Berkman Buzz: Week of June 28, 2010

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
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What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.

* David Weinberger live-blogs Lewis Hyde's talk on a durable commons.
* Harry Lewis hears alarm bells in Golan v. Holder.
* Future of the Internet rounds up the week's developments.
* OpenNet Initiative on Afghanistan's Internet filtering.
* Doc Searls is having mobile phone trouble, in France.
* Dan Gillmor finds Google retreating in China.
* Christian Sandvig, "STS insider," struggles with his theoretical contribution.
* CMLP sees Net exceptionalism in Viacom v. YouTube.
* Weekly Global Voices: "Angola: Once Upon a Time in Roque Santeiro"

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The full buzz.

"Lewis Hyde is giving a Berkman talk on his new book, Common as Air (Aug 17). He says a commons is a social regime for managing some collectively held resource. The idea comes from the idea of shared property. They worked because they were stinted: ruled for limited use, e.g., you can take wood from trees but only up to a certain height, you could pasture only a limited number of cattle and only if you’re a land owner. So, if you were thinking about cultural commons today, how would you stint them? And, there were limits on people’s ability to take land out of the commons. commoners had the right to take down encroachments, which they would do in the yearly “beating the bounds”; it was a social affair. As early as 1217, there were laws granting the right to tear down encroachments."
From David Weinberger's blog post [berkman] Lewis Hyde on preserving commons

"A federal appeals court has handed down a worrisome decision in the case of Golan v. Holder et al... As part of the Uruguay Round Agreements (“URAA”) on international copyright, the U.S. agreed to extend copyright protection to certain foreign works which had previously been in the public domain in the U.S. Indeed, some of those erstwhile public domain works had been used by U.S. artists and writers to create derivative works. For example, one Richard Kapp, now deceased but whose estate is a plaintiff in the case, used a sound recording based on works by Dmitri Shostakovich to create a work of his own. Having in good faith acted creatively with public domain works, such plaintiffs now find that Congress has cut their legs out from under them, and maintained that Congress infringed their First Amendment rights."
From Harry Lewis' blog post Retroactive Copyright on Public Domain Works

"iPad security breach. Even closed systems can be vulnerable to exploitation. A group of high-profile iPad owners, including President Obama’s Chief of Staff among 114,000 others, had their email addresses exposed by a web security group. Although it was AT&T’s network that was compromised, Apple is shouldering much of the blame, since it denies iPad customers a choice of carriers and also requires an email address to activate the device. AT&T patched the security hole, but not until after the script used to exploit it was shared with third parties. The FBI is investigating."
From Jennifer Halbleib and Elisabeth Oppenheimer's post for Jonathan Zittrain's Future of the Internet blog, FOI Topics and Links of the Week

"Afghanistan has followed up on its promise to being filtering the Internet: the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports the country is now blocking Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, YouTube and a host of sites related to alcohol, gambling and sex. In March, the government announced its intention to begin filtering the Afghan internet, admitting that it lacked the technology but was investigating ways to block sites related to violence, terrorism, pornography or gambling."
From Rebekah Heacock's blog post for ONI, Afghanistan begins Internet filtering with Gmail, Facebook

"At this point, frankly, I’m kinda beyond caring. I don’t know why the phone companies want to make life so damn hard for customers — as well as for themselves. My current theory is that they’re all Enrons of a sort: outfits that make their offerings so complicated that only they can understand them — and even they aren’t that good at it."
From Doc Searls' blog post Orange crush

"Clever dodge or capitulation? Google's latest move in its ongoing battles with China looks like a bit of both. When Google closed its search operations in China last March rather than obey government censorship edicts, the search company tried some corporate judo: It redirected searches from Chinese customers to servers in Hong Kong, thereby providing more honest results than the ones it replaced. Too clever by half, the Beijing regime decided..."
From Dan Gillmor's post in Salon, Google retreats in China

(Herdict also has a post about Google's "New Tactic in China.")

"If you’ve read any STS, you know by now that STS scholars typically make arguments of the form: “What you thought was technical is actually political!” Lately I’ve noticed that the few STS graduate programs and some of the other PhDs that can be easily STS-inflected (sociology, communication/media, information science, …) seem to be training people to think that this is their big contribution. People are quite obvious and upfront about it. They’re proud. If you ask someone: What is the major contribution of your work? The answer is, “I show that X technology is political!” (or sometimes, social). Is this really their money shot? That depends."
From Christian Sandvig's blog post Technology Studies Needs Both Priests and Missionaries

"Last week YouTube won a landmark victory against Viacom in NY federal court. YouTube successfully argued that it was protected from Viacom's copyright infringement claims by the "safe harbor" provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). As the New York Times noted, Google's subsidiary was entitled to a complete defense because it had removed about 100,000 infringing videos from its web site as soon as Viacom requested that it do so." From Marina Petrova's blog post for CMLP, No Safe Harbor Offline

(Bonus Citizen Media Law Project link: Free Speech Savior or Shield for Scoundrels? An Empirical Study of Intermediary Immunity Under Section 230)

"The Roque Santeiro Market, a name that comes from the famous Brazilian soap opera that was a hit among the soap-opera crazed Angolans, is known for being the biggest open-air market in Africa, for transacting thousands of dollars a day, and for being the main stage for the sale of every imaginable product. Fortunately or unfortunately, the market’s days are numbered. The Luandan government plans to move the market from the Sambizanga to Panguila, located nearly 30 kilometers to the north of Luanda. The date has yet to be decided."
From Clara Onofre's blog post for Global Voices, Angola: Once Upon a Time in Roque Santeiro

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The Berkman Buzz is selected weekly from the posts of Berkman Center people and projects: http://cyber.harvard.edu/planet/current/

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