Berkman Buzz: Week of February 16, 2009

February 20, 2009

BERKMAN BUZZ:  A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations.  If you'd like to receive this by email, sign up here.

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*Jonathan Zittrain looks at Facebook's privacy storm
*The Citizen Media Law Project examines Congressional efforts to stop "libel tourism"
*The Internet & Democracy Project talks about the "Freedom to Scream" in Egypt
*Digital Natives intern Sarah Zhang discusses building online communities
*Hal Abelson explores the iPhone prison
*Ethan Zuckerman follows the political crisis in Madagascar via Twitter
*danah boyd licenses her dissertation under Creative Commons after a brief adventure
*Publius Essay: "Decision-Making in a Culture of Participation" by Craig Newmark
*Weekly Global Voices: "Cambodia: Pushing for a more organic future"

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"Facebook and other social networks have an especially tricky time in this zone, since so much user data is relational.  You upload a photo of you and me; I tag it with your name.  I leave Facebook — does your name disappear from the photo since I was the one who originally tagged it?  Should all traces of someone vanish from everyone’s news feed, or is the alert that X posted a photo (along with a thumbnail of the photo) a different contribution than … posting the photo? Facebook possibly thought to avoid these issues — or at least retain maximum flexibility to answer them — by including the sweeping clauses about being able to retain our data forever..."
From Jonathan Zittrain's blog post, "Facebook’s privacy storm"

"After several false starts, it looks like Congress is finally going to address the issue of "libel tourism," an unfortunate practice where foreign plaintiffs pick the jurisdiction with the most draconian libel laws in which to sue. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press writes that the anti-"libel tourism" bill introduced last year by Senators Arlen Specter, Joseph Lieberman, and Charles Schumer is back under consideration in the Senate.  (And judging by information on Govtrack.org, the new bill has already made more headway toward becoming law than last year's version.) Substantively, the bill would prevent courts from recognizing foreign libel judgments that conflict with First Amendment protections for authors..."
From Arthur Bright's blog post for the Citizen Media Law Project, "Congressional Efforts to Stymie 'Libel Tourism' Rev Up"

"I’ve been digging into our data on the Arabic language blogosphere lately, so I was drawn immediately to Michael Slackman’s great piece in the Times today on blogging in Egypt. He writes that critics of the government are relatively free to complain about the government and even the security services in Egypt, but that taking any steps towards real world protest will quickly get you into hot water. As Egyptian writer Fahmy Howeidy says in the article, 'I call it the freedom to scream. You can say what you want, but you cannot act...'"
From the Internet & Democracy Project blog post, "The 'Freedom to Scream' in Egypt"

"What a week for controversy! As the hubbub over Facebook’s of terms of services is dying down, Tumblr just weathered its own round of controversy over its ToS. Tumblr hasn’t permeated the mainstream as much as Facebook, but it’s remarkable how much the situations mirror each other. In both cases, a sudden top-down policy decision sparked a user revolt that led to the company backpedaling and reverting to their original policies..."
From the Digital Natives Project blog post, "Building Communities: Tumblr and Freedom of Expression"

"iPhones are prisons: iPhones have software locks to ensure that the only applications that run on them are applications you get from Apple.  The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) technology for constructing such locks is explained in chapter 6 of Blown to Bits, illustrated there with the fictitious example of Fortress Publishers.   Now Apple is playing the role of Fortress, and the example is anything but fictitious. The process of removing those TPM locks, a process called jailbreaking, violates the anticircumvention provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).  Apple wants to keep it that way..."
From Hal Abelson's blog post, "The iPhone and the DMCA: i is for 'imprisonment'"

"The nature of breaking news is changing. Recent breaking stories, like the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, have been simulcast on mainstream news sites and via social media like blogs and twitter. To stay up to date, I’ve increasingly found myself triangulating between traditional and new media, sometimes frustrated by the speed of rumor spread in new media, sometimes moved by the personal, direct and eyewitness perspectives I’ve gotten from individuals directly affected by attacks..."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post, "Watching Madagascar, via Twitter"

"When I wrote my dissertation, it didn't dawn on me that using the Creative Commons license might be remotely controversial. There's a template for dissertations at Berkeley and one of those pages is the copyright page. Initially, I edited the copyright page to match the CC license that Cory Doctorow uses in all of his books on the copyright page. Shortly before I was set to file, I talked to another grad student in my department who had just filed his dissertation. Much to my horror, I learned that he was the first student to file his dissertation at Berkeley under the Creative Commons license and that it had been a disaster..."
From danah boyd's blog post, "licensing your dissertation under Creative Commons"

"A culture of participation involves a community which is to some large extent, self-governing. In principle, everyone participates in the decision-making process, perhaps just by voicing their opinion. In principle, decisions have buy-in from everyone involved, even if they are merely tolerated. In such environments, there's a continuous process of consensus-building, involving a large degree of mutual trust. It involves the 'consent of the governed.' Consensus-building, when done well, involves most everyone and relies on a lot of buy-in. However, consensus-building skills are rare, and the process is frequently a lengthy one. It involves many one to one or one to a few conversations..."
From Craig Newmark's Publius essay, "Decision-Making in a Culture of Participation"

"Bloggers at CAAI News Media and Khmer Stars feature a Phnom Penh Post article on the slow food movement that ran on February 10, 2009. The article discusses Slow Food's philosophy of creating food in a good, clean and fair manner and how that philosophy is applied in Cambodia. The article interviews a restaurant owner in Phnom Penh who explains the country's relatively clean soil..."
From Chhunny Chhean's blog post for Global Voices, "Cambodia: Pushing for a more organic future"