged boy who wooed and then rejected Meier. It was a heartless act, and Drew and her helpers deserve at least contempt if not a civil lawsuit.

Using Hacking Law

Officials in Missouri had no cause for criminal action, however. But federal prosecutors hauled Drew off to Los Angeles and tried her for violating a federal law, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which had been used in the past to go after hackers who'd plundered others' computers for financial gain. Using a computer, prosecutors said, Drew had:

intentionally accessed and caused to be accessed a computer used in interstate commerce, namely, the MySpace servers located in Los Angeles County, California, within the Central District of California, without authorization and in excess of authorized access, and, by means of interstate commerce obtained and caused to be obtained information from that computer to further tortious acts, namely intentional infliction of emotional distress on [Meier].

As the Citizen Media Law Project reiterated last week, Drew's alleged crime was, boiled down to the actual law as opposed to the emotional element of the case, "nothing other than failing to submit 'truthful and accurate' registration information when creating a MySpace profile. She would have been no less liable for misstating her height."

Think about this. Is there anyone using online registration systems who has always, without exception, given utterly accurate information? As the judge explained in his ruling, allowing Drew's verdict to stand would make everyone who's ever violated a terms of service, no matter how minor the violation, guilty of a crime as well.

The prosecutor, Thomas P. O'Brien, didn't care. As Wired News reported, he was proud of himself. Sure, he said, using the CFAA was "a risk," but his office "will always take risks on behalf of children."

The larger risk was, in fact, to liberty. O'Brien's willingness to twist a law to serve even a well-meaning end deserves contempt, not praise, because he's supposed to know better.

So, one might imagine, would a member of Congress. One would be wrong. Rep. Linda Sanchez, a California Democrat, has praised O'Brien for his overreach even as she urges passage of her federal legislation against "cyberbullying" -- a bill that could looks like a dramatic overreach of its own.

Make no mistake. What Drew did was despicable. But what the federal prosecutor did was, in its own way, just as bad.

The graphic footage made its way around the world, sparking outrage. Two weeks later, Johannes Mehserle, the former BART officer accused of killing Grant, was charged with murder, a first according to The San Francisco Chronicle. The newspaper reported that the Alameda Country District Attorney representatives could not remember a previous time when an on-duty officer had been charged in a fatal shooting in the last 20 years.

This Wednesday, some six months after the shooting, a fellow BART officer had to retract his initial testimony that Grant disobeyed police orders when the video evidence clearly contradicted that claim. On Thursday, a judge ordered Mehserle to stand trial for murder.

Racial Tensions with Police

I thought about this recently as I sat in New York City with a friend who was almost numb with anger over the death of Omar J. Edwards, a black off-duty New York City Police officer shot in the back by a white officer who says he mistook Edwards for an armed criminal.

"It just doesn't stop," my friend said.

The relationship between police and the black community has long been tense. According to the New York Times, cases of black officers shot by their white colleagues, though rare, date back as far as 1940. But until relatively recently, that tension has simmered just beneath the nation's consciousness.

When I was a young reporter in Bakersfield, CA some 25 years ago, an African American man with ties to the Bakersfield Police Department was stopped by police officers as he drove down the highway at night. With their guns drawn, they ordered him out of the car and down to the ground until he was able to prove his identity.
The only other African American reporter at the paper and I assured the editor that this was an entirely likely scenario. To give the editor some context, my colleague, a black man, described how he was often stopped by police as he walked home at night.

But this was years before the term "driving while black" had entered the general vocabulary and some of my colleagues didn't think it plausible that the police would pull over a motorist and start brandishing their guns for no reason.

A few years later, an editor at another paper would tell me how, when he was coming of age, the local police officers would take him home to face his family when his actions bordered on the criminal. Having grown up learning that the police were as likely to harm you as help you, hearing this editor's experience both enraged and amazed me.

More importantly, it also helped me understand in part why it was so difficult for some people to believe that the police they relied on to protect them could turn on others without provocation.

Rodney King Video

Less than a decade after I left Bakersfield, the world saw police officers assaulting Rodney King, thanks to the technological advances that made video cameras available to the average affluent person.

Since then, other cases have surfaced to receive national attention. Most notably Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old Guinean immigrant who was reaching for his wallet when four police, who later claimed they thought he was reaching for a gun, fired off 41 rounds, killing him. And, more recently, Sean Bell was shot and killed by New York City police officers in the early morning hours before his wedding.

In both of these cases, the officers involved were acquitted of all charges stemming from the shootings.

It's likely this fraught history between communities of color and law enforcement played a role in the number of people who pulled out their cell phones in the early hours of New Year's Day. According to the Oakland Tribune, many said they started recording because they thought the officers were abusing their authority.

For some, the only solace as they watch the case unfolding is that after years of frustration at the lack of police accountability in the deaths of citizens, there is finally a new weapon of choice against police brutality: the cell phone.

Which is why it is so refreshing to see a shift in perspective occurring (perhaps even, gasp, a paradigm shift?) at two of this country's preeminent journalism schools: the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. In commencement speeches last month, Nicholas Lemann and Barbara Ehrenreich both exhorted the graduates to view these difficult times as an opportunity to reinvent journalism.

From Nicholas Lemann's speech at Columbia (posted by Clay Shirky because Columbia didn't see fit to post it!? - I guess that answers my question about a paradigm shift):

It's amazing to think about how many new journalistic forms have been developed over these last few years, because of the Internet: blogs, wikis, interactive graphics, animations, audio slide shows, and so on. If you keep constant our basic mission of gathering, assessing, and presenting information, the specific ways in which we do this are changing more rapidly than at any time I can remember. And we don't get to decide on our own how they change-that depends on what the technology permits us to do, what provides an economic basis for our work, and what our audiences respond to. This is not a time for journalists to say, "We have decided that the traditional news story is the best basic form of news delivery, so we're doggedly sticking with it." This is, instead, and more interestingly, a time for experimentation, which also means it's a time for listening.

Second, and more broadly, we have been in the habit of assuming that whatever appears in a newspaper or a magazine or on a broadcast or a news organization's Web site is available there uniquely, and represents a distinctive and irreplaceable contribution to public life. I spent a lot of my time these days talking to non-journalists about journalism, and I can tell you that we all have to learn to make a more sophisticated argument for ourselves.

***

So this is your charge. You will not only have to reinvent journalism, you will also have to reinvent the conversation about journalism, making it less internal to the profession, and more interactive with the rest of society. That's an enormous job; I wonder whether any generation of journalists has had a more momentous mission than yours. But, to me, and I hope to you too, it sounds like fun.

Barbara Ehrenriech echoed similar thoughts in her speech to the graduates at UC Berkeley (available on the school's website), noting that they will be trying to "carve out a career . . . within what appears to be a dying industry" but in the end, "we will not be stopped."

We are not part of an elite, akin to movie stars, anchorpersons and hedge fund managers. We are part of the working class - which is exactly how journalists have seen themselves through most of American history- as working stiffs. We can be underpaid, we can be jerked around, we can be laid-off arbitrarily - just like any autoworker or mechanic or hotel housekeeper or flight attendant.

But there IS this difference: A laid-off autoworker doesn't go into his or her garage and assemble cars by hand. But WE - journalists - we can't stop doing what we do!

As long as there is a story to be told, an injustice to be exposed, a mystery to be solved, WE WILL FIND A WAY TO DO IT. And what is so special about YOU, compared to a grizzled old veteran like me, is that you possess a multitude of new skills so that you can invent and CREATE NEW WAYS TO DO IT.

A recession won't stop us. A dying industry won't stop us. Even POVERTY won't stop us because we are ALL on a mission here. That's the meaning of your Berkeley degree. Do not consider it a certificate promising some sort of entitlement. Consider it a LICENSE TO FIGHT.

And consider this day to be your induction into a kind of knighthood-or samurai brotherhood and sisterhood. You are not civilians any more. You are journalists, which means you are part of a worldwide, centuries-long fight for truth and justice.

In the 70s, it was gonzo journalism. For us right now, it's GUERILLA journalism, and we will not be stopped.

To these inspiring speeches I'd add the following additional points: Most of you will not be working for "traditional" journalism organizations. Many of you will be freelancers using tools such as blogs, wikis, and micro-messaging (ala Twitter). Some of you will start or join online-only ventures. These "facts" should be viewed as presenting opportunities, not limitations. And lastly, the Citizen Media Law Project is here to help you with the legal issues you'll likely face as you reinvent journalism.

It's time to get to work.

We've also added some detailed background on Section 230, links to our legal guide materials, and feeds showing recent legal threats from our database, blog posts, and news from other websites. The page also has a list of outside resources and will soon host a compendium of Section 230's legislative history.

We hope that this new page will help citizen media and other online publishers conveniently access the diverse and ever-increasing materials and commentary on our site and across the Web relating to Section 230 and provide useful context for understanding the statute and the debates surrounding it.

You can check out the new page here.

The amicus coalition, represented by Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic, submitted a "friend of the court" brief yesterday in the case of Maxon v. Ottawa Publishing. The case is before the Illinois Appellate Court for the Third District and involves pseudonymous comments posted on mywebtimes.com, the website for The Times, a local newspaper in Ottawa, Illinois published by Ottawa Publishing Company. Local business owners Donald and Janet Maxon served a pre-litigation petition for discovery on Ottawa Publishing seeking the identity of several anonymous commenters. Ottawa Publishing opposed the request, and an Illinois trial court dismissed the Maxons' petition in October 2008, applying the test for protecting anonymous speech laid out in Dendrite International v. Doe, 775 A.2d 756 (N.J. App. Div. 2001). 

In the brief, we urge the Illinois appellate court to affirm the trial court's choice of a heightened standard and join the consensus among courts nationwide by holding that a party must undertake reasonable efforts to notify the anonymous speaker of the request for disclosure and demonstrate that its underlying claim has legal and factual merit before the court will order disclosure of an anonymous Internet speaker's identity. The brief highlights the long tradition of anonymous speech in the United States and the important role of anonymity in promoting an online marketplace of ideas.  We took no position on the merits of the plaintiffs' defamation claims -- rather, the brief urges that the Court balance the plaintiffs' interest in pursuing legitimate legal remedies against the rights of individuals to speak anonymously by putting the onus on the plaintiffs to demonstrate that their claims have merit.  The brief also recommends that the appellate court follow cases such as Dendrite, Mobilisa, and Brodie in further balancing the equities between the parties, before ordering disclosure.

You can read more about the case and about issues concerning anonymous speech on our website.  The entire brief is available here.

Austin is the first of the large Access Stations that we've worked with in this Knight News Challenge project, and it presented a whole new slate of challenges in comparison with the comparatively simpler implementation at Urbana Public TV. The entire process was documented, and the new ChannelAustin dev site was launched this week. Text documentation is being developed and posted online, with video to follow.

ChannelAustin is poised to be a strong partner in the development of the Open Media System, which is designed to empower community members to have more control over their community media organizations. With a new Statewide Franchise system to phase-in across Texas by 2011, operational funding for Public Access TV stations is not guaranteed. In Denver, the Open Media tools have proven to enable the community members to do the majority of work that is traditionally reserved for staff. In Denver, where there are no operating funds provided for Public Access TV, community members register and pay for classes and memberships, reserve equipment, submit TV shows remotely and in the station, create accounts, profiles, and projects, produce and edit videos in the field and in our studios, and even generate the programming schedule for our 3 TV channels, without requiring staff involvement.

Besides increasing community ownership and support, the vision of the Open Media Project is to establish a new user-driven network of community media organizations, sharing best-practices, cooperating in systems development, and sharing the best noncommercial media across the globe, with all content published using Creative Commons. At SXSW we were able to catch up with CC founder, Lawrence Lessig, who had this to say about the Open Media "experiment".

Historical context

The importance of community media for community empowerment and democratization is well known. And voice based media are especially relevant in the Indian context, given the poor literacy levels in rural areas. However, despite radio being an efficient channel for voice-based community media, communities and independent organizations were forbidden to set up their own radio stations. Pioneering organizations such as Voices and Drishti Media therefore chose a concept called narrow casting to circumvent the policy restrictions. They worked with NGOs Myrada in Bangalore and Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan (a women collective) in Gujarat to train rural community reporters to produce audio programs just like it would be done in a radio studio. But the programs were played out over loud-speakers in common community meeting points such as near temples and at Panchayat (village level governing bodies) meetings, or within "listener groups" of women working together in mcrofinance self-help-groups. The audio production was itself done in a small studio where eminent village personalities and local politicians were invited for interviews, local artists were called in for recording folk songs, and school children were invited to recite poems and famous speeches by great personalities. Namma Dhwani (meaning, our voices), the setup at the village of Buddikote near Bangalore, even pioneered a new concept called cable casting where they used the cable TV network in the village for broadcast. This was a daring step in many ways against the repressive government policies -- since cable TV was run by local operators, Namma Dhwani could purchase air time cheaply for their own programs even though it could not run its own radio station. The channel of course did not have any video -- just a blank blue screen -- but given the high penetration of television in the community, it was a fantastic outreach channel.

Both the experimental setups near Bangalore and in Gujarat were extremely successful in empowering communities, making them realize their rights, and lobby for their demands from local authorities. Given ready evidence, enterprising activists from organizations such as Drishti, Voices, Ideosync, Maraa, One World South Asia, and many independent individuals incessantly lobbied for a policy change to get permission for radio broadcast. Their efforts were rewarded in late 2006, but the policy still remains mired with many complications.

Community radio policy

Currently, there are a number of points of dissatisfaction amongst the CR community.

• Only non-profits more than 3 years old can apply for a CR license. Although this clause is present to help ensure accountability, it is restrictive for new organizations that want to venture into community radio in a dedicated manner. The older non-profits that are applying for licenses have been working in different streams such as micro-finance, low-cost housing, health, etc, and tend to look upon CR as an outreach channel for their existing programs. However, the vision and mission of CR is substantially broader and a niche domain in itself.

• The license process can take well over a year. It goes through the approvals of almost five different ministries, and if the application is stuck at any point, then there are hardly any avenues to find out. Updates are rarely available on the government websites. The entire process is also very inconvenient for the applicant organizations because they are often asked to supply more details within sudden deadlines, or required to appear in person in New Delhi without any warning. One of the most significant tasks during the application process is also a community survey that is supposed to be filled out by over 1000 respondents. Although surveys are definitely valuable to assess the information needs of the communities, the specific survey mandated by the government is available only in English, and contains a whole host of amusing questions that are completely irrelevant to community radio. Many people behind the CR movement strongly feel that a one-fits-all survey is not suitable in the diverse Indian context, and applicants should be allowed to design their own surveys based upon certain specific guidelines laid down by the government. Fortunately though, the government secretaries are open to suggestions, and the process will hopefully smoothen out over time.

• The FM transmitter equipment for the community radio station can be sold by only three authorized vendors. The newest vendor, Nomad, designs and manufactures indigenous transmitters, and got approval only last year after a long struggle with the bureaucratic red tape. Prior to Nomad, the transmitter equipment was available at a prohibitively enormous cost from the other vendors. At Gram Vaani, although we know that even lower cost alternatives exist, but given the approval difficulties we have deferred our development efforts on the transmitter front, and decided to focus on other components of the CR technology in priority.

• The policy mandates that the CR station should be owned by a non-profit organization. This is very different from policies in Nepal where local communities can pool funds and apply for a license, or in Bolivia where it is mandatory for a CR station to be governed by a council of members elected from the community. This therefore becomes a push-based top-down approach in India, as opposed to a more desirable pull-based bottom-up approach in Nepal and Bolivia. The non-profit organization in India may or may not choose to listen to feedback from the local community, and there have been reports where feedback from certain community individuals was ignored because these people did not participate in the other development programs supported by the non-profit organization. In the same manner, since the community also may not incur any clearly-observable liability from a failure of the CR station, it would effect their levels of engagement with the radio station. Unfortunately a circular problem, this does outline the complexities of participatory community development programs.

Other challenges for community radio stations

CR stations also face other challenges, the foremost ones being financial sustainability and technology.

• CR stations are permitted 5 minutes of advertising per hour. If well marketed, this could help cover the operational costs to run the CR station and pay salaries to the staff. But it is practically infeasible for resource-crunched CR station operators to acquire business skills and look for advertisers while they also produce good quality radio content. We feel that having a central agency like Gram Vaani look for advertising on their behalf will be very helpful. But it is also important to create other revenue streams for community radio. We have a number of interesting ideas based on coupling radio with telephony services, that we will outline in a subsequent post.

• The setup used by most stations is quite basic -- just a computer and mic, connected to the FM transmitter via a mixer. Although simplicity is good, the lack of interactive systems such as telephones, field reporting tools, and content sharing, makes it harder to sustain engagement from the community. Even software used to run the radio station can have a significant impact on its success. Most CR stations currently use Winamp to play out radio programs, and have to resort to hacks to do live broadcast, or interleave advertisements between programs. A professional radio automation system is very necessary to scale activities, but currently there is no free and open-source system that provides a one-stop solution to playout, broadcast, telephony, SMS, and Internet content sharing.

The current push behind the CR movement

We are very glad that our Knight funding came at an opportune time to enable us to make a significant impact in the growth of community radio in India. Gram Vaani is among the early players in the area of improving technology for community radio, and building a business model around making CR stations financially sustainable. Please take a look at our earlier post on details of the kind of software and hardware systems we are building for community radio. We will shortly also write about our current thinking on the business model of enabling services through radio and telephony.

The Gram Vaani team and other CR activists are also part of the Community Radio Forum, a pan-India collective whose most important mandate is to lobby for legislative changes on the CR policy front. The third annual meeting of the CR Forum was held last month at a small town called Orchha, in the Bundelkhand region of India. Orchha was chosen because the very first community radio station licensed under the new policy was established there by Development Alternatives five months back. It was widely attended by almost all organizations in the community media space in India, including Gram Vaani. Anita Iyer from Radio and Music has written a detailed article on the meeting. Please do take a look for more information and some fantastic pictures.

The road is long, as all roads always are, but it has been a terrific start so far. The one thing I can definitely vouch for though, is that the enthusiasm and commitment of the CR community in India is undying, and will continue to push the horizons of community media indefinitely.

It's hard not to get all fangirl when going to the Media Lab. I mean, I used to read about this place in issues of Wired back before they adopted rational typography!

We all got brief presentations on three projects at different stages of development. One, Virtual Gaza, took eyewitness testimonies from people living in Gaza and overlaid them on a Google Virtual Earth layer. Another, called Between the Bars, was a still-in-concept-phase project that would enable the publishing of letters from prison on the Net. A third researcher reported on discussions with the city of Boston on the potential for using SMS to distribute information on domestic violence prevention.

So many online media projects are about a single question: "what happens when you increase the messaging capacity?" Wikipedia, for example, answers the question, "what if an encylopedia had many thousands of editors and contributors?" Many citizen-media projects ask the question, "What if stories were not limited by the messaging capacity of a newsroom? (After all, an individual reporter with limited time can only call so many sources, right?).

But these projects had more in common than simply increasing messaging capacity -- they were about increasing that capacity in places where news does not reach, and in places that were "hot" -- politically hot, socially hot, war-zone hot.

When I started my own experiments in citizen media, I also gravitated toward a place where messaging capacity was low -- I started a site for a suburb of Boston that was indifferently covered by the nearby regional daily, and covered well-enough by the local weekly -- but still had no real online community.

But it wasn't "hot." There was little crime in my town; it was and is about as far from a war zone as you can get. There were also few truly "hot" political issues, and I can think of only two or three times where I held a story because I wasn't able to confirm it and I worried that publishing something that might turn out to be untrue would have a significant impact on anyone.

By contrast, the "heat" of the environments and topics chosen by the participants in the Media Lab group meant that the messages sent could have real weight. A false story from Gaza could amount to propaganda; publishing letters from prison might have all sorts of consequences, as could messages to and from anyone in a home where domestic violence is an issue. At the same time, when silence prevails, that has its own consequences, both political and personal.

The visit also made me reflect on what's considered valuable in journalism. A lot is made of the courage to go to hot places -- war zones, stories where a reporter or his employer might face legal action or even arrest.

Turns out that we might be able to get to hot places even from the very, very cool web.

Residents out west, in some of the most scenic and (until recently) unspoiled parts of the US have called their regions a "national sacrifice zone" where their health, welfare, and environment are being traded for energy that used in other parts of the country. In many cases rural and suburban communities lack the experience, knowledge, or political capital to hold industry accountable. Industry can cut corners, use unspecified and dangerous chemicals, and negotiate substandard agreements with the people whose property and livelihood they are impacting. ICT systems that record an individuals' experiences, make them accessible, and allow these individuals to network and organize can help rectify the knowledge gap. Film maker Paula Aguilera followed some of our fieldwork and put together this video:

But although the attention on the subject has waned in the media, Prince and UMG have kept up their plight, and the latest fallout is the death of one of the oldest and most popular fan sites around, housequake.com One of the few to take notice was Ben Margolin, founder of Prince.org. On more than one level, his blog entry from last week provides a poignant understanding of why the copyright claims of Prince and UMG are baseless.

Margolin writes that fan sites like housequake and prince.org have "nothing directly to do with Prince, but everything to do with the extremely diverse community that has grown out of past and present (and if he's lucky, future) Prince fans."

Like the music Prince and UMG put into the ethos, all information (whether music, photos, or words) takes on a life of its own. As humans, our connection to and understanding of reality is shared through information. Human development requires building on information from others, and that information is always flavored by the individual sharing it and the medium through which its shared. Almost none of it is new. Its just "flavored" by us, re-arranged, and re-released into the ethos so that others may build upon it. Once that re-release happens, the information takes-on a life of its own, designed to be perceived by others and, possibly, contribute to the progress of human understanding.

Meanings are re-arranged in our heads and perceived through the filter of the rest of our life experiences. Lyrics are misunderstood, unintended epiphanies are reached, and so on. Whether its a troubled teenager deciding the lyrics are encouraging suicide, or a housewife inspired towards a new career-path, the information (or song) released is no longer an isolated work.

In this sense, even the very process of being exposed to a work, re-arranges and alters that original work. The information is perceived and processed by the viewer/listener/consumer in a way that is profoundly different from that of the creator. The original intention of the creator of any work is thus separate from the work itself, a fact that applies to Prince's music as well as Margolin's website.

Margolin states, "I am still close friends with many people I met through a shared interest in Prince. I wouldn't say I'm still a friend, or fan, or fam, or whatever the hell the currently-authorized term is, of Prince. And that's okay." Ben Margolin is utterly devoted to Prince.org, but he's NOT EVEN A FAN of Prince anymore. He's a fan of a community that grew out of a shared interest in Prince, and Prince has no more right to shut that down than he has a right to call for a world-wide ban on the use of the color purple.

Prince re-arranged musical notes and words and concepts with a "flavor" that was so appreciated, it became his livelihood and earned him millions. For others to replicate and profit off of Prince's flavor is one thing, and so perhaps his lawsuit against Pirate Bay is justified. But for Prince to try to criminalize people like Stephanie Lenz for expressing themselves in a way that draws from their life experience (which includes the flavored information he contributed) is a crime against human development.

Like Prince's songs, these fan sites and YouTube videos have become something entirely separate from what the author originally created; and now, even though Ben Margolin is confident that his own flavored information, Prince.org, benefits Prince significantly, today he maintains the site in-spite of that fact, not because of it. As he tells his readers, "We're here for you, the now or once-, or future-Prince fan. Even if it does benefit Prince's crazy ass in the process."

For more recent developments in this arena, check out the work of our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"... the sins of princes, it is the princes who have also suffered the penalty." -- Nicolo Machiavelli

The 2009 Presidential Inauguration is actually a series of events held over four days. The festivities start Sunday, January 18 with a "kick off" event at the Lincoln Memorial and conclude Wednesday, January 21 with a prayer service. A list of official events is available on the Presidential Inaugural Committee website, and a map of Washington displaying where the various events will take place is available from The Washington Post.

We expect that many attendees will want to document the events, whether for purposes of reporting on a blog or other website, or simply to create a personal record of their own experiences. During the Inauguration, strict security measures will be in place across the area, particularly where official events are taking place. These security measures, as well as tickets, permits, and credentialing requirements, will impact what you can do to document the events.

While many inaugural events are open to the public, free of charge, some events, like the ten official Inaugural Balls, will require a ticket to attend. The Presidential Inaugural Committee handles ticketing for official events other than the swearing-in ceremony, which is handled by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies. You should check the Presidential Inaugural Committee's website for information about which events require tickets, and how you can acquire them.

Your location and what events are taking place at the time will influence what legal and other limitations you may be subject to. Generally speaking, you should have no problem if you bring small, handheld still and video cameras and carry them in a small bag (but not a backpack). While we found nothing written that suggested any size limitations on cameras, officials told us in telephone conversations that small, handheld equipment is the safest bet, given that security screeners have discretion to prohibit any item "that may pose a threat to the security of the event." To the best of our knowledge, small microphones and other recording devices will be permitted as well.

To help you navigate the security requirements and get the most out of the Inauguration, we've created a Guide to Documenting the 2009 Presidential Inauguration. The guide is the product of a tremendous amount of work by Alexandra Davies, a third-year law student at Harvard Law School and a participant in the Berkman Center's Cyberlaw Clinic. Alex researched the many security directives and made countless telephone calls to officials at the Secret Service, D.C. Metropolitan Police, U.S. Capitol Police, and the National Park Service in order to get to the bottom of what is permitted and prohibited at the Inauguration.

The Citizen Media Law Project began rolling out its Legal Guide, with the generous financial assistance of the Knight Foundation, in January 2008 and continues to add information addressing the legal issues creators of citizen media may encounter as they gather information and publish their work. The guide is intended for use by citizen media creators with or without formal legal training, as well as others with an interest in these issues. You can access the full guide to documenting the Inauguration here: Documenting the 2009 Presidential Inauguration.

I don't think I am the only one who feels this way. The evidence of chatter from both sides of the political divide reveals a wide current of apprehension and skepticism about the legitimacy of our election system generally, and this election in particular. For a flavor of these concerns, see Time's recent piece on 7 Things That Could Go Wrong on Election Day which concludes that the American voting system is "a worrisome mess, a labyrinth of local, state and federal laws spotted with bewildered volunteers, harried public officials, partisan distortions, misdesigned forms, malfunctioning machines and polling-place confusion."

Even a cursory review of these problems reveals them to be systemic and in many instances intractable. We certainly aren't going to fix them all between now and November 4. But that doesn't mean we are powerless to do anything about it. After all, this is OUR ELECTION.

We can use the technological tools most of us have in our pocket right now to get started down the path of fixing these problems. I am talking about cell phones with text messaging, photo, and video capabilities. These incredibly powerful -- and network enabled -- tools can allow you to share your experience in near-real-time. How long was the line to get into your polling place? Did you have difficulty registering to vote or proving that you were registered? Did you experience any problems with the voting equipment? Did you see any evidence of voter fraud or suppression? Even if you don't have a cell phone with these capabilities, you have access to a computer, right? Gena Haskett at BlogHer has a number of great suggestions for ways you can share your voting experiences.

If you have the capability to take photos or video, you can document the problems you experience in a more compelling and concrete way than mere textual descriptions provide. This is what is so exciting about the projects that are helping voters "video the vote," including YouTube's Video Your Vote project (Note: The Citizen Media Law Project, which I direct, is involved with this project) and Video the Vote, a national initiative to protect voting rights by monitoring the electoral process. Both of these ventures make it easy to upload your videos and share them with the world. Keep in mind that a number of states limit what you can record in and around polling places, so you will want to check the Documenting Your Vote page in our legal guide before heading to the polls.

But simply capturing the experiences of individual voters is only one part of a larger effort to understand and make a record of what is going on at the polls during the election. In fact, we really see the potential for citizen media in the websites that aggregate and filter information submitted by individual voters. Sites such as MyFairElection.com, which provides a crowd-sourced map of electoral conditions across the United States, and the Voter Suppression Wiki, which seeks to be a collection point for information relating to voter suppression, are examples of sites that are using the power of Web 2.0 to monitor the election.

These sites could identify problems while they are still small and potentially fixable on election day, as well as provide the impetus for comprehensive election reform. Imagine if voters in Florida had taken photographs or shot video of the butterfly ballots that caused so much confusion in the 2000 election. If those images had been made available to the public at the time, election officials in Palm Beach might have understood the extent of the problem and acted quickly to replace the ballots or issue additional directions to voters on how to use them. Perhaps we will see this sort of real-time corrective action in this election, but even if we don't, these sites are laying the groundwork for real-time adjustments in future elections.

But let's return to the issue of election reform, which is where the long-term impact of the efforts to harness the power of citizen media will bear fruit. One of the impediments to election reform has been the dispersed nature of the problems and the fact that they are largely invisible to the average voter. As Heather Gerken at Yale Law School noted:

Discarded ballots, long lines, machine breakdowns, registration problems -- these all occur routinely during the election process. But voters only become aware of these problems when a race is close enough for the problem to affect the outcome. Given that most races are not competitive, that's a bit like tracking annual rainfall by counting how often lightening strikes. Because voters learn about election administration problems in a haphazard, episodic fashion, politicians have no incentive to pay attention to them unless there's what Rick Hasen calls an "electoral meltdown."

If enough voters record and share their experiences on election day, and this information is aggregated and filtered in meaningful ways, this could galvanize voters to demand comprehensive election reform and would begin to provide election officials with the data they need to identify what needs fixing.

We might also find that by sharing our voting experiences (both the good and the bad), we actually increase voter enthusiasm and turnout. Voting is, after all, a social act and the quintessential shared experience of our democracy.

(For information on the legal issues involved in documenting the election, including a list of state election laws, websites, and contact information for election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as detailed analysis of the law in many battleground states, see the Citizen Media Law Project's guide to Documenting Your Vote.)