Berkman Buzz: April 13, 2012

From the ever-growing file of trademark cases that are bad for free speech, Eric Goldman and Techdirt bring us an interesting case concerning a recent Hyundai ad. The ad is a series of brief vignettes conveying luxurious items in non-luxury settings: … a group of people playing basketball with a ball that appears to have what Louis Vuitton calls its "Toile Monogram" pattern on it. … As this blog noted as recently as last month, Louis Vuitton is notoriously aggressive in trademark enforcement. This was no exception. The company brought suit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging a variety of trademark violations.

Last fall, the Associated Press introduced an updated social media policy for its reporters and editors. As recently reported in Yahoo! News, the AP memo advised reporters and editors that “Retweets, like tweets, should not be written in a way that looks like you’re expressing a personal opinion on the issues of the day. A retweet with no comment of your own can easily be seen as a sign of approval of what you’re relaying.” The guidelines note, “[W]e can judiciously retweet opinionated material if we make clear we’re simply reporting it.”

Members of the media might want to be careful, however, that statements like “No comment” or “without comment” before tweets do not take on meanings of their own. Often, retweeting something “without comment” can indicate an unwillingness to comment due to an either enthusiastic support for or disapproval of the content of the original tweet.

The folks @medialab interviewed me about my news habits: t.co/bLUXx97i --danah boyd (@zephoria)

My friend Nathaniel James has a kickstarter-like project going in order to fund a 90-day tour gathering stories and information about “New Giving.” (Yes, this is a self-reflective New Giving project.) He’s got five days left to reach the tipping point so that the project actually gets funded. Nathaniel is a smart, sincere, good-hearted person, so I kicked in a little bit. But I have reservations. Not about Nathaniel. About this model of funding.

Brief video update on the #DPLA planning effort as of April 2012 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2g16PY7xNUg; next stop: San Francisco April 26-27 @digpublib -- John Palfrey (@JPalfrey)

I’m Benjamin Mako Hill and I’m a rebel with rather too many causes. I’m a social scientist and PhD student at MIT studying free culture and free software communities: my dissertation is on the sociology of attracting contributors to free culture projects. I’m also a hacker on a bunch of free software projects, a writer, and a blogger. In various ways, I’ve been involved with Debian, Ubuntu, Wikipedia, One Laptop per Child, and the Free Software Foundation.

OER Grantees Meeting 2012: Keynote by Joi Ito http://storify.com/berkmancenter/oer-grantees-meeting-2012-keynote-by-joi-ito #storify #oer12hf -- Joi Ito (@Joi)

This week's guest, Juan Carlos de Martin, readily admits that he is only the latest in a long line of thinkers to portend the end of the university as we know it. He almost gleefully cites Thomas Edison as one of his most notable predecessors. But Juan Carlos may be the first to be right. David Weinberger interviewed Juan Carlos – a Berkman Fellow and co-founder of the NEXA Center for Internet and Society in Torino, Italy – about what Juan Carlos has called the "perfect storm" on the University's horizon.

Change policy first - or the world and let policy follow? No, see it as feedback cycle, says Peter Suber #oer12hf -- Urs Gasser (@ugasser)

I actually hate to talk about copyright because, once it's brought up, it just seems to take over any conversation. Most of the time I feel like that conversation then becomes counterproductive. People throw around complex legal principles. The jargon resembles a foreign language. Often, the emotions get so heated that a room ends up divided at just the time when we need to work together. I've also noticed that most of the people crowing about copyright aren't individual copyright holders. They're groups of people who make money from the business of policing and administering copyright.