Peter Black's Freedom to Differ

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Podcast on Ice TV Pty Ltd v Nine Network Australia Pty Ltd

Yesterday evening I had a chat with Ben Grubb from Tech Wired Australia about the High Court's decision Ice TV Pty Ltd v Nine Network Australia Pty Ltd.  Ben has posted a podcast of that conversation you can download here.  And see my previous posts on the decision here and here.

What others are saying about Ice TV Pty Ltd v Nine Network Australia Pty Ltd

Yesterday the High Court of Australia handed down its decision in Ice TV Pty Ltd v Nine Network Australia Pty Ltd, bringing to an end legal proceedings that have been going on for the past three years.  (I first blogged about the case in October 2006 here.)  I had hoped to post a summary of the decision as well as some comments by this morning but unfortunately it now appears that I'm unlikely to get the time to write anything until the weekend.  However, a few other Australian blawgers have posted their thoughts on the decision:

• My QUT colleague Kylie Pappalardo has an excellent summary on her blog OctaviaNet here.
• Warwick Rothnie posted his initial thoughts at ipwars.com here before a posting a more detailed summary and analysis last night here.
• On Australian Regulatory Compliance Review David Jacobson highlights a particular interesting part of the judgment here.
• Joshua Gans comments briefly here.
• Law student Katherine Liew has also written up her reaction to the decision here.

I'll continue to update this list as more people post their thoughts on this decision ...

One aspect of the decision that hasn't really been commented on yet was the nature of the divide on the Court.  Although all six justices agreed that the appeal should be allowed, the court divided into two groups of three justices each.  One judgment was authored by French CJ, Crennan and Kiefel JJ, and the other was authored by Gummow, Hayne and Heydon JJ.  This seems to be part of ongoing trend that suggests that maybe there is a divide on the Court emerging between the more established justices (Gummow, Hayne and Heydon JJ) and the more recent appointees (French CJ, Crennan and Kiefel JJ).  In particular, I can't help but wonder if there is minor battle taking place behind the scenes of the High Court between the new Chief Justice and the longest serving member of the Court, Gummow J, for the intellectual leadership of the Court.  If my suspicisions are correct, it will be fascinating to see how it plays out.

Ice TV Pty Ltd v Nine Network Australia Pty Ltd

Update: link fixed.  Judgment also now available on AustLII here.

The High Court of Australian has handed down this morning its decision in Ice TV Pty Ltd v Nine Network Australia Pty Ltd.  I've been following this case since October 2006 (see my first post here) so it is interesting to note that Ice TV has ultimately been successful.  The judgment is not yet available on AustLII but I have posted a copy of the judgment for you to read here.  This is also what Ice TV has posted to their website:

IceTV wins High Court decision - freezes Nine!

April 22nd, 2009

The High Court of Australia has today ruled in favour of IceTV in what has been an epic three year legal battle with the Nine Network.

Six months after the appeal was heard by the High Court and 3 years since the case originally began the High Court has today in Canberra, allowed IceTV’s appeal from the decision of the Full Court of the Federal Court. A comment as to the High Court findings will follow shortly.

In an official statement made immediately following today’s judgment, IceTV’s Chairman and major investor, Mr. Colin O’Brien said the following;

“I would like to thank all our shareholders, our staff, our customers and our business partners. Without their support during the last three years IceTV would not have survived. IceTV now looks forward to a successful future bringing both Free-To-Air TV and content via various partners to viewers in a way that satisfies viewer demand, whilst embracing the future of digital Free-To-Air television in Australia.”

Since it’s incorporation in 2005 IceTV has had one aim: To give TV viewers the freedom to record and manage their TV shows as they choose. To record what they want, skip what they want and watch it at a time that suits them. No longer do viewers have to watch their chosen shows when the Networks tell them or to watch content they would rather skip through. IceTV gives them this choice.

This win today is also a win for our many subscribers who enjoy the benefits of simpler, smarter TV viewing.

IceTV’s General Manager, Mr. Matt Kossatz made the following comment after the High Court’s decision;

“Today’s decision is the news that we (IceTV), our staff and our loyal users have waited 3 long years and worked very hard for. With everything happening with digital television in Australia at the moment, the timing is ripe and almost worth the wait. We are seeing more and more content coming to both free-to-air TV and via the web and as an independent company (not a TV Network), we will always have the ability to put the interest’s of the consumer first in terms of features we offer”.

For more information, please read our following Press Release.

A copy of the High Court’s Judgment is expected to be made publicly available later this week. A copy of the High Court’s Summary of Findings will be made available via IceTV’s website as soon as possible.

Regards,
IceTV

I'll try to post a summary of the judgment later today.

Podcast of The Tangled Web: Beyond an Internet Filter

On Tuesday night I had the pleasure of chairing a newmatilda.com public forum on the internet regulation debate in Australia:

newmatilda.com presents a series of public forums about the internet regulation debate in Australia.

The Federal Government's proposal to block internet sites with a mandatory filter has drawn overwhelming opposition from voices across politics and civil society. So what are the real questions for policy-makers?

These forums explore the ethical, social and political questions raised by government regulation of the internet. With the growing intersection between technology, politics and media, how do existing and proposed classification regimes measure up?

Is filtering inevitable? Or are there better ways to regulate the world wide web?

Chair:
Peter Black, QUT Faculty of Law

Speakers:
Senator Scott Ludlam, The Australian Greens
Irene Graham, libertus.net
Nic Suzor, Electronic Frontiers Australia

A podcast of the audio recording of this forum can be downloaded here:

iiNet copyright case update

In November I blogged that iiNet had been sued for copyright infringement by by Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Disney and the Seven Network (see here).  The case moved forward during the week with iiNet filing their defence on Thursday and a preliminary hearing taking place before Justice Cowdroy on Friday:

THE court showdown between internet service provider iiNet and movie studios has been set for October 5 in the Federal Court.

The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), on behalf of seven leading film companies and their affiliates and licensees, sued iiNet last November on copyright infringements claims.

AFACT alleges that despite being warned on 18 occasions over a five month period, iiNet didn't stop its customers from illegally downloading and exchanging movies and TV programs.

It is seeking a ruling that iiNet infringed copyright by virtue of not taking reasonable steps to prevent its customers from allegedly dabbling in the illegal activity.

iiNet has said it would vigorously defend itself against the lawsuit.

Entertainment industry heavyweights party to the court action include Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Disney Enterprises, Seven Network and Twentieth Century Fox, owned by News Corp, which also owns The Australian.

In the Federal Court this morning, lawyers for iiNet and AFACT agreed that the trial would last around two weeks.

Justice Dennis Cowdroy also set the next directions hearing date on July 29, as well as a series of deadlines for affidavits to be filed.

Read more here (from Australian IT).  The Age has more details about iiNet's defence:

iiNet filed its defence yesterday, claiming that the Copyright Act and Safe Harbour provisions introduced with the US free trade agreement stipulated that ISPs were not liable for copyright infringement by customers.

...

In its defence, iiNet admitted that the movie studios held copyright to their libraries of films but was not yet ready to concede that its customers illegally downloaded them.

Regardless, it said that it would not derive commercial benefit from customers downloading films illegally and would in fact incur more costs due to the additional bandwidth used.

In court today, lawyers for the movie studios said they provided iiNet with evidence of its customers' copyright infringement yesterday. The studios hired online investigators DtecNet to intercept BitTorrent traffic and record all instances of iiNet users downloading copyrighted movies illegally.

In the face of this evidence, lawyers for the movie studios said they expected iiNet to admit that its customers had downloaded movies illegally. iiNet's lawyers said they were still reading the document but may be willing to concede that point.

Both sides agreed that the main issue in the hearing would be whether iiNet was liable for the actions of its users and whether it in effect "authorised" their copyright infringement by failing to disconnect them when notified of the infringements by the movie studios.

The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) sent several letters to iiNet notifying the ISP of the infringements, however, in its defence iiNet said the notifications were "mere allegations of copyright infringement" and were forwarded to police.

"The allegations of copyright infringement in the AFACT notifications were not accompanied by sufficient information to demonstrate the veracity of the allegations," iiNet claims.

"iiNet was, and is, legally bound to continue to provide relevant iiNet Services to iiNet Subscribers under its contracts with those subscribers."

iiNet pointed out that it provided access to legal downloads of games, movies, music, radio, sports and TV content through its Freezone service. (www.iinet.net.au/freezone)

It said it "did not sanction, approve, or countenance" alleged copyright infringement by any iiNet user.

Read more here.  I was interviewed about the iiNet lawsuit for ABC's Radio National PM program on Friday.  You can listen to the report or read the transcript here.

"25 Things I Didn't Want to Know About You"

Time's Claire Suddath has understandably had enough of the latest ridiculous Facebook meme, "25 Things About Me":

A girl I knew in high school has memorized all of Janet Jackson's dance routines. A college acquaintance is afraid of train whistles. Five separate people harbor lifelong desires to visit New Zealand. How do I know these things? Because they won't stop writing about them on Facebook! (See the 50 best websites of 2008.)

Facebook's "25 Things About Me" meme seems harmless enough; people write 25 facts about themselves and post them on their Facebook pages, just as they do with videos, status updates and photos of last weekend's party. An estimated 5 million of these notes — that's 125 million facts — have appeared on the website within the past week. Assuming it takes someone 10 minutes to come up with their list, this recent bout of viral narcissism has sent roughly 800,000 hours of worktime productivity down the drain. (Read "Does Facebook Replace Face Time or Enhance It?")

But it's just so stupid. Most people aren't funny, they aren't insightful, and they share way too much. Facebook is a loose social network; a "friend" on Facebook might translate to someone you'd barely recognize in real life. I don't care that my college roommate's sister is anemic or that my stepcousin's boyfriend gets nervous around old people (apparently he's afraid they're going to die). (See the best social-networking applications.)

Below are 25 facts I wish people hadn't told me about themselves.

Read those facts here.  I thought of compiling my own list based on what my Facebook friends have disclosed through this meme, but I decided that would be cruel.  Claire Suddath's list will have toto.

Joe Trippi at QUT: "Online campaigning in the US Presidential election"

As part of Joe Trippi's visit to Australia thanks to Microsoft Australia, he will be speaking at QUT on Thursday 5 March:

QUT Faculty of Law Free Public Lecture Series 2009
Presents
 
Mr Joe Trippi
Trippi & Associates (USA)
 
Online campaigning in the US Presidential election
 
Thursday 5 March 2009
 
The Gibson Room
Level 10, Z Block
QUT Gardens Point Campus
 
5.30 pm Refreshments
6.00 pm Lecture commences
7.00 pm Lecture concludes

The Speaker
Joe Trippi is the man who introduced the internet into US presidential campaigning and is widely-credited with having ‘re-invented campaigning’.

Much of the success of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has been attributed to the innovative use of the internet to rally grassroots support.

As National Campaign Manager for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2004, Joe pioneered the use of online technology to organise what became the largest grassroots movement in presidential politics.

As a campaign manager, Joe has run presidential, senate, gubernatorial and mayoral campaigns in the US. His innovations have brought fundamental change to the electoral system and have become the model for smart campaigning.

Joe Trippi has been profiled in GQ, Wired, Fast Company, The New Republic and The New York Times Magazine. He is a  political analyst for the 24-hour US cable news channel MSNBC and a former Harvard University fellow. He currently heads the Washington, DC political consultancy, Trippi & Associates.

Joe is the author of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet and the Overthrow of Everything,” the story of how his revolutionary use of the Internet and an impassioned, contagious desire to overthrow politics as usual grew into a national grassroots movement and changed the face of politics, and indeed many aspects of American life, forever.

Joe Trippi’s visit is supported by Microsoft Australia.

Registration: Register by 27 February 2009 at qutlawpubliclectures@qut.edu.au

Registered attendees may claim 1 CPD point for the Queensland Bar Association and Queensland Law Society.

Second Annual Microsoft Politics & Technology Forum: Online Campaigning

On Thursday 26 February, Microsoft will be hosting their second annual Politics and Technology Forum.  The keynote speaker this year is Joe Trippi.  Once again it looks as though it will be an excellent event:

Join government, business leaders and political bloggers at the second annual Microsoft Politics & Technology Forum.

On this informative morning, Keynote Speaker Joe Trippi details the impact of new technologies on modern politics. Heralded by the US press as the man who “reinvented campaigning”, Joe has run Presidential, Senate, Gubernatorial and Mayoral campaigns. His innovations have brought fundamental change to the electoral system and have become the model for online campaigning.

There will also be a Q&A panel discussion, new technologies will be demonstrated, and some revealing insights and statistics around Australian digital behaviour will be shared.

We are delighted to welcome Lindsay Tanner MP, Minister for Finance and Deregulation, The Hon Malcolm Turnbull MP, Leader of the Opposition to this exciting event.

RSVP here. Note, however, that before you start booking flights to Canberra, Microsoft is organsing events in other capital cities where Joe Trippi will akso be speaking.  Stay tuned for details of those other events ...

Update: Microsoft's Australian Government Affairs Blog has more information on the event, including this invitation:

While our keynote and discussion will be invaluable to anyone interested in democracy and communication in the first half of this century I also wanted the forum to be an opportunity for a look at practical examples of new technology tools.

To that end I'd like to invite any developers, web 2.0 or social networking activists with ideas for, or examples of, on-line tools that can be used in political campaigning and who would like to demonstrate their ideas (as a proof of concept or developed application) to the attendees at the forum to contact me.

I'm not interested in how the tools were or are developed, what platform or language the tool was or would be developed with as long as the idea is original, is yours, and you are prepared to demonstrate the concept or tool to the audience. It would be preferable if the idea were capable of wide usage but that is a matter for you.

• Up to three ideas will be selected for demonstration.
• Financial support will be provided to get to Canberra.

Contact me:

If you have an idea or you have developed a tool that you think will support on-line campaigning and you want to demonstrate it to our federal political campaigners and bureaucrats send me an email - simone@microsoft.com

Proposals will need to be with me by 16 February and you will need to have the tool ready for demonstration on the 26th of February in Canberra.

Read more here.

Pirating the 2009 Oscars

Waxy has posted some amazing data on the availability of unauthorised copies of Oscar-nominated movies.  The data reveals that virtually all movies have been posted to file sharing networks and that the source for almost all of those movies are screener copies distributed by the studios and not the poor quality camcorded copies that the industry claims is the primary source of movie piracy.  Interestingly, the average time from the time screeners are received by Academy members to its leak online is just six days.

Read Waxy's post here.

Lose-lose: The New York Times and GateHouse Media settle their dispute over linking

The New York Times Company and GateHouse Media have settled the copyright infringement suit Gatehouse Media filed last month:

GateHouse had accused The Boston Globe and its website, Boston.com, both of which are owned by The New York Times, of violating copyright law by posting material without permission from WickedLocal.com, a GateHouse website covering small towns in Massachusetts.

GateHouse, which is based in Fairport, New York and operates hundreds of daily newspapers and local websites, was objecting to the publication on Boston.com of headlines and lead paragraphs of stories from WickedLocal.com.

The case was being closely watched by many in the media industry because of potential legal implications for the common practice of linking between news sites and the use of links to content on other sites by news aggregators.

The New York Times had argued after the lawsuit was filed last month that linking to other websites is widespread and that Boston.com provided a link back to the original stories on WickedLocal.com.

A trial had been scheduled to begin in a US District Court in Boston on Monday but an agreement was reached over the weekend.

Under the terms of the settlement, neither party admitted any wrongdoing and in the absence of a court ruling, the case failed to bring any legal clarity to the situation.

Under the settlement, GateHouse agreed to put in place technical safeguards that would prevent Boston.com from automatically "scraping" material from GateHouse sites and Boston.com agreed not to try to circumvent the barriers.

Boston.com would also discontinue its use of RSS feeds from GateHouse sites and take "reasonable commercial steps" to remove headlines and lead paragraphs of GateHouse stories from Boston.com by March 1.

But the agreement did allow both websites to continue providing links to one another -- so long as they did not do so through RSS feeds or "scraping."

Read more here (from Google News).  Download a copy of the settlement here.   Techdirt's Mike Masnick sums up why this settlement isn't good news for anyone:

It's bad for the NY Times, because in settling they've almost guaranteed that plenty of other companies will now come seeking similar "settlements." It's bad for GateHouse Media because in winning "the battle" they're losing the war. The NY Times/Boston Globe will no longer be sending them the traffic they were getting in the past. It's hard to describe the level of pure cluelessness that goes into actively turning away the kind of traffic a major media publication can provide. It's bad for readers of both sites, because it limits the usefulness of the content they get. And... most importantly, it's bad for everyone in failing to have a hard and fast precedent set that linking to such sites and including the headline and a snippet are clearly fair use. What a shame.

Read more here.

Facebook thinks friends are worth more than 37 cents

I thought I should post an update to the story on the interesting marketing strategy employed by Burger King on Facebook that I blogged about two weeks ago(see here).  From TechCrunch:

Burger King, through their insanely creative advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky (see their recent Burger King perfume launch), launches a Facebook application that encourages users to remove Facebook friends. Sacrifice ten of them and you got a free Whopper. 233,906 friends were removed by 82,771 people in less than a week.

Facebook is overjoyed, right? What a great example to show the Madison Avenue agencies on how a big brand can get real engagement from users. This is the future of advertising. Or it could have been, if Facebook hadn’t shut it down, citing privacy issues:

We encourage creativity from developers and brands using Facebook Platform, but we also must ensure that applications follow users’ expectations of privacy. This application facilitated activity that ran counter to user privacy by notifying people when a user removes a friend. We have reached out to the developer with suggested solutions. In the meantime, we are taking the necessary steps to assure the trust users have established on Facebook is maintained.

Did anyone talk to the sales department before pulling the trigger on this? All that happened is the user being dissed got a message telling them, which helps the application spread virally. Without that feature the app is far less powerful. There is no real privacy issue here, just a policy decision by Facebook that people shouldn’t be notified when you remove them as a friend.

Read more here.

A Thousand Words

Ted Chung's mesmerising short film, A Thousand Words, is deservedly beginning to go viral.  Jeffrey Wells describes it in this way:

... an elegant, concise and very affecting portrait of big-city loneliness and instant connections that flare up and are gone seconds later. The emotions are halting and delicate but true. Beautiful piano score.

And here it is:

A Thousand Words from Ted Chung on Vimeo.

White House exempts YouTube from privacy rules

CNET's Chris Soghoian has a fascinating post on an under-reported early decision of the Obama administration:

The new Web site for Obama's White House is already drawing attention from privacy activists and tech bloggers. While the initial focus has been on the site's policies relating to search engine robots, a far more interesting tidbit has so far escaped the public eye: the White House has quietly exempted YouTube from strict rules relating to the use of cookies on federal agency Web sites.

The new White House Web site privacy policy promises that the site will not use long-term tracking cookies, complying with a decade-old rule prohibiting such user tracking by federal agencies. However, the privacy policy then reveals that Obama's legal team has exempted YouTube from this rule (YouTube videos are embedded at various places around the White House Web site).

While the White House might not be tracking visitors, the Google-owned video sharing site is free to use persistent cookies to track the browsing behavior of millions of visitors to Obama's home in cyberspace.

No other company has been singled out and rewarded with such a waiver.

...

For the past 10 years, federal agencies have been prohibited from using tracking cookies on their Web sites, except in a few special cases. The Office of Management and Budget rule M-03-22 states that:

"Agencies are prohibited from using persistent cookies or any other means (e.g., web beacons) to track visitors' activity on the Internet except .... [when there is] a compelling need."

The question we must now focus on is this: Is the need for Obama to use embedded videos hosted by YouTube (and not, say, another company's video-streaming platform that does not force cookies upon its users) a use that can be reasonably described as compelling?

Presumably, this has been justified on the basis that YouTube forces cookies on the visitors of any Web site that embeds one of its videos. However, while Joe or Jane blogger has no bargaining power with YouTube/Google, the federal government certainly does.

In just the past couple weeks, YouTube has launched dedicated pages for both the House and Senate to show off their own videos, and the site also recently started allowing users to directly download copies of some videos. This latter feature has not yet been widely deployed across the site, and is seems to be limited to videos posted by Obama's team.

Given the famously close connections between Obama and Google, you'd think his tech team could negotiate for a cookie-less way to embed videos. At a technical level, this would be an easy enough change, even if it would deny Google the ability to collect even more information on millions of Americans.

Read more here.

Colbert's Remix Challenge

When Larry Lessig appeared on The Colbert Report two weeks ago to talk about this latest book, Remix, he basically invited people to remix the interview over the protests of host Stephen Colbert's (see here).  Now Colbert has responded to some of the remixes that have popped up online (for some examples see here):

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Stephen's Remix Challenge

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

Filtering political speech

Stilgherrian has a piece in Crikey today titled So Conroy’s Internet filter won’t block political speech, eh?:

“Freedom of speech is fundamentally important in a democratic society and there has never been any suggestion that the Australian Government would seek to block political content,” intoned Senator Stephen Conroy on Tuesday.

Yet the very next day, ACMA added a page from what’s arguably a political website to its secret blacklist of Internet nasties.

The page is part of an anti-abortion website which claims to include “everything schools, government, and abortion clinics are afraid to tell or show you”. Yes, photos of dismembered fetuses designed to scare women out of having an abortion. Before you click through, be warned: it is confronting. Here’s the blacklisted page.

Read the rest here (you don't need a Crikey subscription to read it).  When writing the piece, Stil asked me for my thoughts and I jotted them down in a quick email, extracts of which Stil generously quotes.  Here is what I wrote to Stil in that email:

The ACMA classifying this anti-abortion website as prohibited content or potential prohibited content highlights several serious flaws inherent in the policy to filter the internet. 

First, it is indicative of the difficulty associated with defining “political speech”.  Legal scholars, judges and philosophers have wrestled with the boundaries of political speech for centuries, from John Milton to Alexander Meikeljohn, and it ludicrous to suggest that the ACMA or the Government is magically imbued with the ability to determine which websites have an element of political content and which do not.  And nor should that be the role of the ACMA or the Government.  Citizens in a liberal democracy should be lawfully able to inform themselves on matters that are of political interest of them, and not have the debate framed or restricted by Government classification.

Second, it demonstrates the inflexibility of the classification standards.  It is probable that this website does indeed constitute prohibited content or potential prohibited content under the Broadcasting Services Act, but that is only because the definitions in the Act inevitably treat all content in the same way; the same standard applies to political and non-political content.

Third, it is a good example of the dangers inherent in prior restraint.   Once a website like this gets added to the blacklist is becomes impossible for Australian citizens to determine for themselves whether this website should be banned or not.  The proposed filter means that the public cannot review the decisions made by the ACMA or the Government.  This lack of accountability should be very troubling to anyone living in a liberal democracy.

Ultimately the fate of this website is an illustrative example of the dangers inherent in any Government censorship scheme.  Issues of political speech, classification and accountability are without doubt both complex and important, and any notion that they can be adequately addressed and balanced by a Government regulator engaging in prior restraint is somewhere between being unbelievably naive and downright dangerous.

Again, you can read Stil's piece in Crikey here.

Copyright blocks The Wonder Years on DVD

Techdirt reports that thanks to problems with music licensing rights, The Wonder Years is unlikely to be available on DVD anytime soon:

One of the tragedies of ridiculous music licensing practices has been that TV shows that involved great music can no longer be seen -- because when they were first aired, there was no aftermarket, and so no rights were cleared with the music owners. The famous case is the TV show WKRP in Cincinnati, which tried to get around the issue by replacing all the great classic rock in the original, with crappy new music -- really harming the quality of the show. Tom sent in a note pointing out that the classic 80s TV show The Wonder Years is actually facing a similar issue, and because of it, the show is not available on DVD. The show was famous for integrating great music into the overall show -- clearing all that music for a DVD release is apparently too difficult, leading to an overall loss to society and culture.

Read it here.

Social media and US Airways Flight 1549

When US Airways Flight 1549 crash landed on the Hudson River, the event unfolded before the world on a range of social media websites.  Employees at Hill & Knowlton have put together two interesting presentations that illustrate the speed at which this event unfolded online.  The first is an animation created by Niall Cook that shows the rapid transformation of Wikipedia's entry on the crash of US Airways Flight 1549:

First 90 Minutes' Wikipedia Edits to US Airways Page
Uploaded by niallcook

Second, H&K Canada's digital team also captured (as the event unfolded) screen caps of key sites - search engines, blogs, social networks, corporate sites, aggregators etc.  Brendan Hodgson blogs that this "further demonstrates and reinforces the sheer dynamism of the communications environment in which we now exist; as it relates to the speed by which information on an incident is communicated and shared (e.g. via Twitter), the competitiveness as well as the synergy shaping the relationship between traditional and citizen media, and the actions taken by corporations to respond within this new environment":

Us Airways Crash 1549 Online Analysis

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: crash communications)

Freakdom of Speech

Patrick Bristow's Freakdom of Speech is a satire of the diversity of dumb to be found in America.  The first episode is America on Obama:

Read NewTeeVee's review here.

We Live in Public trailer

Josh Harris has created a documentary We Live in Public, about the possibility of the virtual world taking over society in the future, which premiered this week at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival:

iTunes for news

In a piece for the New York Times, David Carr suggested that there should be an iTunes for news:

Last Tuesday, iTunes, Apple’s ubiquitous online music store that sold more than 2.4 billion tracks last year alone, changed its own tune, announcing that songs would no longer be sold with copying restrictions and that they would be available at various prices.

The digerati crowed over the collapse of the hated digital rights management (which Apple never liked, either) and record companies kicked up their heels at the thought of leaving behind the tyranny of the 99-cent price point.

But lost in the hubbub was the fact that Steve Jobs and Apple had been able to charge for content in the first place. Remember that when iTunes began, the music industry was being decimated by file sharing. By coming up with an easy user interface and obtaining the cooperation of a broad swath of music companies, Mr. Jobs helped pull the business off the brink. He has been accused of running roughshod over the music labels, which are a fraction of their former size. But they are still in business.

Those of us who are in the newspaper business could not be blamed for hoping that someone like him comes along and ruins our business as well by pulling the same trick: convincing the millions of interested readers who get their news every day free on newspapers sites that it’s time to pay up.

Read more here. Now VF Daily has imagined what such a site may look like:

12 January 2009: a decisive day in the history of intellectual property?

Three days ago, YouTube permanently disabled the account of critic and commentator Kevin B. Lee, suggesting that YouTube is cracking down on critical video essays posted to the site:

Kevin’s video essays wed critical commentary or conversation to clips from copyright films in a “teaching” context, and most of them were created as part of his project to “view every film on the list of 1000 greatest films of all time, as compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don�t They?.” Kevin says he received a copyright warning earlier today in regards to his video essay on …And God Created Woman. It was the first time YouTube had ever slapped his wrist over one of the video essays, although they had contacted him about two unaltered clips in the past, one from The Sorrow and Pity and one from Dames. Three strikes, and Kevin’s out — YouTube has removed all 70 of his videos, including 40 original video essays. If you’ve embedded one of these in your own blog, that embed will now be unplayable.

Kevin has his own personal archive and can potentially re-upload the clips; he says he’ll investigate other online video sharing options. But YouTube is still the biggest game in town, and Kevin says he’ll miss it. “I’ll miss not only the unparalleled audience reach, but the cool stats that YouTube had to offer (like learning that viewers would rewind repeatedly to watch Bardot’s bare ass in my video essay for …And God Created Woman),” he noted in an email. “But that’s nothing compared to having the right to share my work in the first place.”

Kevin is one of a number of people producing film criticism via online video who have had trouble with YouTube of late. These videos represent the first real advance in film criticism as an art form in, at least, decades; other video sharing platforms may remain more friendly to copyright borrowers for awhile, but ultimately this practice may have to either move underground or disappear.

Read more here (from SpoutBlog).  In a passionate (and lengthy) post on The House Next Door, Matt Zoller Seitz thinks 12 January 2009 might be a decisive day in the history of intellectual property:

Kevin has copies of all his work, and I'm sure it will show up again somewhere, sometime. But the obliteration of YouTube as a global platform for his voice is a crime of greater magnitude than anything he did to create the video essays in the first place. YouTube is the town square of the 21st century—rather like a gigantic virtual mall that is, technically speaking, a private space, but which operates as a public sphere: a gathering spot, a cultural and political crossroads. By scourging Kevin's work from this crossroads and banning his video essays—and, potentially, all similar work—from YouTube, the company is allowing the powerful to muzzle the near-powerless. And it is endorsing the idea that in cases involving intellectual property law and the Internet, filmmakers can be deemed guilty, silenced, then made to plead for their right to speak.

There's also an unspoken class bias at work here, a bully mentality that chooses its targets based on who's likely to fight back and win. Consider commercial TV, which is filled with programs that routinely air copyrighted material without permission for purposes of journalism, satire or simple entertainment. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report don't ask permission to air any of the news clips they slice and dice each night for yuks; they consider a network's onscreen logo to be acknowledgment enough, and their assumption is almost never challenged. Talk shows don't think twice about airing a rival network's news footage or clips from a popular or notorious TV program in order to spark a discussion or anchor a satirical montage. Infotainment shows compile film clips for use in movie star obituaries—not just electronic presskit snippets meant for PR purposes, but clips from older movies that predate EPKs and that might have originally aired on some corporate competitor's channel—and the movie's copyright holders don't object. The shows that feature such clips are routinely repurposed on the parent company's websites, often with ads and sometimes with embedding functions that allow the clip to be reproduced by bloggers, and there are not currently, to the best of my knowledge, any lawsuits seeking to stop the practice. Kings wink at each other. Peasants get the axe.

Kevin B. Lee is not Napster; he's not some guy uploading every frame of every Bette Davis movie for kicks; he's not even Goldentusk. He's a critic and scholar doing work that could be considered, at worst, compelling free ads for essential pop art. YouTube, by reflexively siding with whichever party has more money and power, has renounced its founding spirit.

There should be a way to distinguish between piracy-for-profit (or unauthorized, free redistribution) and creative, interpretive, critical or political work that happens to use copyrighted material. And there must be an alternative to unilateral takedowns. The issues aren't just legal, they're practical. History has demonstrated that there's no copyright protection that can't be defeated, no corporate edict that can't be subverted. And given the technological sophistication that permits digital watermarking, there ought to be a way to make sampling of any sort, authorized or not, scaled to suit the filmmakers' means, profitable for the rights holders, and as fully automated as the copyright-infringement-scouring that's currently happening all over the Internet.

Whatever the solutions, they should be something other than one-size-fits-all. Digital watermarking abusers are engaged in an unwinnable war—one that, in its present state, will only produce collateral damage and make them increasingly unsympathetic, and therefore more likely to be demonized and resisted. The entertainment industry's unwillingness to recognize the plain fact that people have complex, idiosyncratic and yes, possessive relationships to songs, films and TV shows—relationships that are qualitatively different from their relationships to cars, hats, shoes and beer—contributes to a culture of calcified mutual resentment, and a public mindset (manifested most vividly in generations that cannot remember life before the Internet) that sees big entertainment companies as lead-footed dopes—Elmer Fudd blasting every rabbit hole in sight hoping to hit Bugs Bunny.

The situation as it stands is immoral, untenable and, I believe, a violation of fundamental rights. Almost nobody taking part in the early phases of digital media has the money to fight the Googles and Viacoms of the world, and of course that's what the takedown gremlins are counting on; injustice not resisted eventually becomes tradition. I fervently hope some brave, knowledgeable lawyer will see that there's more at stake here than the ethics of ripping and posting scenes from movies, and make a test case of Kevin's unconscionable treatment. The circumstances may seem mundane, but the implications are grim as can be. When individuals and governments permit corporations to dictate the terms by which their culture may be examined, the First Amendment becomes just another pile of words.

Read more here.

The Importance of Ideas

Check out a great new blog from Jason Whittaker, The Importance of Ideas, here.  The name of the blog comes from this quote from the legendary journalist, Edward R. Murrow:"Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information."  I'm looking forward to reading Jason's ideas on politics, the media and popular culture - I've added it to my RSS reader and would encourage you to do the same.

Social Media Club Brisbane January

The inaugural event for the year for the Social Media Club Brisbane is next week, on Tuesday January 20, commencing at 5.30 pm, at the Melbourne Hotel in West End.  Co-hosting this event with SMC Brisbane, and generously covering venue costs and providing refreshments, is the blogger advertising network Nuffnang, established recently in Australia. Nuffnang Co-Founder, Cheo Ming Shen is flying in from Singapore that afternoon and will be at the function, explaining for 15 minutes or so how interested bloggers might be able to benefit from being part of the Nuffnang network.

If you would like to attend this event, please RSVP at the Facebook site for the event here.

A-PAC: Australia's Public Affairs Channel

Australia's answer to C-SPAN, now called A-PAC, will launch on 20 January.  The website is online here, where you can watch a promotional (propaganda?) video that gives the impression that this channel was the most important outcome of Kevin Rudd's 2020 Summit and that it has come "more than a decade ahead of that vision".