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Free Speech
Citizens Get Conflicting Messages About Their Right to Record
This month, federal agencies and local officials sent two powerful but conflicting messages to the American public about our right to record. On May 14, the Justice Department submitted a letter to the Baltimore Police Department providing in-depth guidance on citizens' right to record. The letter was submitted as part of a court case that dates back to 2010. The plaintiff,...
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Legal Drama
The First Amendment Should Protect Everyone's Right to Record
Since September, police have arrested dozens of journalists and activists around the country for the "crime" of trying to document political protests in public spaces. People using smartphones and mobile devices are changing the way we record and share breaking news. In return, police have targeted, harassed, and in many cases, arrested those trying to capture images and video of...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #44: Social Media's Role in Activism, Trayvon Martin; Pinterest's Legal Drama
Welcome to the 44th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, this time with Mark Glaser and the Rachel Sklar as co-hosts. Sklar is a writer and social entrepreneur, and is filling in for Rafat Ali. This week, we convene a special roundtable to discuss how social media is changing activism, in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, in a...
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EducationShift
How Educators Are Using Pinterest for Showcasing, Curation
Pinterest is the "in" site of 2012, and its phenomenal growth has sparked interest among millions of users. It's also spread to journalism educators, who are increasingly experimenting with it in the classroom. The social network launched two years ago, but in recent months has drawn red-hot excitement for its unique visual, topic-based curation approach. While its 10 million users,...
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Legal Drama
Journalists Should Learn Best Practices for Fair Use in Digital Age
As we listened to the 80 journalists we interviewed over the last year for a study, Copyright, Free Speech, and the Public's Right to Know: How Journalists Think about Fair Use, we got a clear message: hard-working journalists are often confronted with copyright questions that threaten to keep them from doing their jobs well. Take these hypotheticals: Caitlin works for...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #34: SOPA Protests Make a Difference; Yang Out at Yahoo
Welcome to the 34th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali. This week the show is mainly focused on the huge day of protest online Wednesday against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) before the U.S. Congress. After Wikipedia, Reddit and other...
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Guides
Your Guide to the Anti-SOPA Protests
Today was an important day in the history of the Internet and activism. While the U.S. Congress expected to quickly pass two bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), mounting opposition online has led them to reconsider. That all came to a head today when various sites such as Wikipedia and Reddit decided to black...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #33: CES Jumped the Shark?; SOPA Battles; Google+ in Search
Welcome to the 33rd episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali. This week we have a special show focused on the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) happening in Las Vegas all week. Apple isn't there and Microsoft did its last keynote presentation there. Is the show losing momentum? Are...
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Business
2012: Why the Web Is Not Dead and Other Flashpoints
First the easy predictions for the new year: In 2012 we'll see a rise of politics in the digisphere, along with reporting as if the phenomenon is a surprise; more strum over the Murdochs' drum; and a snazzy new iPad 3. But, there are bigger rumblings afoot in the year ahead, too. Here's my second annual round of predictions for...
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Legal Drama
Wiretapping, SOPA, Occupy: 2011 Was a Tumultuous Year in Media Law
This piece is co-authored by Jeff Hermes and Andy Sellars. This year turned out to be one that could fit well in a Billy Joel song: peppered protesters, jailed journalists, Internet crusaders ... the list goes on. To recap a year that has been chock-full of shifts in media, we put together a list of the top 10 (plus...
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Legal Drama
Copyright Infringement Defendants Turn the Table on Righthaven
Righthaven LLC, which still bills itself on its website as "the nation's preeminent copyright enforcer" is now on its way to a new title. It may soon become the nation's first copyright enforcer to be forced into bankruptcy by sanctions awarded to the targets of its copyright infringement lawsuits. What's That They Say About Payback? Righthaven was formed to generate...
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Legal Drama
Changing Media Landscape Could Topple FCC's Indecency Rules
Since the 1970s, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has regulated indecency in broadcast programming. It has enforced laws that prohibit broadcasters from airing, at least during certain hours, any "patently offensive" sexual or excretory material. And since the 1970s, broadcast outlets have attacked the FCC for doing so. They've challenged the agency's authority, as well as the constitutionality and consistency...
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BookShift
Did Apple Collude with Publishers to Fix Prices on E-Books?
Apple's iBookstore wields enough power to change how electronic books are sold and priced, according to plaintiffs in class-action suits against the Cupertino, Calif., company and several traditional publishers. The complaint alleges that Apple violated antitrust laws by colluding with publishers to keep e-book prices high. Hagens Berman, a consumer rights class-action law firm, filed the original complaint in U.S....
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PoliticalShift
Attack of the Attack Ads: Citizens United and the 2012 Elections
In 2012, two tidal waves will reconfigure the American electoral system and the news media that cover it. A tsunami made of money will buoy up the structure of entrenched political power, while a huge wave of personal technology will disrupt it. I can predict both of these events with certainty because they've happened every election year over the last...
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Legal Drama
Colleges Run Afoul of First Amendment in Barring Sports Journalists
College athletics are, in some ways, the epitome of what sports are supposed to represent. In our collective minds, college sports are pure, a reminder that decades ago, we too were once young, agile, and full of potential. Every season, alumni forced to move away from "dear ol' State" descend upon land-grant campuses in a tribal, nearly reflexive migration. But...
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Europe
Infographic Explains Hackgate, News of the World Scandal
Maybe you're still confused about the whole "hackgate" scandal in the United Kingdom, where the News of the World tabloid hacked cell phone voicemail messages to get inside information. Perhaps our guide to the scandal was just too dense. Well, here's an even simpler proposition: one simple infographic to explain the whole thing. The infographic was created by security firm...
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Free Speech
Free Speech Concerns Could Sink Missouri's Social Networking Ban for Teachers
Last week, a Missouri judge issued a preliminary injunction against the state, suspending part of a law that would have made it illegal for teachers and students to connect via social networks. Section 162.069.4 of the Amy Hestir Student Protection Act -- which aims to protect children from sexual predators -- prohibits teachers from establishing, maintaining or using a "non-work-related...
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Free Speech
Online Comments Run Afoul of Thailand's Laws Shielding Royalty from Criticism
BANGKOK -- As a high profile case against a prominent media campaigner returns to court in Bangkok, it has emerged that the long arm of Thailand's lèse-majesté law has reached into California. On Thursday Chiranuch Premchaiporn of the Thai current affairs website Prachatai returned to court in the Thai capital to face vague-sounding allegations that she facilitated third-party remarks about...
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Guides
Your Guide to the U.K. Phone-Hacking Scandal (or 'Hackgate')
From time to time, we provide an overview of one broad MediaShift topic, annotated with online resources and plenty of tips. The idea is to help you understand the topic, learn the jargon, and take action. We've previously covered Twitter, local watchdog news sites, and Net neutrality, among other topics. This week MediaShift U.K. correspondent Tristan Stewart-Robertson looks at the...
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Your Take
Who Is Ultimately Responsible for the U.K. Phone-Hacking Scandal?
The revelations coming out by the hour in the U.K. phone-hacking scandal are breathtaking. What began as supposedly a rogue operation by a gossip reporter and a private investigator have now allegedly widened to include many more editors, reporters, investigators, bribes to police and the shutdown of the best-selling newspaper in the English language -- the News of the World....
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Legal Drama
New Jersey Supremes Take Narrow View Defining Journalists Online
If you're a self-described journalist who posts on Internet message boards, then you're not protected by the reporter's shield law. So says, at least, the Supreme Court of New Jersey. Earlier this week, it handed down Too Much Media LLC v. Hale [PDF file], a case featuring porn, cybersecurity and death threats. (What more could you want?) To unpack the...
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Legal Drama
Who Really Owns Your Photos in Social Media?
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo announced June 1 that the company was partnering with Photobucket to make it easy to share photos at Twitter.com. With a "Twitter native photo-sharing experience," he said, "users will own their own rights to their photos." The implication? That this might not be the case with third-party services. Therein lies the real battle over photo-sharing sites:...
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Europe
In Lithuania, an Overdue Crackdown on Online Hate Speech
Online hate speech is becoming more and more widespread in Lithuania and until recently, comments like, "The world needs Hitler again to do the cleansing job," which was posted on a website called Delfi, or "Expel dirty Roma people out of Lithuania" would have gone unheeded by criminal justice. "Although the Lithuanian Criminal Codex includes sufficient law provisions to prosecute...
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Legal Drama
Tasini Lawsuit Against Huffington Post Has No Merit
Jonathan Tasini's at it again. Last week, the writer and labor activist declared war on Arianna Huffington, first promising to make her "a pariah in the progressive community" and then threatening to make her life "a living hell." He went on, in a splendid variation of Howard Beale's "I'm mad as hell" speech, to say that unpaid Huffington Post bloggers...
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Legal Drama
Will Righthaven Copyright Lawsuits Change Excerpting Online?
Editors' note: An update has been added at the end of this article. Is it an infringement of copyright to post an excerpt from an online news article -- including a link to its source -- on a website, a blog, or an online forum? This practice is ubiquitous in online journalism, but its legal status has been in question...
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5Across
5Across: Online Privacy and the 'Do Not Track' Debate
The debate around online privacy has largely centered around advertising that is targeted at people depending on where they have been online. While somewhat creepy, those ads are perhaps the least of our worries. What many of us don't realize is that there are multiple parties tracking our moves online, some harmless and some possibly nefarious. In fact, one...
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Legal Drama
Will U.S. Government Crack the Whip on Online Privacy?
This week MediaShift will be running an in-depth special report on Online Privacy, including a timeline of Facebook privacy issues, a look at how political campaigns retain data, and a 5Across video discussion. Stay tuned all week for more stories on privacy issues. Online privacy is the new openness. After years of telling all on the Internet, of tweeting about...
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Legal Drama
Top 3 New Media Legal Battles of 2010
This year's been a big one. Spain won the World Cup. Lindsay Lohan went to jail. Don Draper married his secretary. And, of course, the federal courts waded into some of the thorniest legal issues affecting new media. Three cases stand out from the rest of 2010's docket. Each one shook up the law in a significant way. Below...
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Legal Drama
Michigan Official's Hate Speech Protected by First Amendment
For the last few months, Andrew Shirvell, an assistant attorney general of Michigan, has crusaded against the "radical homosexual agenda" of 21-year-old Chris Armstrong, the openly gay student-body president of the University of Michigan. Shirvell has verbally attacked Armstrong at campus events, demonstrated outside the student's home, and has bashed the kid on his personal blog, Chris Armstrong Watch. On...
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EducationShift
Spending the Summer in 'Journalist Law School'
What do you get when you cross a lawyer and a journalist? Most of the time, of course, you get a lawyer. You know: The kids who worked so hard on the college paper but jetted off to Boalt when the prospect of years of unpaid internships scared them off. Most journalists remember a few people like that. (I know a dozen or so.)
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Legal Drama
Who Owns Your E-Book of 'War and Peace'? Probably Not You
Who owns your copy of "War and Peace"? If we're talking about a dog-eared paperback copy of "War and Peace" that you purchased in your college bookstore, then you own the copy for purposes of copyright law. But if we are talking about an e-book version of the latest translation that was bought online and downloaded to an e-reader or...
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Legal Drama
What the Viacom vs. YouTube Verdict Means for Copyright Law
Some have called it a license to steal. To others, the recent Viacom v. YouTube court decision was no less than a trumpet heralding the protection of free speech on the Internet. And yet to a third contingency, Manhattan federal judge Louis Stanton's decision was really an exercise in high-minded legal theory. Regardless of your outlook on the case, it...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: YouTube Wins Court Case Against Viacom
In this week's 4MR podcast I consider the ruling in the YouTube vs. Viacom court case, with the judge essentially throwing out Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit. The judge believed that YouTube followed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "safe harbor" provision, taking down videos that violated copyrights when the copyright holder gave it a take-down notice. Viacom said it would appeal the decision while YouTube called it a strike for content-sharing sites on the web.
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Legal Drama
Can Financial Firms Use 'Hot News Doctrine' to Stifle Aggregators?
Traditional print newspapers and magazines are experiencing upheaval thanks to the rise of the Internet, but they are not the only information providers facing serious challenges. Even before the tumult created by the recent recession, major financial firms were struggling with the effects of competition from online financial news aggregation services aimed at investors. In some cases, these online services...
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PoliticalShift
Politicians Face Consequences If They Don't Secure Name Domains
Search the name of Representative Pete Hoekstra of Michigan's second district and PeteHoekstra.com is among the top results. But click on the site and you'll encounter this tag line: "Dangerous, Polarizing & Bad for Michigan!" How could a nine-term Congressman, a ranking member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence and now a candidate for the gubernatorial race in Michigan...
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Legal Drama
CDA Protects Newspapers from Liability for Libelous Comments
A desperate, weeks-long search in 2007 for missing Purdue University student Wade Steffey yielded a number of stories in the local Lafayette, Indiana, newspaper, the Journal & Courier. The newspaper also covered a mugging incident that was reported by another student, Timothy Collins, on the same night of Steffey's disappearance. Local police, apparently suspicious of the coincidence between the two...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Legal Implications of Gizmodo iPhone Caper
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition I focus on the brouhaha surrounding Gizmodo obtaining a next-generation prototype of the Apple iPhone. The tech blog paid $5,000 for the prototype, took it apart, and then returned it to Apple. But police raided Gizmodo editor Jason Chen's house and took away computers, hard drives and cameras,...
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World View
Navigating Media Ethics and Censorship in Dubai
Around the world, dozens of organizations, from Freedom House to Reporters Without Borders, advance the ideal of a free press and a free citizenry. The ideal suggests there is one type of free press to be secured globally: the Western model of a constitutionally protected free press. What stands over and against the free press? The typical examples are the...
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Legal Drama
Attributor Helps Media Companies Crack Down on Web Scofflaws
Websites that scoop up content from the mainstream media without compensation are being put on notice: Pay up or risk being shut down. The warning comes from Attributor, a California-based company that monitors web content on behalf of magazine, newspaper and book publishers. Earlier this month, Attributor announced a "new model for online content syndication" called FairShare Guardian. It's not...
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World View
Turkish Reporters Unite to Protest YouTube Ban
The Turkish courts banned YouTube in May 2008, and now a new protest campaign launched by the editorial team of the Milliyet newspaper is drawing attention to how long the country has been prevented from using the website. The initiative, which was was launched on February 19, is not the first campaign of this type. But it's notable because previous...
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Legal Drama
What Are the Legal Implications of PleaseRobMe?
They know where you sleep, and now they know where you get coffee. That was the message driven home by the recently created website PleaseRobMe.com. The site aggregates Twitter posts sent when a person uses Foursquare to check in at a location -- meaning they're basically telling the world that they're not at home at the moment. According to the...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Google's Trouble in Europe; WAC vs. Apple
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the trouble Google is having in Europe, with its executives indicted in an Italian court; the European Commission investigating anti-competitive behavior; and recent privacy complaints against Street View. Plus, an alliance of rival cell phone companies wants to create a unified app store to take on Apple. Plus I ask Just One Question to Spot.us honcho David Cohn, who explains an innovative ad plan for the crowdfunding site.
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Legal Drama
Courts Still Wary About Webcasts, Live-Blogs, Tweets at Trials
One of the most watched television events in U.S. history was the announcement of the verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial in October 1995. By the time that trial was televised, the public had become accustomed to watching footage of both civil and criminal proceedings in state courts, and such proceedings continue to be broadcast today. But shortly...
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World View
2009 Was a Terrible Year for Free Speech Online
2009 was an unprecedented year for online repression. For the first time since the Internet emerged as a tool for public use, there are currently 100 bloggers and cyber-dissidents imprisoned worldwide as a result of posting their opinions online in 2009, according to Reporters Without Borders. This figure is indicative of the severity of the crackdowns being carried out in...
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Legal Drama
Lessons Learned from Tweeting a Biker Gang Trial
We fell into Twitter somewhat accidentally in our newsroom at the London Free Press in Ontario, Canada. The Bandidos biker gang trial was going to be a big one for the Free Press. We'd extensively covered the crime when it first happened: eight bikers from Toronto found dead on a rural road near London, and six men charged with...
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World View
Sri Lanka Makes Journalism an Act of Terrorism
As of December 10, J.S. Tissainayagam, a respected Tamil journalist and editor, had served the first 100 days of a 20-year sentence in a Sri Lankan jail. In his World Press Freedom Day statement, President Obama cited Tissainayagam as an "emblematic example" of a journalist who was being persecuted. Amnesty International also named Tissainayagam a prisoner of conscience, and...
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Legal Drama
Is It Legal for an Editor to Unmask an Anonymous Commenter?
On November 13, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's website, StLToday, asked readers to comment on a story titled, "What's the craziest thing you've ever eaten?" Soon, a commenter posted a reply that included a "vulgar, two-syllable word for a part of a woman's anatomy," according to an online account by Kurt Greenbaum, the paper's director of social media. Editors at the...
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World View
Iran Cracks Down on Internet Expression, Bloggers, Journalists
Last week, the Iranian blogger Sasan Aghaei, who runs the site Azad Tribun, was arrested by intelligence ministry officials after they carried out a search of his Tehran home. It is not known where he was taken. Aghaei is also a reporter for the daily newspaper Farhikhteghan, and he's the third employee of the paper to be arrested since the...
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Legal Drama
Will Google Sidewiki Shift Control of Online Comments?
Journalists and news outlets are accustomed to offering comments and criticisms about others, but they're not as used to being the subject of public comment themselves. In the online world, where technology can and does upend established relationships, journalists and online news outlets are joining the ranks of the commented-upon. The shift has taken place due to the increased presence...
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PoliticalShift
Best of Twitter: FTC Workshop Discusses Future of Journalism
For two days this week, some of journalism's most high profile executives and experts descended upon Washington, DC, for "How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?" a workshop hosted by the FTC. One exchange of note came between Rupert Murdoch and Arianna Huffington, who spoke separately but did a good job of representing two divergent points of view. Murdoch kicked...
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Public MediaShift
FTC Should Consider Policy Reform to Support Public Media 2.0
It's been a busy season for prognosticators who examine the intersection of public policy and media. Today will be particularly hectic for them, as journalists, bloggers, public broadcasters and policy wonks pack into a session at the Federal Trade Commission to ponder, yet again, "How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?" (Submit your own thoughts via Twitter here). Two weeks...
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Legal Drama
Does Gawker's Publication of McSteamy Sex Tape Constitute Fair Use?
Editor's Note: new information was appended to this article on Dec. 15. It probably seemed like a fun idea at the time. Last year, Eric Dane, known as "McSteamy" from the show "Grey's Anatomy," his wife Rebecca Gayheart, and former beauty queen Kari Ann Peniche decided to make a home movie. Yes, that type of home movie. The threesome recorded...
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World View
President Obama Must Press China on Web Censorship
In China, Google is forced to censor its search engine, Facebook and Twitter are blocked, U.S. news agencies are barred from selling their services freely, and foreign investment in the media industry is closely watched. Yet when President Obama visits the country in a few days, it's unknown if he will publicly pressure the Chinese government on issues of censorship...
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World View
Hossein Derakhshan's Arrest: One Year Later
It's been over a year now since the arrest of Hossein Derakhshan, popularly known as Hoder. Ever since he wrote the first Persian-language blogging guide in November 2001, he has helped pioneer the Iranian blogging community while living in his adopted home of Toronto. (Derakhshan is a dual citizen of Iran and Canada.) However, beginning in 2006, Derakhshan's views started...
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Legal Drama
It's Now or Never For Citizen Journalists and Federal Shield Law
When Sen. Charles Schumer amended the Senate's bill to exclude unpaid reporters, bloggers, and citizen journalists from a proposed federal shield law, many in the Internet and journalism community were outraged. In the wake of the change, MediaShift published an article that argued Why Bloggers and Citizen Journalists Deserve a Shield Law. [Ed. note: please see update at the bottom...
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Legal Drama
Why the Future of Online Speech Depends on Net Neutrality
Late last week, the Federal Communications Commission announced it was seeking public input on draft rules that would codify and supplement existing Internet openness principles. This was another chapter in the ongoing "Net neutrality" debate. On one hand, the White House was calling for a "free and open Internet" and endorsed a bill called the Internet Freedom Preservation Act. Yet,...
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Weblogs
Why Bloggers and Citizen Journalists Deserve A Shield Law
Today in the United States, there is no legislation that allows bloggers to protect their sources. Yet bloggers have become a great way for the public -- and journalists in particular -- to keep informed about important topics. A survey from Middleberg Communications and the Society for New Communications Research released on September 22 found that 66 percent of journalists...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: FTC's Blogger Rules; Charging for iPhone Apps
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the new FTC rules for blogger disclosure, when they are reviewing a product or service. They are now required to disclose if they are being paid by the company or if they get a freebie. And what's up with all the new paid news apps...
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World View
Online Reporters in Malaysia Struggle Against Jail, Fines and Filters
Malaysia ranked No. 132 out of 173 countries on last year's edition of Reporters Without Borders' World Press Freedom Index, which means it's already a hostile place for reporters. Thanks to recent initiatives aimed at controlling the flow of online information, the country appears ready to tighten its grip on the Internet, too. But bloggers and web journalists continue to...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Bay Area News Project; FCC and Net Neutrality
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the new Bay Area News Project, a non-profit startup with $5 million in funding from financier Warren Hellman, in association with KQED and UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Plus, the FCC's new chairman Julius Genachowski makes waves by supporting new rules for Net neutrality,...
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World View
Environmental Reporting Becomes Hazardous Work in Egypt, China
Since May 2009, Tamer Mabrouk has held one of the saddest records regarding human rights abuses in Egypt. He is the first blogger to receive a fine after a company sued him for having criticized its activities in Lake Manzala, which is connected to the Suez Canal. Mabrouk was fined $8,700, lost his job, and was forced to move out...
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Legal Drama
Was Twitter Document Theft, and Publication by TechCrunch, Legal?
In June of this year, the personal email account of a Twitter employee was accessed, apparently as a result of an insecure password. By Twitter's own account, the unauthorized access to that account was the first in a series of actions that ultimately gained the hacker (who calls himself "Hacker Croll") access to Twitter corporate documents that were maintained...
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MovieShift
Animated Film Takes Donations, DVD Sales to Pay Music Costs
When New York-based animator Nina Paley decided to distribute her independent animation project "Sita Sings the Blues" online for free, she recalled the fate of 1920s jazz vocalist Annette Hanshaw. Once hugely popular, Hanshaw had almost completely disappeared from public knowledge when Paley decided to include her songs in the score for her film. "How could this happen to an...
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Legal Drama
Changing the Law to Save Newspapers: Some Modest Proposals
As newsroom staffs continue to shrink and newspapers go out of business at an alarming rate, the difficulty newspapers have experienced in gaining economic traction online has been blamed on blogs and websites that link to content on newspaper sites. According to some, this kind of "free riding" is responsible at least in part for the distress in which newspapers...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: TechCrunch's Twitter Docs; YouTube Profits?
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the controversy surrounding tech blog TechCrunch posting internal documents from Twitter that were obtained from a hacker stealing them. Some people defend TechCrunch as running newsworthy documents, while others think they are harming Twitter too much. I also look at possible profits coming from video...
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Legal Drama
Criminal Cases Push Newspapers to Identify Anonymous Commenters
Anonymous comments on newspapers blogs are drawing attention from prosecutors seeking information about criminal matters, once again raising the issue of whether newspaper blog comments are protected under state press shield laws. Last fall, I wrote about two civil cases involving claims of defamation, where two separate courts refused to order newspapers to disclose information that would lead to the...
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Legal Drama
A Brief History of AP's Battles with News Aggregators
The news is information, and information wants to be free, as the saying goes. But for news organizations, the news is a product that is collected, recorded and sold for profit. And those profits are now under extreme economic pressure, threatening some news organizations with extinction. Both online and traditional news outlets are regrouping, retrenching and reconsidering their business models...
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Wikis
Wikipedia Art: Vandalism or Performance Art?
Artists Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern developed the idea to create a self-referencing Wikipedia article late last year. The plan was to write a new article, titled Wikipedia Art that was wholly devoted to the fact that the page had been created -- an article that was completely meta and self-referential. The axiom that all press is good press is...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Kindle DX; Google vs. Newspapers
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. This week I look at the unveiling of the new wide-screen Kindle DX aimed at newspaper, magazine and college textbook readers. Will people pay $489 for it? Plus, I look at the AP and News Corp.'s moves against Google, with the AP playing hardball for running content in Google News. Meanwhile, Google...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Pirate Bay Case; Oprah-geddon on Twitter
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. This week I look at the recent ruling in the Pirate Bay case, where four men at the file-sharing site were found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison -- but are asking for a retrial due to a conflict of interest by the judge. I also mention @Oprah's entry to...
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Legal Drama
Coalinga Newspaper Not Liable for Running MySpace Rant
A post on a social networking site like MySpace could end up anywhere, and depending upon where it ends up, the result could be catastrophic. We've covered that territory before on MediaShift, discussing a case involving discipline of a teacher for conduct shown on a MySpace page. In Moreno v. Hanford Sentinel, a California appeals court considered a case...
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Legal Drama
'Fox & Friends' Hosts Not Liable for Repeating Associated Content Parody
As newspapers are closing or abandoning their print editions, online news sources are growing in importance -- as are sites that rely on user-submitted news stories. But with so much unfiltered news content available online, how do you separate the accurate from the inaccurate and truth from parody? You might think that traditional news sources would be better able...
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4MR
4-Minute Roundup: State of the Media; Jurors' Itchy Twitter Finger
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I talk about the new gloomy State of the Media report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), and the positive side for online media. I ask "Just One Question" to PEJ director Tom Rosensteil, and cover the latest news about jurors going online, Twittering and Facebooking...
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Legal Drama
How Crowdsourcing Could Revolutionize Patent-Busting
Ricky James Robertson knew very little about touch-screen personal navigation devices when he first began reviewing patents on them back in November of last year. He was surfing Slashdot when he came across a launch announcement for a company called Article One Partners; the group offered awards for as much as $50,000 to individuals who could invalidate specific patents...
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Legal Drama
How Animal Rights Activists Beat the Rodeos in Videotaping Events
As cell phone cameras and palm-sized videocams have become cheap and ubiquitous, there is little if anything that is immune from being documented and displayed on the web, as numerous celebrities and sports stars have learned to their regret. In the realm of hard news, the result is that citizen journalists are able to bypass big media news organizations and...
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World View
Monarchs Use 'Lese Majeste' Laws to Silence Online Critics
"When it comes to a monarchy, all reason goes away," according to a Thai reporter quoted in a Reporters Without Borders report on free expression in Thailand published this week. He was commenting on the multiple charges of lese majeste -- injury or insult to the king -- brought against journalists and writers in his country, where speaking negatively about...
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Legal Drama
U.S. Supreme Court (Finally) Kills Online Age Verification Law
In 1998, the U.S. Congress enacted the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a law intended to control child access to sexually explicit material on the Internet. The law was immediately challenged on free speech and other grounds and its enforcement was delayed. After ten years of litigation, on January 22 the U.S. Supreme Court dealt the final blow to...
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Legal Drama
Can U.S. Laws Protect Online Speech from Foreign Libel Suits?
"...in cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance." That's a remark famously made in 1997 by John Perry Barlow, one of the co-founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Barlow's complete statement is well worth re-reading but one implication of this particular remark is that the reach of American constitutional values may be limited by our country's physical borders. When...
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Legal Drama
Canadian Court Rules Linking to Libel Isn't (Necessarily) Libel
Linking to content is the essence of the online experience -- it's the "Web" in the World Wide Web. But there's a lot of legal gray area around linking, and surprisingly few court rulings providing guidance as to the circumstances when linking could result in liability. A court in Canada has now weighed in on the question of liability under...
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Legal Drama
Judges Rule Anonymous Commenters Protected by State Shield Laws
Political campaigns often produce a blizzard of ancillary election-related litigation -- for an example, just look to the 2000 presidential campaign. When the press reports anonymous accusations during an election campaign, sometimes that litigation involves lawsuits by candidates or public officials seeking to learn the identity of those anonymous sources. In many states, newspapers and other media can protect such...
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World View
China Blocks Blogs, Search Results on Tainted Milk Scandal
The evidence is accumulating. The censorship imposed on the Chinese media about the contaminated milk scandal has had disastrous consequences according to Reporters Without Borders. Last July, a journalist working for the investigative weekly Nanfang Zhoumo (Southern Weekend) gathered reliable information regarding a wave of hospitalizations of new-born babies, with four killed and 53,000 sickened. These illnesses were linked to...
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Legal Drama
Teacher Fired for Inappropriate Behavior on MySpace Page
It's not just students who can get into difficulty for school-related blogging. In a recent case, a federal court rejected a challenge brought by a non-tenured teacher when the public school at which he taught decided not to renew his contract. The school had accused the teacher of overly familiar contacts with students via his MySpace page that were deemed...
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Legal Drama
Court Rules Print-on-Demand Service Not Liable for Defamation
Book publishers can be sued if they publish a book full of libelous statements because, the reasoning goes, a publisher should know what it prints. The publisher reviews the manuscript, edits and proofreads it, and distributes the finished book to retailers. It is involved in every part of the process. But the Internet has given rise to a new...
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World View
How a Protester Pulled Off the Clandestine Radio Broadcast in Beijing
The voices of Chinese human rights activists can be heard on the radio. A former journalist describes the censorship she experienced, and a human rights activist explains the increasing crackdown on Chinese dissidents that has occurred these past few months. A former political prisoner complains about the appalling conditions in which he was held. Have the Chinese authorities gone wild and suddenly opened the airwaves?
more »Legal Drama
Should Copyright Law Change in the Digital Age?
This is the final part of my three-part email roundtable discussion looking at the new Code of Best Practices in Fair Use of Online Video created at the behest of the Center for Social Media at American University. In the first part, the respondents in this email roundtable talked about what the Code means, how they might put it...
more »World View
China Partially Lifts Great Firewall for Media, but Access Remains Pricey
BEIJING -- Journalists scrambling to make Games-time deadlines might not make it to Badaling or Juyongguan during their trip overseas, but they're sure to become familiar with China's other Great Wall: the Great Firewall, that is. On July 31, Olympic officials admitted the International Olympic Committee had not yet secured unfettered Internet access to foreign journalists, leaving everyone to...
more »Online Video
Creating a Video to Help Educate People on Fair Use
Last week, I ran the first part of a special three-part series on fair use in online video. With the release of the new Code of Best Practices in Fair Use of Online Video, the question was how this Code might help video producers, remixers and mash-up artists use copyrighted works legally under "fair use" rules. In the first...
more »Digging Deeper
Will Code of Best Practices Help Video Mash-Up Artists Stay Legal?
You just created the best video mash-up ever, taking a speech given by John McCain broadcast on Fox News, remixing it with the song "Ol' Man River," and quick-cutting in clips from gangsta rappers. You upload it to YouTube and other video-sharing sites, and watch the views pile up. But have you run afoul of copyright law? Do you...
more »Legal Drama
AP Badly Mistaken on Drudge Retort
Last week, the Associated Press decided that the Drudge Retort was in violation of copyright laws because it excerpted parts of AP stories and linked to them. The AP legal team sent a cease-and-desist letter to Drudge Retort's owner, the technology book author Rogers Cadenhead.
more »Digging Deeper
Net neutrality or network neutrality means that Internet service providers (ISPs) such as cable and telephone companies must treat all traffic equally that travels across their networks. That means that your broadband service provider couldn't block you from seeing a particular site or using a high-bandwidth service arbitrarily.
more »Digging Deeper
With the advent of the Internet and a growing number of security breaches, people worry that their personal information can be seen and exploited around the world in an instant. If you have incriminating photos online, a potential employer or love interest might find them and make snap judgments. If you shop online with a credit card, a merchant might steal your information and run up charges on your card. If you surf online around major media sites, publishers might use your "data trail" to target advertising to you.
more »Digging Deeper
Anti-Piracy Dragnet Could Hurt 'Fair Use' of Copyrighted Video
All the lawsuits and rhetoric around people uploading copyrighted material on video-sharing sites such as YouTube make it seem like a black-and-white situation: either you're shooting your own original video or stealing it from someone else. But what's lost in that simple either-or interpretation is the more gray area in copyright law known as fair use, which protects people...
more »MediaShift
10 MediaShifting Moments of 2007
As the year 2007 sets in the distance, we can take some time to consider the year that was. I'm not a huge fan of year-end lists, but sometimes they help us get a grip on what transpired -- and ponder what's to come. What's perhaps most amazing about 2007 is that two distinct phenomena -- the iPhone and...
more »AdvertisingShift
How much do online marketers and websites know about us? Do they save records on what we've bought, sites we've visited, people we've contacted? It's a subject that few of us bother with until we find out our private information has been stolen or inadvertently been made public. And privacy concerns have been front and center lately as MySpace...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Even in U.S., Bloggers Get Little Protection
Earlier this year, there was a debate in journalism circles and in the general public about who could be considered a journalist, as San Francisco videoblogger and media maker Josh Wolf was jailed after refusing to turn over video footage to federal authorities. After spending 226 days in jail, Wolf was dubbed the "longest-jailed journalist in American history." But...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Is the Future of Television Online? Not Yet
Late last month the BBC announced that it would be offering up a large part of its television content free of charge on its website. And back in May, ABC announced it would stream some of its primetime shows in HD online for free. As networks begin to put more of their content online -- either on their websites...
more »Your Take
Should online video of presidential debates be free for public use and remix?
Just who owns the video of presidential debates? Up until this point, the TV networks that broadcast the events held the copyright to that footage and could post it online, monetize it in whatever way they wanted, and restrict usage by other folks. But Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, a proponent of Creative Commons "copyleft" systems, started an online petition...
more »Legal Drama
Digg Users Show Strength in Numbers in DVD Dust-Up
The community-generated news site, Digg, has been an experimental hothouse for online communities. Last summer, there was the move by Netscape to offer to pay top Diggers to do their news-article bookmarking at Netscape, with Digg CEO Jay Adelson saying he'd never pay Digg community members. Now comes the user revolt after Digg decided to remove posts that mentioned...
more »Your Take Roundup
Loosen Copyright Restrictions for the Internet Age
Slowly but surely, the entertainment industry is realizing that it can't use copyright law as a blunt force in the digital age. Take the case of music giant EMI. Not long ago, EMI was fighting music-sharing service Napster and threatening DJ Danger Mouse over the mash-up, The Grey Album. But today the music company announced a plan with Apple...
more »Your Take
How would you rewrite copyright law for the digital age?
The music industry is still suing college students over file-sharing. Viacom is suing Google and YouTube for $1 billion for copyright violations. NBC and News Corp. are teaming up with their own video-sharing concept, dubbed NewCo (or "ClownCo" by Google), to help protect their copyrighted material. The increasing length of copyrights in the U.S., and the quick obsolescence of the...
more »Legal Drama
Viacom, YouTube Legal Tiff Irrelevant in End
Judging by the sturm und drang roiling the blogosphere and media circles, you'd think that Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against Google's YouTube is the epic confrontation of old media vs. new, of suits vs. hipsters, of DRM vs. free love, of greed vs. good. It may well be all those things, but it will not change the basic fact...
more »TVShift
The heavyweights of the media world are lining up in opposition to YouTube, and supporting Viacom's recent removal of all its clips from the video-sharing service. That removal followed a back-and-forth last fall when Viacom initially asked for clips to be removed, and then went into negotiations with YouTube. Those negotiations turned chilly, and now comes the freeze-out for video clips from MTV and Comedy Central shows such as "The Colbert Report" and "The Daily Show."
more »Online Video
Fake Anchor Colbert Gives Best Take on YouTube Takedowns
The last week has been a surreal one for fans of fake news. TV shows such as Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" have had huge boosts in their popularity thanks to online communities, who share video clips and summaries from each show. But the corporate parent to Comedy Central, Viacom, was a bit blind to that fact when it asked video-sharing site YouTube to pull down video clips from those shows that had been posted by fans.
more »Online Video
Stephen Colbert: Don't Love and Leave YouTube
We in the Colbert Nation are sickened by the recent news that heavy-handed trial lawyers at Viacom, representing Comedy Central, have asked YouTube to force its users to remove video clips from "The Colbert Report," "The Daily Show," and "South Park." While those lawyers have legal standing to do this, it goes against the spirit of Internet sharing and viral promotion -- two phenomena that have helped make your show so popular in the first place. It just doesn't sound like you, Stephen, baby.
more »PoliticalShift
Transparency Key to Constructive Partisanship
Among the oddities of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act effort was that many of the major advocates -- who spanned the political spectrum from left to right -- had never worked together and did not meet in person until the day President Bush signed the measure into law.
more »Legal Drama
Hate Site Horrendous, But Blocking Through ISPs Faulty
A case unfolding in Canada and the U.S. exemplifies all that is terrible and difficult about free speech on the Internet. Ottawa human rights lawyer Richard Warman and the Canadian Jewish Congress have asked the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) -- similar to the FCC -- to direct Internet service providers in Canada to block two hate sites based in the U.S. Warman says the sites, run by white supremacist Bill White of Roanoke, Va., contain "an actual call to murder myself and all Canadian Jews," according to an article by the Canadian Press.
more »Digging Deeper
Mark Cuban's Sharesleuth Takes Business Reporting to Ethical Edge
Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban has one of the best named weblogs, Blog Maverick, because he is nothing if not a maverick in the technology, sports and online worlds. He shepherded his Broadcast.com streaming multimedia company through a successful initial public offering in 1998 and sold it to Yahoo in 1999 for more than $5 billion. Cuban used the proceeds to start high-definition TV networks, HDNet, buy Landmark Movie theaters and buy the Dallas Mavericks NBA team. He's probably the only major team owner who asks fans to email him feedback.
more »Legal Drama
Sock Puppetry::Are Blog Commenters Paid in Net Neutrality Debate?
When I posed a question to my readers on March 31 -- Should the government regulate Net neutrality? -- I was surprised to see how many readers opposed Net neutrality regulation. In the Your Take Roundup the following week, I even headlined it, "People Wary of Government in Net Neutrality Debate." Now word is spreading through the blogosphere that...
more »Legal Drama
Opinion Roundup::Mixed Views on Apple Vs. Gossip Sites
In the Age of the Blog, the wheels of justice are spinning in the U.S. as courts are trying to rule on the rights of bloggers as journalists. There are more questions than answers in a case such as Apple vs. Does: Are the people who run gossip news sites such as PowerPage.org and Apple Insider journalists or even...
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::Reporters Without Borders Backs Online Freedom Act
While the Republican-majority U.S. Congress has favored less regulation of big business, one GOP lawmaker, Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, has shown a willingness to regulate technology and Internet businesses in their dealings with China. Smith held prominent hearings on Capitol Hill on Feb. 15, compelling representatives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco to answer criticism of their...
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