Berkman Buzz, week of October 15

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School
Week of October 15, 2007.

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What's going on... take your pick or browse below.

* David Weinberger wonders how to make peer review more widespread.
* John Palfrey analyzes the increasing pressure on Yahoo! in the Shi Tao controversy.
* William McGeveran summarizes new dialogues on trademark use.
* Lawrence Lessig praises Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism.
* Doc Searls argues that the news cycle is a thing of the past.
* Citizen Media Law Project: U.S. House Overwhelmingly Passes Federal Shield Bill, Changes Definition of Who is Covered.
* Weekly Global Voice: El Salvador: Bloggers and Journalists.

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The full buzz.

“I have a friend who is in charge of managing the peer review process at some serious scientific journals. It's a tough job requiring a set of skills that includes dealing with sometimes ornery people, managing multiple schedules, and expertise in the fields in which she works. She makes a good case for peer review, and for the journals that rely on it. Peer review has value and costs money, she says. So, journals have to charge fees to support the peer review process, and they have to hold onto the rights at least long enough to recover their costs.  I recognize the value of peer review. It not only directs our attention to worthwhile research, it is part of an editorial process that improves articles before they're published. But peer review doesn't scale.”
David Weinberger, “Peer review review”

“Rep. Tom Lantos has called on Yahoo! executives to return to Congress to talk about what they knew and when in the Shi Tao case. Rep. Lantos alleges that Yahoo!’s general counsel misled a hearing (at which I and others submitted testimony, too) in 2006 by indicating that the company knew less than it actually did about why the Chinese state police were asking for information about Shi, a dissident and journalist. Yahoo! did turn over the information; the Chinese prosecuted Shi; he remains in jail; and the issue continues to point to the single hardest thing about our US tech companies doing business in places that practice online censorship and surveillance.”
John Palfrey, “Yahoo!, the Shi Tao Case, and the Benefit of the Doubt”

“Sometimes when legal academics debate each other about some area of theory or doctrine, it doesn’t have much impact on judges and regular lawyers. The current debate about the 'trademark use' requirement is not like that. Anyone concerned about free speech and trademark law, or about keyword advertising and related uses of trademarks online, needs to pay attention too. The Iowa Law Review just published an exchange among some of the biggest trademark scholars on just these points. Let me summarize, hopefully in fairly plain English, and also give some links to those important sources that are freely available online.”
William McGeveran, “The ‘Trademark Use’ Debate”

“I bought this book because I heard it described on the radio (NPR, no less) in a way that made it sound like the dumbest book of the decade. It turns out that it was the summary, and not the book, that was dumb. Indeed, this is a fantastic book by an extremely smart and experienced liberal. It is the first book on the Corruption Required Reading list. A clue that there's something interesting here is that here a liberal is arguing (among other great arguments) that the corporate income tax ought to be abolished (shareholders should pay that tax instead), and that corporations should not be giving health benefits to workers (the tax benefit is a huge skew to the economy, producing an inefficient and ineffective national health care system, costing close to $140 billion a year).”
Lawrence Lessig, “Supercapitalism = super”

"Here’s the problem with most news: it isn’t. It’s olds. It happened hours ago, or last night, or yesterday, or last month, or before whenever the deadline was in the news organization’s current "news cycle". It’s not now.  Unless, of course, it’s been fed out through syndication and picked up by a news reader or feed search engine (e.g. Google Blogsearch or Technorati) that’s paying attention to how long ago something got posted.  Note that feeding is not cycling. Rivers don’t flow in circles. News is a river, not a lake.”
Doc Searls, “Future to Newspapers: Jump in the river”

“Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed – for the first time ever – a federal shield bill by a vote of 398 to 21. This follows on the heels of the Senate Judiciary Committee's passage of a similar bill on October 4. The House version, however, makes a critical change in the language regarding who is entitled to the bill's qualified protections by excluding those who do not receive ‘substantial financial gain’ for their activities.”
David Ardia, “U.S. House Overwhelmingly Passes Federal Shield Bill, Changes Definition of Who is Covered”

“The intersection points of blogging and journalism are many and varied in El Salvador. Journalists are bloggers. Bloggers write about journalists and vice versa. Although El Salvador is a country where most people can't spend significant amounts of time online, the ever-growing number of bloggers in El Salvador is starting to influence public debate.  Discussions about the role of blogs were sparked when the conservative El Diario de Hoy newspaper ran a piece titled Cybernetic Proselytism [ES] which warned of supposed dangers from blogs including ‘disinforming, disorienting and denigrating,’ all resulting in prejudice to democracy.”
Tim Muth, “El Salvador: Bloggers and Journalists”