Berkman Buzz: Week of November 1, 2010

November 05, 2010

What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.

* Henry Jenkins interviews Berkman Fellow Sasha Costanza-Chock about DIY video activism.
* John Palfrey proposes a Citizens' Choice Framework for net neutrality.
* Dan Gillmor weighs in on the effect of the midterm elections on net neutrality.
* Lokman Tsui releases his dissertation, "A Journalism of Hospitality."
* CMLP discusses defamation in works in fiction.
* Radio Berkman 167: The Ghost of Video Future.
* Herdict on the Iranian government blocking the website of former President Mohammad Khatami.
* OpenNet Initiative on Turkey's rapid un-banning and re-banning of YouTube.
* Weekly Global Voices: "Peru: Blogger Sentenced for Defamation of Former Politician"

Special note: The Berkman Center is now accepting applications for fellowships for the 2011-2012 academic year.

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The full buzz.

"...Increasingly I think people (not just activists) are also setting up their own, community controlled, noncommercial, free and open source alternatives. For evidence of this just look at the growth of the Open Video Alliance, or the spread of projects like Miro Community or Plumi. Recently, I've been working with Transmission, a network of video makers, programmers and web producers developing online video distribution as a tool for social justice and media democracy, to launch a new free and open source platform to aggregate video from all the activist video organizations that participate in the network. There's a preview up."
From Henry Jenkins' interview with Sasha Constanza-Chock, DIY Video 2010: Activist Media (Part Three)

"The central tenet of this plan would be to locate the choice to differentiate services with the consumer, not with the Internet Service Provider.  The overriding policy goal is to create incentives for increasing bandwidth infrastructure rather than monetizing or encouraging scarcity.  And the plan should prioritize Managed Services that support national purposes as set forth in the National Broadband Plan."
From John Palfrey's blog post A Citizen's Choice Framework for Net Neutrality

"The robber barons who run our local telecom duopolies and the barely competitive mobile networks are surely thrilled with their good luck. They aren't stupid enough to believe voters tossed out Boucher and other net-neutrality supporters on that issue alone, or that voters even gave it much thought, but they'll definitely take advantage of the circumstances."
From Dan Gillmor's post on Salon, Net neutrality another election loser

"How would a newsroom look if we could build it from scratch, current technologies in hand? My project answers this question through a comparative study of legacy mainstream professional newsrooms that have migrated online, what I call “adaptive newsrooms”, and two “transformative” newsrooms, Indymedia and Global Voices. In particular, it takes up the challenge of rethinking journalism in the face of new technologies, by analyzing the cultures, practices and people of a new kind of news production environment: Global Voices, an international project that collects and translates blogs and citizen media from around the world in order to “aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online – to shine light on places and people other media often ignore.”"
From Lokman Tsui's blog post my dissertation lives

"Like the woman who inspired this post, aspiring novelists who plan to "write what they know" should heed the warning of a 2009 libel case from Hall County, Georgia.  In November of that year, a Georgia jury returned a $100,000 verdict for plaintiff Vickie Stewart, finding that a character in The Red Hat Club, the 2003 New York Times best-selling novel by Haywood Smith, had been based on Stewart's life and inspired by Stewart's involvement with the Red Hat Society  (a real-life organization of women over 50 who dress in red hats and purple clothes and get together with the goal of celebrating and enjoying life to the fullest).  The case went to the jury on claims of defamation and publication of private facts (though the jury ultimately rejected the publication of private facts claim) because the Judge found over two dozen specific similarities between the lives of the plaintiff, who had known the novel's author for over 50 years, and the character "SuSu," a middle-aged flight attendant who figures prominently in the book. "
From CMLP's blog post When Art Imitates Life: Suing for Defamation in Fiction

This week, Radio Berkman reports back from the Open Video Conference, the annual "confab of industry, artists, techies, and academics thinking about the future of video on the web and in the world" to share thoughts from Tiffiniy Cheng and Holmes Wilson, co-founders of the Participatory Culture Foundation on technologies to make video more accessible, and from Adam Chodikoff, senior producer of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, about the value of the mainstream media.
Radio Berkman 167: The Ghost of Video Future

"The Telegraph UK reported a few weeks ago that Iran’s government has recently blocked Iranian ex-President Mohammad Khatami’s website, khatami.ir. Led by current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the administration banned access to Khatami’s posts, in which he expresses his opposition to Ahmadinejad. A website affiliated with the main opposition group led by Mir Hossein Mousavi confirmed that the government committee in charge of monitoring Internet content in Iran was actively blocking Khatami’s site."
From Qichen Zhang's blog post for Herdict, Former Iranian President's Website Blocked in Iran

"Less than a week after the media declared YouTube accessible in Turkey, the country has again blocked the site, this time in response to a video purportedly showing former opposition leader Deniz Baykal in a hotel room with a woman who is not his wife.  Yesterday, the OpenNet Initiative asked, in a blog post, if Turkey's unbanning of YouTube would be short-lived: Indeed, it was."
From Jillian C. York's blog post for ONI, Turkey: Unbanning of YouTube Short-Lived Indeed

"On Friday, October 29th, the court's sentence was handed down for the offensive libel suit brought by the former government minister and parliament member Jorge Mufarech Nemy against the law school graduate and blogger José Alejandro Godoy. The judge's ruling calls for a suspended sentence of three years imprisonment, commuted to a three-year probation as long as Godoy fulfills additional obligations: a payment of 350 thousand soles (approx. $125,000) and 120 days of community service. The reaction from the media and bloggers has been immediate."
From Juan Arellano's blog post for Global Voices, Peru: Blogger Sentenced for Defamation of Former Politician

(Bonus: the Berkman Center's recently released "Accountability and Transparency at ICANN: An Independent Review")

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The weekly Berkman Buzz is selected from the posts of Berkman Center people and projects -- http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/planet/current/ -- and sometimes from the Center's wider network -- http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/planet/network/

Suggestions and feedback about the Buzz are always welcome and can be emailed to jyork@cyber.law.harvard.edu