Berkman Buzz, week of January 12
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.
* Rebecca MacKinnon analyzes the Global Online Freedom Act of 2007
* Lawrence Lessig revisits the matrix
* Ethan Zuckerman on open source and Second Life
* Dan Gillmor asks if media reform is too left-wing
* Rebecca MacKinnon on the powerful Asian blogosphere
* Ethan Zuckerman on internet regulation and economic growth
The Full Buzz:
"While I have been plenty critical of U.S. companies' complicity in stifling free speech in China and elsewhere, I have gotten into some fairly heated arguments with some of my friends who work for human rights organizations about their endorsement of this legislation as it currently stands. It is, in my view an overly blunt instrument and promotes an oversimplistic world view that divides the world into "good" countries versus "bad" countries and legislates corporate behavior accordingly."
Rebecca MacKinnon, "Global Online Freedom Act is re-introduced"
"There is a very difficult (maybe unanswerable) debate about whether encouraging and facilitating some contribution to the commons on balance weakens or strengthens the commons. There are easy cases on both sides: If a parallel strategy (noncommercial and commercial) encourages music that otherwise couldn't be contributed to the commons in any way, that's a good thing. If a parallel strategy encourages an academic to distribute articles he would have published in a pure open access way now in a commercial way, that's a bad thing. But I think the strategy should be to make arguments to creators, not to force structures into place that remove the choices of creators."
Lawrence Lessig, "The Matrix, part two"
"Linden Labs, the folks behind Second Life, have announced that they’re releasing the source code for their client 'viewer' application under a GPL license. This announcement has already inspired a good deal of conversation and debate, including a number of emails and blogposts asking me whether I’ve withdrawn my argument with Charlie Nesson in the light of Linden 'going open source'.
Nope. Linden’s taken a great step towards opening up their code, but it’s still a huge leap before I would consider Second Life to be an open platform."
Ethan Zuckerman, "Unpacking Linden’s “open source” announcement"
"The main worry seems to be the notion that big media will throttle good journalism. I know people on the political right who believe the big media have already done so, and they’re also working to foster new kinds of media that some in this ballroom would agree we need."
Dan Gillmor, "Media Reform: Only for the Left?"
"Edelman the P.R. company has come out with a fascinating study of global blog readership titled A Corporate Guide to the Global Blogosphere.... While the report's primary audience is meant to be companies, there is plenty for non-corporate people who study the blogosphere to chew on.
Their key finding is not surprising: blogs are much more influential in Japan, South Korea, and China than they are in the West."
Rebecca MacKinnon, "Asia leads the world in blog readership"
"Explaining to a telecom regulator that they need to prevent Verizon from prioritizing packets from Yahoo over Google’s packets because openness to new ideas is a critical driver of US economic competitiveness strikes me as a tough sell. Documenting the role of openness to ideas in economic development in quantitiative terms is one key step in this debate. But winning this argument is going to require sharp, concrete examples of ways that closed networks hurt economic competitiveness… which is going to require addressing tough questions like how China’s closing off of certain ideas (freedom of assembly, access to information) hasn’t crippled their booming economy."
Ethan Zuckerman, "Susan Crawford, ideas and economic growth"