ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard law professor named by President Obama as a special advisor to oversee the development of a new federal Consumer Finance Protection Agency, earned US$90,000 as an expert witness in a class-action lawsuit against credit card networks and the US’s biggest banks. Warren did this at the same time that she was heading the US congressional oversight panel monitoring the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP)—the US$700 billion bank bailout. Robert Schmidt, writing for Bloomberg, reports that Warren discussed the situation before ever joining the congressional oversight panel and the outside work was cleared by the panel’s ethics counsel. Furthermore, Warren’s outside work was permitted under the rules governing her part-time panel appointment. Richard Paynter, who was President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer and is now on the faculty of the University of Minnesota Law School, told Schmidt, “She should have had the judgment to say no. It’s highly inappropriate in a position that has this much power.” Really? George W. Bush’s top ethics lawyer is calling Elizabeth Warren out on, of all things, ethics. Really? Disclosure notice: My potential conflicts of interest are clearly listed in the “Disclosure box” sidebar. To be absolutely clear: I have been employed by the University of Minnesota’s College of Design as senior editor/ecommunications manager since 25 July 2006.

Intellectual property

The entertainment cartel is back pulling US congressional strings. If the legislation Hollywood wants passed—Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act (COICA)—makes it into law, the US will look and feel like China or Saudi Arabia where, “as a nation that makes sure most of its citizens won’t find information that a tiny, elite group deems improper for their eyes,” As Dan Gillmor writes in his piece for Salon. The bill would mandate the creation and maintenance of two domain name system (DNS) blacklists of censored domains: The first list containing those domains that the US Department of Justice deems to exist for the “central” purpose of copyright infringement; the second list containing those domains that a court has ordered put on the list. Internet service providers and domain registrars would be incentivized to block access to domains on the first list, but required to block access to domains on the second list.

Internet

Do you feel like you’re tweeting to an empty room? Don’t feel alone. Jennifer Van Grove, writing for Mashable, cites a Sysomos study of 1.2 billion tweets finding that 71 percent of all tweets are neither replied to or retweeted. Only six percent of tweets get retweeted, and almost all replies and retweets happen in the first hour (96.9 percent and 92.4 percent, respectively).

Law

Last year the US Supreme Court equated money with speech and decided that corporations have free-speech rights under the First Amendment. This week the Supremes agreed to hear a case concerning whether a corporation has privacy rights and can challenge the release of government documents. AT&T successfully blocked the release of documents related to a 2004 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigation into its billing practices for the E-Rate program. The telecommunications giant claimed the documents are “competitively sensitive” and protected under a provision in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that protects “personal privacy.” The Obama administration appealed to the Supreme Court over the protest of AT&T who argued, “Corporations, like individuals, face the prospect of public embarrassment, harassment, and stigma based on their involvement in such investigations,” according to Greg Stohr writing for Bloomberg. AT&T and the lower courts hold that the definition of a “person” with regard to FOIA includes corporations as well as natural human beings. The Obama administration argues that only natural individual human beings have privacy rights.

Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Kennesaw State’s Center for Sustainable Journalism hosted the Media Law in the Digital Age conference and promise to publish video clips of the panel discussions. Meanwhile, the conference handouts are available in aggregate (.pdf; 5.3MB). This is a fantastic resource detailing the quick and constant changes to the American legal system with regard to media law. Highly recommended.

Media

In a stunning act of wishful thinking, Helienne Lindvall, writing for the Guardian, tries to take down Cory Doctorow in her lede. Lindvall, penning an article on the hefty speaking fees that advocates of a free content business model command, writes, “it’ll cost you US$25,000 to get him [Doctorow] to speak at your conference (according to his booker, the fee is only US$10,000 to US$20,000 if it’s a ‘college-oriented talk’).” Doctorow, in the comments, schools Lindvall on his actual speaking fees from the past six months.

Privacy

Because much of the American citizenry no longer uses wireline telephones, the Obama administration wants new internet regulations that make it easier to wiretap internet communications—including the decryption of encrypted communications. Charlie Savage, writing for the New York Times, reports US federal law enforcement and national security officials argue “that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is ‘going dark’ as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.” The officials want easy wiretap access to “all services that enable communications”—everything from mobile smartphones to Facebook. James Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology tells Savage, “They basically want to turn back the clock and make internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.” Under the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), US broadband networks are already required to have such wiretap capabilities. The decryption of encrypted communications bit harkens back to the crypto wars of the 1990s when the US intelligence community insisted public key cryptography was a national security threat. The security experts provided excruciating detail showing that strong cryptography actually benefitted national security.

In a similar move, the Obama administration is proposing that banks be required to report all electronic transfers. Banks are currently required to report cash transactions of more than US$10,000 and to keep records on all transactions of more than US$3,000. “It is an extraordinary overreach by the US government,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Martin Crutsinger, writing for the Associated Press. “This looks like a big electronic fishing expedition.”

Publishing

The corporate book publishing industry has clearly reached its apotheosis and it’s all downhill from here. The bean counters say it’s because the sale of print books has been declining since 2008 and while ebook sales have more than made up the slack in unit sales, authors’ share of revenues is way down. Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, writing for the Wall Street Journal runs the numbers: “A new US$28 hardcover book returns half, or US$14, to the publisher, and 15%, or US$4.20, to the author. Under many ebook deals currently, a digital book sells for US$12.99, returning 70%, or US$9.09, to the publisher and typically 25% of that, or US$2.27, to the author.” Trachtenberg’s article focuses solely on literary fiction and finds that author advances have shrunk drastically. The legendary seven figure advances from a corporate publisher for an author’s first book are gone, replaced with US$15,000 or less. But the bean counting is only half the story (advances from the independent publishers have always been much, much lower). Corporate publishers are no longer willing to patiently nurture an author through several books. “Writers like Anne Tyler and Elmore Leonard have to simmer quite a bit before they are going to boil. Publishers no longer have the patience to work through multiple modest successes,” Laurence Kirshbaum, a literary agent, tells Trachtenberg. “There is a real danger that these people could be lost today.” Novelist EL Doctorow thinks that publishing may be reverting to its cottage industry origins, and that may be a good thing. “Writers come up from nowhere, from the ground up, and nobody is looking for them or asking for them, but there they are,” Trachtenberg quotes Doctorow as saying. “If there is a weeding out that’s going to occur because of such difficulties, it may be all to the good.”