ARTS & FARCES internet

Censorship

The third US Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that public schools can discipline students for their off-campus, online speech (.pdf; 434KB), but may not go as far as suspending a 14-year-old student. The court also ruled that a Pennsylvania school district violated the First Amendment rights of two students who were disciplined by the school for publishing remarks about their principal, using off-campus computers. The test for suppressing student off-campus speech is the same as a 1969 US Supreme Court ruling: Whether or not the speech will “materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.” But in the Supreme Court case, about whether students could wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, the decision was about on-campus speech. Now that decision has been extended to students’ off-campus speech.

Apple, bending over even further for the entertainment cartel, has apparently applied for a patent on new technology that disables mobile phone video upon command from external signals in public venues. Tim O’Reilly takes the next logical step: “Now imagine if that same technology were deployed by repressive regimes. Goodbye to one of the greatest tools we’ve yet seen for advancing democracy.” O’Reilly’s wrong to think that the situation would be any different with Google, but he’s absolutely correct in calling the entertainment cartel “one of the most pernicious industries on our planet.” Eric S. Raymond has published an analysis of the risks of computing environments that are not user-controllable “down to the bit level.” Here’s Raymond’s nut graf: “As we become increasingly dependent on computers and the internet to mediate our communications with others, the integrity of our social and political networks requires that we have complete control of those computers. Without that control, not only are we liable to have our communications with others blocked and filtered, the evidence of reality itself can be suppressed. Concerts, police actions, and political demonstrations can be censored from the internet-enabled conversation. These events can, in an increasingly important sense, be made unwitnessable –- deleted from social memory.”

Intellectual property

Last year Righthaven, a copyright holding company, began entering into agreements with newspaper publishers to litigate against website owners excerpting and linking to the newspaper content. More than 200 of these copyright infringement cases have been filed, and about a third of the defendant websites have settled. In April, a federal judge unsealed the agreement between Righthaven and one of its client publishers, revealing the client publisher receives half of the proceeds of the lawsuits and that Righthaven holds only limited rights in the published material, potentially limiting the copyright holding company’s standing in these lawsuits. On 14 June 2011, US District Judge Roger Hunt dismissed one of the infringement cases brought by Righthaven (.pdf; 143KB), characterizing the case as a “sham,” and ruling that Righthaven didn’t have standing because it never owned the copyright on the published material. “Today’s decision shows that Righthaven’s copyright litigation business model is fatally flawed, and we expect the decision to have wide effect on the over 270 other cases Righthaven has brought,” said Kurt Opsahl, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) senior staff attorney in a statement. In the case, the Democratic Underground website published an excerpt from an article, a clear application of the fair use exception to US copyright law. Would that the judge rule on that, the core of the case, instead of a technicality, albeit a big one.

Media

At first glance, the latest French attempt at internet control—no, not Sarkozy’s e-G8 summit plea to “civilize” it; the ruling by the Conseil superieur de l’audiovisuel prohibiting the mention of Facebook or Twitter on broadcast except when discussing either company directly—appears to be the frogs being, well, frogs. Not so fast. John Naughton, writing for the Observer, does an excellent job of unpacking the ruling. Basically, it’s just being consistent with a 1992 ruling that prohibits media organizations from promoting brands during news broadcasts. “What’s going on, in other words, is that our media are treating Twitter and Facebook as if they were public utilities, like the open web,” writes Naughton. He goes on to cite Dave Winer’s earlier explanation: “The Library of Congress, which is part of the government, is subsidizing Twitter, by doing a complete archive of Twitter, before making a serious attempt at archiving the web. This helps cement Twitter as the medium of record, which is ridiculous.”

Publishing

Guardian News & Media (GNM), publisher of the Guardian, has announced plans to become a digital-first news organization, focusing its efforts on open journalism. The move comes at a time when digital audiences have grown rapidly while print circulation and advertising revenue continue to diminish. Kevin Anderson, writing for Strange Attractor, notes that at its present burn rate (GNM has lost about £34.4 million and £33 million in 2010 and 2011 respectively) the business could run out of money in three to five years.

The spammers have figured out how easy-to-use Amazon’s Kindle ebook publishing system is and have begun content farming it. Exceptionally low-quality “books” are being published in the Kindle store with little more content than a crop of links to publishing your own spam books. Hell, you’re even encouraged to reuse the content in your own spam book so long as you leave the content and links intact. It’s called Private Label Rights, content acquired for nothing or nearly so and reformatted into an ebook. Alistair Barr, writing for Reuters, reports these book-like digital artifacts are placed in Amazon’s Kindle store, right next to the good stuff. Alexis Madrigal, writing for the Atlantic, calls it “... some kind of bizarro remix culture in which everything sucks and is for sale.” Casey Johnston, writing for Ars Technica, explores the Private Label Rights universe.

User experience

“I’ve found the most valuable thing you can do to improve a website or app is to have the people who are building it, paying for it, or marketing it watch some people trying to use it.” That’s what Steve Krug tells Oliver Lindberg, writing for .net. For Krug, the answer to the usability testing question is do-it-yourself. “You can do your own usability tests and do them fairly well,” he tells Lindberg. It’s going to cost a couple of hundred dollars as opposed to US$5,000-US$10,000. And you can do them more frequently, which is much more valuable.”