Berkman Buzz: Week of August 11, 2008

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 University

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*Wendy Seltzer discusses a recent court decision on free software licensing practices
*Jonathan Zittrain takes a look at iPhone's kill switch
*Rebecca MacKinnon takes a deep dive into Chinese censorship
*Ethan Zuckerman's thoughts on Google Insights incite conversation in the Berkman blogophere
*Digital Natives Reporters in the Field: "Digital Shadows"
*Weekly Global Voices: "Georgia, Russia: 'What's Next?'"

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The full buzz.

"The Federal Circuit held this week in Jacobsen v. Katzer, that Java Model Railroad Interface author Robert Jacobsen’s release of software under the Artistic License gave him the right to sue for copyright infringement those who distributed modified JMRI software without obeying the conditions of its license. The decision confirms an important cornerstone to many of the open source and free software licenses: Taking the work without accepting its license’s conditions is an infringement of copyright, subject to all of copyright’s enforcement options.  Users of free and open source licenses, or Creative Commons licenses for non-software works, offer their works to the world on a non-exclusive basis on a set of conditions. In the Artistic License, those conditions are..."
From Wendy Seltzer's blogpost, "Federal Circuit Confirms Key Free Software Licensing Practice"

"It’s been clear from the start that information appliances like the iPhone, tethered to their vendors, would have a kill switch — that’s just a subset of the vendor’s (in the case, Apple’s) ability to reprogram any aspect of the phone from a distance at any time.  In a world of third party apps, that means that Apple could kill any app, too.  After some breathless reporting caused by the discovery of a Web page meant for consultion by iPhones that lists bad apps, and debate about whether the switch was more modest — say, only to say which apps wouldn’t be allowed to use the iPhone’s GPS functionality, as a way to protect user privacy — Steve Jobs confirmed that any app can be killed..."
From Jonathan Zittrain's blogpost, "The iPhone kill switch"

"China's system of filtering websites by blocking web addresses and keywords of overseas websites has come to be known as the 'Great Firewall.'  (No that is not it's official name - I believe the term was first coined by some frustrated bloggers.) But the GFW, for short, is only a small part of Chinese Internet censorship.  Repeat after me: 'The Great Firewall is only one small part of Chinese Internet censorship.' China's system of filtering websites by blocking web addresses and keywords of overseas websites has come to be known as the 'Great Firewall.'  (No that is not it's official name - I believe the term was first coined by some frustrated bloggers.) But the GFW, for short, is only a small part of Chinese Internet censorship. Repeat after me: "The Great Firewall is only one small part of Chinese Internet censorship..."
From Rebecca MacKinnon's blogpost, "Censorship Foreigners Don't See - Stuff that didn't fit in my Op-Ed"

"The folks at Pingdom, a company focused on server performance monitoring, posted a fascinating little piece of research based on Google’s Insights for Search tool. I’m interested both in their specific research question - what social network tools are popular in what parts of the world? - and the richness of the data available via this tool from Google. (Basically, I’m feeling boneheaded that I hadn’t realized this data set was available.) The Pingdom folks tried a simple experiment, using Search Insight to search for information on a dozen social networking sites. The Insight tool reveals how popular searches for particular terms are, and where in the world those searches are coming from..."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blogpost, "Who seeks what, where - Google’s Search Insight"
Read more insights on Google Insights from Hal Roberts and Bruce Etling.

"This week we’re taking a break from all the interviews to give you a glimpse of the world of Digital Dossiers. Your dossier is made up of all the digital tracks you leave behind – from your photos on Flickr, to the Facebook messages you send, to all the data your credit card company collects about your transactions. On a daily basis, digital natives are consistently leaving information about themselves in secure or non-secure databases. You probably do this without a second thought in you day-to-day life – but have you ever considered the amount of information being collected about you, or the extent to which this information spreads..."
From the Digital Natives Project blogpost, "Digital Shadows"

"Russian president Dmitry Medvedev announced the end of the so-called 'peace enforcement' operation yesterday. LJ user varfolomeev66 - Radio Echo of Moscow journalist Vladimir Varfolomeev - asked this question on his blog: 'What's next?' He wrote (RUS): I'm not referring to Georgia now. 'The Russian government has used every serious crisis as a reason for yet another tightening of the screws and strengthening of its own positions. After the [Moscow apartment blasts of 1999], the [Second Chechen War] began, and Putin came to power. After [the 2000 Kursk submarine disaster] and then [the Nord-Ost theater siege in 2002], [ORT and NTV TV channels] were finally suppressed. After [Beslan school siege of 2004], regional elections were canceled...'"
From Veronica Khokhlova's blogpost for Global Voices, "Georgia, Russia: 'What's Next?'"