Berkman Buzz: November 10, 2014

Thursday's announcement by Aereo that it will be shuttering its Boston office and laying off most of its staff is the inevitable consequence of an unfortunate Supreme Court decision that will chill disruptive innovation in stodgy industries like broadcasting for many years to come.

Aereo is, of course, the company that deployed a warehouse full of dime-sized antennas to stream over-the-air broadcasts to its customers' Internet-connected devices. Unlike traditional cable TV systems, which use one big antenna to capture and distribute the same broadcast signals to every subscriber, each of Aereo's tiny antennas enabled individual customers to watch a broadcast in real-time or record programs on Aereo's cloud-based DVR service.

Existing copyright policy is based largely on the utilitarian theory of incentivizing creative works. This Article looks at content production incentives in the online adult entertainment industry. A recent trend of industry-specific studies tries to better understand the relationship between intellectual property (IP) and creation incentives in practice. This Article makes a contribution to the literature by analyzing a major entertainment content industry where copyright protection has been considerably weakened in recent years. Because copyright infringement is widespread and prohibitively difficult to prevent, producers have been effectively unable to rely on the economic benefits that copyright is intended to provide.

From the millimeter to ASCII to USB, standards are integral to practical innovation in commerce, the sciences, and technology. But for all their uniformity and consistency, standards are the products of history-and as such, they're never finished, but always in the making. How do standards come to be standard? Their histories connect the cutting edge to the distant past and help us to understand how our latter-day proposals fit into the long story of modernity.

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"For someone with an interest in privacy, there's certainly a lot about you online."

Someone once said that to me, and I laughed because I never said my research was about privacy. It's a common assumption that because I'm writing about data and algorithms, I'm working on privacy.

I often share personal details in my stories to get my point across - when Netflix thinks I have children, when fitness trackers don't match my personal fitness needs, or when Facebook asks me about my fiancé. I understand the cognitive dissonance that comes from sharing these details in an article when it seems the concern is about privacy. I rarely use the word in my work or in introducing myself, yet people still categorize the set of concerns I raise as falling under the umbrella term "privacy."

As more of our lives are made legible as data and more of our experiences are processed by algorithms, I think privacy is an inexact term and doesn't fully encapsulate the range of our concerns. So if not "privacy," what could we call our concerns over data instead?

Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets, my new book available full text @creativecommons http://bit.ly/shadows-streets #oa cc @joi @doctorow
—Sasha Costanza-Chock (@schock)
 

Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society has recently adopted an open-access policy. Open access means unrestricted access to peer-reviewed research. This entails no paywalls or other forms of limited access. Berkman's new policy is a pioneering model, even within Harvard University. Harvard has stated for years that it cannot afford journal publishers' prices.

Earlier this year, a peer-reviewed book chapter I wrote was published in a book, and unfortunately behind a paywall. The publisher Asser Press / Springer Press sent me a digital version of my chapter, but told me I could not make it available for download although I never signed a copyright waiver. I looked for Springer Press's policies and found they actually have an open-acess option. Except that you have to pay this tiny fee of 3000 USD to publish an article open access.

This post is not about the scandal unfolding precipitously around former CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi. I am not particularly interested in using this space to go through the sundry dirty details of the story, to debate whether or not Ghomeshi has been convicted in the court of public opinion without a trial, or whether or not the only place he'll ever work again is France. There is no shortage of others filling the traditional and social media horns of plenty with all manner of opinions that pertain to those and other questions, and really, another voice added to those aspects of the discussion is not needed. Instead, I want to examine this story for the way it demonstrates how new forms of media have changed our experience of breaking news and events. That way we sidestep the circus, number one, and number two, even if you don't know who Jian Ghomeshi is, or care about the story one way or the other, there is food for thought contained within.

The Cyberlaw Clinic has filed a petition on behalf of a coalition of medical device researchers as part of the Copyright Office and Library of Congress’ rulemaking for exemptions to copyright's anti-circumvention law. Every three years the Librarian of Congress, at the recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, considers exemptions to the general law against circumventing technological measures that prevent the public from accessing copyrighted works. These exemptions are granted in cases where the law against circumventing technological measures around copyrighted works unduly impedes on lawful uses of those works. (For more on anti-circumvention law, see the Chilling Effects FAQ.)

TheRuNet is in uproar over a new scandal that threatens the fate of one of the few arguably independent media outlets in Russia. A comment made on Twitter by a veteran Ekho Moskvy journalist has caused him trouble with the radio station's owners and possibly cost him his job. But is this really about a tweet?

Aleksandr Plushev, a journalist and radio host for Ekho Moskvy, one of Russia's most venerable media institutions, was informed he was being fired by the station and its main shareholder, Gazprom-Media. This news came soon after Plushev posted a tweet commenting on the death of the son of Sergey Ivanov, Putin's chief of staff. Some found the tweet provocative, and others, like municipal deputy and activist Maxim Katz, complained directly to Aleksey Venediktov, Plushev's chief editor.