Stello's Choice

This first year of law school has wrecked my determination to keep this blog going, but I've still been keeping tabs when possible on the media news / technology developments that grind my gears.  Here's a roundup, Omnivore style:

Journalism

Russian authorities have finally convicted someone for killing Magomed Yevloyev, though the family's lawyer calls it a "peculiar farce."  More good news in the publishing world: lone newspaper watchdog Editor & Publisher was set to close before being bought out to see another day and CQ Researcher found that the internet is bad for press freedoms.  Wikileaks is appealing for foundations and contributions to continue publishing classified documents.  47 journalists are imprisoned in Iran; 56 journalists were killed in Mexico over the last 9 years; 68 journalists were killed in 2009 worldwide; and the European Court of Human Rights upheld a shield law for reporters.  John Nichols and Robert McChesney, longtime media critics who released their book "The Death and Life of American Newspapers," wrote a teaser article in The Nation on how to save investigative reporting.  Google launched fastflip and buzz, a study from the PEJ found that traditional news sources are still doing most real reporting, and Britain decided to tax libel lawyers' fees 90% to help pay for reporting.  In the US, the FCC has solicited opinions on how to help our own journalism debacle, and the New York Times is instituting a partial online paywall.

Nonprofit News

The Investigative News Network is growing, news orgs around the globe are considering the Spot.us model, and in California the Center for Investigative Reporting is launching a new venture called California Watch that hopes to use readers' participation along with "real journalism."  The Chicago's News Co-op was finding early success, and publishes stories in a section of the New York Times.

Online Media

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard arguments for FCC v. Comcast, and will decide whether the FCC had the authority to censure Comcast for singling out Bit-Torrent traffic among its users; Free Press filed briefs on behalf of the FCC.  Observers say the FCC's new "net neutrality" rules would permit the blocking of Bit-Torrent anyway.  The United States made appeals to Russia in a bid to increase cyber-security, a field that is increasingly called out by studies as perilous.  Twitter was working on technology to get around censorship tools used by despotic regimes, and Global Voices Online released a confusing tool to track online civic engagement related to transparency.  The New York Times published a book review of Jaron Lanier's book "You Are Not A Gadget," which seeks to articulate some serious problems with an open-knowledge culture - or as he puts it, "digital Maoism."  The misleadingly named Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was still being negotiated in secret (more), Google was working with the National Security Agency (more), and the Pentagon was allegedly still running its military analyst program to sway domestic opinion.  Tickets now take your copyrights.

Slight break in the mayhem of finals studying to relay this bit of news that is not making the rounds in the echo chamber as it probably should.

EFF has a great write up here.

Ars also covered the story here.

How many customers?  Not sure, but it looks like customers were "pinged" for their location data over 8 million times through a web site available to law enforcement.

This is according to a graduate student's blog covering his trip to the Intelligence Support Systems gathering, who has the MP3 recordings to back up his claim.

It helps to view this in light of the ongoing NSA warrantless wiretapping controversy.

• EFF posts a good update on the ACTA.
• Reporters want copyright law to repay them for costly news gathering.
• Obama Admin. wants to keep things in the dark.
• Chicago Police want to keep disciplinary records under wraps.
• Washington Post will close its last remaining US national newsrooms.
• ABA endorses the Federal Shield Law, so does Obama.

RCFP says:

Under the revised version of the law, a journalist will not be required to be a salaried employee of a media company, but rather a person gathering news for the purpose of disseminating the information to the public, which could include unpaid online journalists. A person who is reasonably believed to be claiming the privilege to cover a crime of terrorism or aiding a terrorist organization will be excluded from the definition.

Why am I thankful this year?  Because if we lived in Azerbaijan, we could be charged with hooliganism.

Or better yet, if we were Iraqi we could be beaten by the government.

Meet the ACTA.
Ars has a good write up here.
BoingBoing says:

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

* * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

* * That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

* * That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

* * Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)

The ACTA Internet Chapter: Putting the Pieces Together

It is not clear how accurate these accounts are, but these conjectures aren't a far cry from other US supported trade agreements.