Reporters Without Borders has released its 2006 Worldwide Freedom of Press Index and the news is not good for the United States. The U.S. has fallen nine places down the scale to rank 53rd out of 168 countries in terms of how much freedom the press enjoys — this after coming in 17th in 2002, the first year the index was produced.
Reporters Without Borders uses 50 criteria in compiling its rankings and then sends a questionnaire to journalists and free press groups worldwide to ask them to rate the various countries according to the criteria. The war on terror, and the current administration’s crack-down on journalist access to information related to the war on terror, is the cause for the fall.
Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of “national security” to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his “war on terrorism.” The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 US states, refuse to recognise the media’s right not to reveal its sources, even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism.
Freelance journalist and blogger Josh Wolf was imprisoned when he refused to hand over his video archives. Sudanese cameraman Sami al-Haj, who works for the pan-Arab broadcaster Al-Jazeera, has been held without trial since June 2002 at the US military base at Guantanamo, and Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein has been held by US authorities in Iraq since April this year.
Other countries that came out far lower this year: France (35th), which slipped five places due to a rise in government searches of media offices and Japan (51st), which fell fourteen places due to rising nationalism and a system of press “clubs.”
Rounding out the bottom of the list are North Korea (168) Turkmenistan (167th) and Eritrea.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:31 PM | Print | Comments (0)
I’m a little late to this, but Chris Bowers at MyDD has mounted a campaign (which is either genius or crazy) to get liberal bloggers to link to negative press articles regarding Republican candidates, all in an effort to boost the Google rankings of these articles when users search on the candidates names. This “Google-bombing” is an effort to game Google’s system, which is based on links, to put the bad news about the Republican candidates’ first.
Here’s what Bowers recommends: any time a blogger refers to one of a list of targeted Republican candidates, say Jim Talent of Missouri, a link should be embedded in the candidate’s name which jumps to a negative press article, from a reputable news source, preferably local. Here’s the article for Talent.
But the Google-bomb effort is going even farther than that — Bowers recommends that bloggers add the source code for the links to their templates, which theoretically could increase the number of links, and therefore the Google ranking, geometrically.
It’s too soon to tell if this effort achieves any results, but it’s an intriguing, and slightly disturbing, negative campaign tactic. Moreover, it’s not clear if Google-bombing works, particularly for well-known candidates.
But it is far from clear whether this particular campaign will be successful. Much depends on the extent of political discussion already tied to a particular candidate’s name.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:52 PM | Print | Comments (0)
It will be harder to manipulate results for searches of the name of a candidate who has already been widely covered in the news and widely discussed in the blogosphere, because so many links and so many pages already refer to that particular name. Search results on lesser-known candidates, with a smaller body of references and links, may be easier to change.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ set up a free Wi-Fi network for businesses and residents to get connected to the Internet, providing a lifeline for a battered city. The network was built after receiving an exemption from a Louisiana state law that barred the provision of free municipal Wi-Fi service and over the reported objections of incumbent telco BellSouth.
Now, with the city coming back to life and the crisis receding, New Orleans’ free Wi-Fi network will go dark after the New Year, replaced by a private network owned by EarthLink. EarthLink, however, promises to continue offering free service with a 300 kbps tier.
As Katie Fehrenbacher at GigaOm, who jumped on this story soon after the network’s shuttering was announced, noted city CIO Greg Meffert, who won VON’s First “Medal of Honor” for keeping communications patched together in the Big Easy after Katrina, once vowed to go to jail to protect the network.
Meffert’s no longer the CIO of New Orleans (he resigned last month) and EarthLink will take over. It’s not clear what will happen to the city’s network — city officials say the Wi-Fi nodes may be deployed elsewhere.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:03 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu (fresh from a starring turn in Bill Moyers’ documentary on net neutrality) has this excellent essay in Slate on why YouTube is in good fighting shape when it comes to the threat of copyright lawsuits. Despite Mark Cuban’s predictions that YouTube, or Google, its soon-to-be-parent-company, will get crushed by litigation for the unauthorized copyrighted videos it hosts, the law is pretty clear, according to Wu.
The DMCA’s safe-harbor provisions give YouTube fairly solid legal defenses against these suits. All the copyright owner has to do is ask YouTube to take down the content. So long as YouTube is not aware that it’s hosting pirated material, it’s in the clear once it complies with the take-down request.
Everyone knows that. Wu, however, puts the DMCA in historical context, noting that in a battle of titans, the telcos fought Hollywood to get the take-down request provisions in the Act so that they would not be held responsible for the behavior of their customers.
Hollywood employs legendary lobbyists, like Jack Valenti, but when they ran into the Bells, it was like Frazier meeting Foreman. The Bells quickly put holds on all the legislation the content industries wanted. Telecom lobbyists like Roy Neel, a close friend of Al Gore (and later Howard Dean’s campaign manager), went to Congress and began saying things like, the “copyright law threatens to put a damper on the expression of ideas on the Internet.”
Facing stalemate, in 1997 the industries settled on a compromise: something called the Online Copyright Liability Limitation Act, which became Title II of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (§512 of the Copyright Code). It is this law that makes YouTube worth paying more than what you pay for its videos. And its long-term effects have been enormous—you might call §512 the Magna Carta for Web 2.0.
Moreover, Wu points out that Hollywood is conflicted about the rise of YouTube and other sites which, while featuring copyrighted content, also provide priceless promotion and exposure. In some respects, content owners have the best of both worlds — they can benefit from the exposure or they can demand that the content be taken down. This “tolerated use” is a new concept in copyright law.
Stated otherwise, much of the copyrighted material on YouTube is in a legal category that is new to our age. It’s not “fair use,” the famous right to use works despite technical infringement, for reasons of public policy. Instead, it’s in the growing category of “tolerated use”—use that is technically illegal, but tolerated by the owner because he wants the publicity. If that sounds as weird as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” you’re getting the idea. The industry is deeply conflicted about mild forms of piracy—trapped somewhere between its pathological hatred of “pirates” and its lust for the buzz piracy can build.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:37 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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