Berkman Buzz, week of September 22
A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations. If you'd like to receive this by email, just sign up here.
What's going on... take your pick or browse below.
* Doc Searls anticipates his upcoming fellowship work
* Global Voices wins Grand Prize Award
* Dan Gillmor proposes a collaborative public media archive
* William McGeveran watches copyright bills get caught in Washington D.C. gridlock
* Derek Slater clears up the confusion surrounding a fate worse than late fees
* Rebecca MacKinnon ponders the journalist/blogosphere relationship
* OneWebDay toasts the first annual celebration of the internet
The full Buzz.
"Now, as a Berkman Fellow, I can continue to work on pushing the identity conversation forward, while also studying the subject of individual empowerment from several academic perspectives, including law, economics and sociology. I can also work with Berkman on organizing events, and get help from students and faculty as well as others at the Center.
I will also be working on collaborations between Berkman and the Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS) at UCSB, where I am a Visiting Scholar. CITS studies transitions where culture and technology meet. My work so far there has been focused on the Live Web. I can see lots of ways I can help advance the missions of both organizations. I'm also still pretty new to both, so I'm approaching those opportunities with care as well as enthusiasm..."
Doc Searls quoted in: "Welcome Doc Searls, new Berkman Fellow"
"It was appropriate that, for an award given for innovations in journalism, overseen by J-Lab (the Institute of Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland), the news came from my colleague Georgia Popplewell at the ceremony in Washington DC via instant message to London and from there out to the Global Voices community across the world via e-mail. Global Voices Online is the winner of the Grand Prize at the 2006 Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism..."
Global Voices: "Knight-Batten Awards: And the winner is"
"Here’s a simple way public TV and radio stations could help seed the public sphere: Every time they go to a press conference or cover an event where a public figure — politicians, celebrities, high-profile business people, etc. — is speaking, the media organization should post on the Web the entire event, not just the snippets it chooses to run as part of a news report. Moreover, the material should be posted under a Creative Commons license allowing further and wider use..."
Dan Gillmor: "Do Public Media Believe in the Public?"
"...it seems next to impossible that any copyright bill could get far before Congress adjourns for the elections. I think that's good news because, completely independent of the substance of this grab-bag bill, there just has not been enough analysis and debate of its provisions. The bad part is that a pretty good orphan works remedy — which was the subject of a thoughtful deliberative process — has become bogged down in the larger legislation. Sigh. Maybe next year..."
William McGeveran: "Copyright Bill Probably Dead for the Year"
"(Fake Headline, Serious Point:) Movie Studios, Blockbuster File Copyright Infringement Suit Against Customer For Failing to Return DVD Rentals.
That's obviously not true, but from the way people talk about Rhapsody and other music "rental" services, they believe that the story could happen, at least in principle. This is part of yet another misunderstanding about how the DMCA [Digital Millenium Copywright Act] reworked the nature of copyright.
Too often, people confuse defenses of DRM+DMCA based on their ability to prevent *infringing* uses and defenses based on protection of new business models predicated on preventing *non-infringing* uses. The former defense is about protecting copyright holder's exclusive rights, the latter is in effect about expanding those rights. These days, this confusion typically involves online music rental subscription services like Rhapsody..."
Derek Slater: "(Fake Headline, Serious Point:) Movie Studios, Blockbuster File Copyright Infringement Suit Against Customer For Failing to Return DVD Rentals"
"The challenge is: How do you do good journalism while at the same time participating in a give-and-take, a conversation about events, which in turn helps to inform your journalistic work? Reuters realizes the answer is not as simple as getting some of their journalists to blog. In fact that may not be the answer at all. What’s more important is to help journalists figure out how to interact with the blogosphere— that big global, interactive, viral conversation about the things that matter to people. How do you interact with these conversations in a way that makes your journalism more relevant, more useful - and more true to the point of journalism in the first place?..."
Rebecca MacKinnon: "Reuters supports NewAssignment.net"
"We’re because the internet has changed our lives. We’re here because the potential of the web to help people solve problems together, play together and work together online is overwhelming.... Because the web runs on machines, people forget that it’s fundamentally a social, human place. OneWebDay is about remembering that, and not taking the web for granted. The web is a wonderful resource that we need to respect, defend, and celebrate."
OneWebDay: "Today, OneWebDay"