Berkman Buzz, week of February 18

BERKMAN BUZZ:  A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations.  If you'd like to receive this by email, just sign up here.
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School
Week of February 18, 2008

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

*David Ardia provides clarity on the Wikileaks injunction
*Doc Searls explores the role of Open Source in public media
*Gene Koo discusses Lewis Hyde's take on fair use
*Internet & Democracy looks at the internet's impact in Burma
*Ethan Zuckerman reveals what can happen when websites are abandoned
*Weekly Global Voice: Brazil: "While traditional media deals with lawsuits, blogs report"

The full buzz.

"Yesterday, I reported that a federal judge in San Francisco had issued a stunningly broad injunction that brought down Wikileaks.org, a site that is developing what it describes as an "uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis." (I'll let the prescience of that statement sink in on its own.)  The plaintiffs in the case, a Cayman Islands bank and its Swiss parent company, probably thought they could slip into court in California right before a holiday weekend and silently silence a critic that had made them and their customers look bad. So much for that plan..."
David Ardia, "Making Sense of the Wikileaks Fiasco: Prior Restraints in the Internet Age"

"Open Source has won. We've moved into Gandhicon 4. Now what? That's the question that occurred to me yesterday, while sitting in the audience of a tech session at Public Media 2008 in Los Angeles — the big annual conference for what most of us still call public broadcasting.  I sat there hearing panelists tell story after story about what stations can do with piles of open code, tools and standards. In cases where the nature or provenance of recommended code was in doubt, questions from the audience went, 'Is the source code for that available?' or 'Is that open code, or just an open service...'"
Doc Searls, "What's Next for Open Source and Public Media?"

- continued -

"Lewis Hyde outlined the 'Encroachment on the Commons' now underway in the academy. A basic dilemma facing educational fair use is that it’s stuck between too much specificity (cutting out potentially fair uses) and too much vagueness (leading teachers to avoid risk by stopping far short of fair use).  To the extent that specific guidelines are available, they’ve been shaped by the publishing industry and drafted without serious input from users (input letters not published), lack legal standing (court in a coursepack case argued need to go back to the copyright statute itself), unclear if they are minimum or maximum allowed (NYU, under litigation threat, treated guidelines as max, now followed by 4 of 5 universities..."
Gene Koo, "Lewis Hyde on Fair Use for Educators"

"When we compare cases where the Internet has played a significant role in democratic struggles (such as the Orange Revolution in Ukraine) and the case of Burma where the use of Internet for internal political mobilization is severely limited, we may be inclined to conclude that the Internet in Burma has largely been unsuccessful to bring about significant change towards democracy. While this observation may largely be correct, this conclusion has the danger of overlooking one fundamental aspect of the fight towards democracy – one of holding governments accountable, no matter what kind of a government it is, democratic or autocratic..."
Internet & Democracy, "An Overlooked Dimension of Internet and Democracy?"

"There are abandoned and distressed properties on the web as well. If you’ve ever put up a wiki and failed to garden it, you know what I’m talking about. I used to have a small wiki on this domain that Rachel and I used for grocery lists. (Yes, I realize very little is geekier, but it’s really cool to have your partner create a grocery list on a wiki while you go to the store and access it on your phone.) We forgot about it until a speaker’s agency, looking for my bio, came across it and let me know that it had become a link farm for porn. I thanked the woman who let me know and mentioned that it was supposed to be a shopping list - she pointed out that my wife and I appeared to be shopping for some racy things indeed..."
Ethan Zuckerman,  "The Kenyan middle class… or is that the digital activist class?"

"Two of the biggest media companies in Brazil are currently involved is court cases that similarly raise the issue of freedom of speech and press even though the media finds itself on opposite sides of the issue in the two cases. The influential newspaper ‘Folha de SP' is facing a series of lawsuits filed by followers of an evangelical church, while Veja, the top weekly magazine, and some of its main editors are going after a blogger through another series of lawsuits. Taking the larger view, the Brazilian blogosphere is uniquely pointing out the similarity and contradictions revealed by the connectedness of both situations..."
Jose Murilo Junior, "Brazil: While traditional media deals with lawsuits, blogs report"