ARTS & FARCES internet

Intellectual property

Agence France-Presse (AFP) is countersuing photographer Daniel Morel because Morel claimed AFP used his photographs without permission or compensation. Morel had published his photographs—and advertised them for sale—on Twitter. AFP doesn’t deny using the photographs but claimed no license was necessary because the photographs were published on Twitter. AFP’s not alone; ABC, CBS, CNN, and Getty Images are also named in Morel’s lawsuit. AFP claims that Twitter’s terms of service grant third parties the right to reuse content published on the social network. That’s just not true. The relevant passage from Twitter’s terms: “This license is you authorizing us to make your Tweets available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same. But what’s yours is yours—you own your content.”

Media

Paul Krassner‘s the Realist—all 146 issues—is finally available on the web. The archive project began in June 2007, but it proved difficult to locate all the issues. Even Krassner himself didn’t have a complete set. And then there were the problems of restoring some of the issues dating to 1958. But now, after more than three years, every issue of the Realist—a true American treasure—is available online, including the subscriber-only material.

The December issue of Harper’s magazine carries an essay by critic Thomas Frank about the crumbling of traditional journalism’s business models and the apocryphal rise of content farms. Without providing a hint of a clue himself, Frank takes Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen to task for their “cognitive failure” in responding to the demise of traditional journalism and its monopoly-based business models. Because Harper’s doesn’t publish online, I can’t link to Frank’s essay. But Rosen fires back against Frank’s disingenuous recasting as “conciliatory” Rosen’s interview with Richard Rosenblatt, chief executive of Demand Media, one of the biggest content farms going. Read it for yourself; Rosen’s interview was anything but conciliatory. Rosen goes on to level a new, mind-bendingly thought-provoking charge against Frank: That Frank could only write his misleadingly dissembling essay because he’s not writing on the web.

Privacy

If the US federal “do not call” lists worked so well—more than 90 percent report fewer telemarketing calls, according to Edward Wyatt and Tanzina Vega, writing for the New York Times—why not a “do not track” list. That’s the thinking of privacy advocates who want to let internet users opt-out of having their online behavior tracked and analyzed in order to assemble shockingly complete dossiers. Wyatt and Vega report that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Commerce Department will release dueling online privacy reports that are likely conflicting in the next few weeks. The Commerce Department favors industry self-regulation while the FTC is at least exploring a mandatory “do not track” option for websites, according to Wyatt and Vega. The Commerce Department started its online privacy study six months after the FTC started its study; most likely because of perceived conflicts between boosting commerce and consumer protection. Marketeers typically despise the “do not track” option. “You simply can’t turn off tracking,” Mike Zaneis, vice president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, tells Wyatt and Vega. “That’s the way interconnected systems talk to each other.”

Publishing

Beginning 1 December 2010, Amazon will increase the revenue split for magazine and newspaper publishers in its Kindle Store to 70 percent minus “delivery costs” ($0.15 per megabyte). Previously Amazon’s revenue split with publishers was as low as 30 percent. Blog publishers who distribute for Kindle will see the revenue split remain at 30 percent of gross revenue. Dan Frommer, writing for Business Insider, opines that “this seems like a change that the publishing industry forced on Amazon, so that publishers could work on the same pricing levels with other content stores, such as Apple’s iTunes.” Frommer cites Ryan Tate’s report for Gawker attributing the limited nature of the New York Times’ iPad app to the Times’ “existing agreement for the Amazon Kindle ... apparently precludes the paper from releasing a cheaper, comparable e-edition on a competing tablet.”

The Center for Public Integrity, the Washington, DC-based nonprofit research outfit is the first online publication to use Treesaver for one of its projects, “Looting the Seas.” Treesaver uses HTML5 to recreate the reading experience of iPad apps in any modern web browser. Content is displayed horizontally—and without advertising—with an optionally displayed vertical navigation bar along the left edge. Navigation between pages is done with the arrow keys on the (gasp) keyboard, and the amount of text displayed and the typography varies according to browser window size. Roger Black is on the Treesaver development team, so you know it’d be gorgeous.