Berkman Buzz, week of February 16

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School
Week of February 16, 2007

What's going on... take your pick or browse below.

*Doc Searls shares his thoughts on the Newspaper 2.0 workshop.
*Wendy Seltzer gets her "First DMCA Takedown."
*Ethan Zuckerman wonders where is Zimbabwe's "breaking point?"
*Larry Lessig gives first in a series of Internet policy presentations.
*David Weinberger looks for a good fight.
*Global Voices: "Congo-Brazzaville: How Long for Sassou Nguesso?"
*OpenNet Initiative examines Dubai's "free zone."
*Rebecca MacKinnon reports on Chinese bloggers fighting back.

The full Buzz:

"Just put up some photos from the Newspaper 2.0 workshop on Saturday at UCSB in Santa Barbara. It was a small informal gathering, modest in scale but ambitious in scope. The purpose was to gather locals and share thinking about what to do with newspapers in an online world, and to move forward projects toward that end. The Santa Barbara setting was opportune, given the meltdown at the city's daily paper."
Doc Searls, "In some ways it's 0.2"

"That didn't take long. On Feb. 8, I posted to YouTube a clip taken from the Super Bowl: not the football, but the copyright warning the NFL stuck into the middle of it, wherein they tell you it's forbidden even to share 'accounts of the game' without the NFL's consent.
Their copyright bot didn't seem to see the fair use in my educational excerpt, so YouTube just sent me their boilerplate takedown. Time to break out that DMCA counter-notification."
Wendy Seltzer, "My First DMCA Takedown."

"When I visited Zimbabwe in September of last year, one US dollar bought $500 new Zimbabwean dollars on the 'black market.' (The term 'black market' implies a shadowy part of town with clandestine deals going down - I bought all my currency from friends, who’ve all been forced to become illegal currency brokers so they can buy dollar goods outside the country.) The official exchange rate was $250 zim dollars to one US dollar, roughly half the black market rate."
Ethan Zuckerman, "Zimbabwe: Where’s the breaking point?"

"The subject here is spectrum policy. The argument is that we deregulate spectrum. 'Deregulate' not in the sense that we auction spectrum. Auctions require a gov’t created property right; that’s a form of spectrum regulation. 'Deregulate' in the sense that we set off large swaths of spectrum for unlicensed use. Congress has made this impossible in the short term for any significant chunk of spectrum. But we do have an important opportunity to set free 'white space.'"
Larry Lessig, "Internet Policy: Deregulating Spectrum."

"Much as I love Wikipedia — and I love it so much that I'm giving it candy hearts on Valentine's Day — its policy of neutrality sometimes forces resolution when we'd rather have debate. Yes, competing sides get represented in the articles, and the discussion pages let us hear people arguing their points, but the arguments themselves are treated as stations on the way to neutral agreement."
David Weinberger, "Debatepedia for when neutrality is premature."

"As Guinea has started a process that may lead to the dismantling of its 50-year dictatorship, bloggers from the Republic of Congo (not to be confused with the Democratic Republic of Congo), a country with its own dinosaur dictator Denis Sassou Nguesso are daring to dream of ways in which he might be brought down. That being said, they are definitely at a much earlier phase in the process and are mainly discussing how the opposition might get its act together and unify against him."
Global Voices, "Congo-Brazzaville: How Long for Sassou Nguesso?"

"Internet companies and users in Dubai free zone will go through filtered Internet this year, reported the Gulf News. Currently more than 500 companies based in the free zone enjoy unfettered Internet access unlike the rest of the country. UAE’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) plans to extend its filter into the free zone which includes Dubai Media City and Dubai Internet City as well as the residential areas affiliated with the free zone."
The OpenNet Initiative, "Dubai free zone will no longer have unfettered Internet access."

"Roland Soong has translated the full text of an open letter to Sina.com (a Chinese portal and blog-hosting service) written by four Chinese lawyers. They are protesting the un-transparent, arbitrary, and unaccountable way in which Sina.com has been censoring blog posts by bloggers on its system."
Rebecca MacKinnon, "Chinese lawyers protest blog censorship by Sina.com."