Berkman Buzz: Week of June 22, 2009

June 26, 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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*Johnathan Zittrain briefly comments on Twitter and "Breaking the 140 Barrier"
*David Weinberger examines "The Price of Music" on Radio Berkman
*Ethan Zuckerman looks at a match made ins heaven in, "Twitter and the news cycle, perfect together"
*Dan Gillmor asks, "What Pays for Newspaper Journalism? Not the 'Cover Price'"
*The OpenNet Initiative reports, "Germany Passes Legislation to Block Child Pornograhpy"
*Christopher Soghoian takes aim at in flight wi-fi when he asks, "Do we need net neutrality at 35,000 feet?"
*David Ardia reports, "Berkman's Cyberlaw Clinic Submits Amicus Brief in Case Involving Prior Restraint and Reporter's Privilege"
*The Law Lab gets lofty in "Cloud Law: When Technology Blurs Human Values"
*Weekly Global Voices: "Togo Abolishes The Death Penalty"

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"Twitter is a foundational technology.  By that I don’t mean it’s (necessarily) revolutionary, just that it’s a building block.  Its open APIs allow it to be baked into all sorts of other services, and like other foundational technologies — say, PC operating systems, or Internet protocol — it’s evolving comparatively slowly.  Even MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia, hasn’t changed all that quickly.  Too much is built on top of it, both technologically and in users’ practices, to change it hastily..."
From Johnathan Zittrain's blog post, "Breaking the 140 Barrier"

"At $80,000 per song, the 24 tracks Jammie Thomas-Rasset is accused of sharing on the Kazaa could represent the most expensive album of all time. Last week a federal jury suggested the fine, adding up to $1.92 million, seemed like a fair price for willful infringement..."
From David Weinberger's interview for Radio Berkman, "The Price of Music"

It’s nice to be listened to. I guess. Maybe. Though I now find myself wondering whether I wouldn’t be better off shutting up. I saw the first reports of Michael Jackson’s death on Twitter around 6pm. I ran a little script I threw together some weeks ago called 'twitcent' to see just how many tweets would share the news. Twitcent takes advantage of the fact that Twitter gives a unique, sequential ID to each tweet to estimate the intensity of posting around certain terms..."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post, "Twitter and the news cycle, perfect together"

"In 'Is Free News Really Worth the Price?,' Alan Cowell of the New York times writes: 'The cover price of a newspaper acknowledges that news has a value and a price worth paying. Yet that idea sometimes seems remote to a Web-savvy generation brought up to believe that their laptops offer a portal to a cost-free universe.' Cowell’s point is muddled by reality. He’s making the same assumptions — and mistakes — that newspaper journalists have been making for a long time now. They don’t realize that they’ve already been, for practical purposes, giving away what they produce..."
From Dan Gillmor's blog post, "What Pays for Newspaper Journalism? Not the 'Cover Price'"

"First it was the UK, then Australia: Over the past year, ONI has witnessed consideration of filtering schemes by several Western countries, as well as the leaking of 'secret block lists' for a few others (such as Norway and Denmark). The latest country to consider a nationwide policy is Germany; in April of 2009, its coalition government drafted a bill aimed at cracking down on child pornography by method of a DNS block list..."
From The OpenNet Initiative blog post, "Germany Passes Legislation to Block Child Pornography"

"Gogo Inflight Internet Wireless is the sole provider of in-flight Wi-Fi in the United States -- and is already installed aboard planes in the domestic fleets of Delta, American and Virgin America. While their service is awesome -- their pricing plans currently involve some fairly horribly discriminatory pricing. 'Mobile' devices including iPhones, Nokia handsets and various Windows Mobile devices pay $7.95 for flights of any length, whereas laptops pay $9.95 or $12.95 based on the length of the flight..."
From Christopher Soghoian's blog post, "Do we need net neutrality at 35000ft?"

"The lawsuit involves The Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter, a website covering news related to the mortgage industry, that posted a New Hampshire Banking Department document, obtained from an anonymous source.  That document described certain business practices of the Mortgage Specialists, Inc., a lending company under investigation in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.  After the mortgage company discovered the disclosure, it sued the website's operators, demanding that the document be removed and that the anonymous source be identified.  The Rockingham County Superior Court granted these requests, and the case is presently on appeal..."
From David Ardia's blog post for The Citizen Media Law Project, "Berkman's Cyberlaw Clinic Submits Amicus Brief in Case Involving Prior Restraint and Reporter's Privilege"

"As technology augments and mediates our daily lives what does it mean to be human if functioning and surviving in a digital dependent society necessitates or mandates technology use? What are the human values that emerge from this melding of co-dependent activity? What new power structures emerge from increased dependency on Cloud technology when individuals have limited control over balance and distribution of processes? How do we assess the Human Experience under these new terms and how does this experience change the value systems that Cloud Laws are based on? What new human rights might emerge from the evolving inter-dependency between the personal technologies (embedded) with its interaction on the Cloud? These are questions at core of our legal systems that challenge the notions and foundations under which laws are based..."
From the Law Lab blog post, "Cloud Law: When Technology Blurs Human Values By Ray Garcia"

"Togo's National Assembly voted on Tuesday to end the death penalty for all crimes, making it the 15th member of the African Union to abolish capital punishment.Although death sentences have been given for crimes as recently as 2003, Togo has not carried out an execution since 1978..."
From Jennifer Brea's blog post for Global Voices, "Togo Abolishes The Death Penalty"