Berkman Buzz, week of August 27
BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society,
Week of
What's going on... take your pick or browse below.
*John Palfrey imagines an ideal non-profit organization
*David Weinberger points to connected Victorian scholarship
*Rebecca MacKinnon discusses Chinese bloggers shrugging off censorship
*William McGeveran describes a tragic misinterpretation of privacy law
*Lawrence Lessig criticizes art schools for “sharecropping” copyrights
*Citizen Media Law Project: Legal Blogger Threatened by Big Law Firm over Posting of Ridiculously Bad Song
*Weekly Global Voice: GV Advocacy - Toward a Global Anti-Censorship Network
The full buzz.
"Total blue sky, inspired in part by a wonderful gathering pulled together by Jake Shapiro at PRX and Vince Stehle at the Surdna Foundation, picking up on thoughts from various contexts: If I could start (or otherwise will into existence) any non-profit right now, what it would do is to develop and apply code for non-profit organizations that are under-using new information technologies for core communications purposes. The organization would be comprised primarily of smart, committed, young coders and project managers, primarily, who know how to take open source and other web 2.0-type tools and apply them to connect to communities of interest..."
John Palfrey, “Throwing Code Over the Wall to Non-Profits”
“Patrick Leary had a terrific article in Journal of Victorian Culture in 2005 that Alexander Macgillivray just pointed out to me. It's called ‘Googling the Victorians,’ and the premise is: ‘Fortuitous electronic connections, and the information that circulates through them, are emerging as hallmarks of humanities scholarship in the digital age.’ He's got some great examples — tracking down the meaning of an 1858 cartoon's ‘Remember the grotto!’ caption — to make the point that ‘What is most striking, and often quite useful, about this sort of fishing expedition is how often the sources in which one finds a ‘hit’ are utterly unexpected.’ Here's another example…”
David Weinberger, “Victorian Scholarship and the miscellaneous”
“As I was digging myself out of the vacation e-mail backlog, I found a pile of alarmed messages. They contained various versions of this story on the Chinese self-discipline pledge that a number of blog hosting services including MSN and Yahoo! signed last week. Before doing anything I checked in with some Chinese bloggers. I found people doing the literary equivalent of thumbing their noses with tongues sticking out and making loud 'pppllhhhh' noises. They seem to view the pledge as a bunch of bureaucrats making yet another meaningless pledge to justify their existence...”
Rebecca MacKinnon, “Chinese bloggers thumb their noses at ‘self discipline’”
“I’ve talked before about how front-line health care workers withhold information because they misunderstand privacy law (or sometimes use it as an excuse). Now it appears the same problem helped bring about the horrific Virginia Tech shootings earlier this year. The state panel investigating the incident has released its final report, which blames university officials for letting the mentally deranged student who perpetrated the shooting slip through the cracks because their misinterpretation of privacy laws made them believe they could not share information about him...”
William McGeveran, “Misunderstanding of Privacy Law at Virginia Tech”
“Film schools are in the business of creating filmmakers -- artists with film. Their job is to teach both the skill and the ethic of an artist. The skill in making film; the ethic of creating art. So what lesson do film schools teach their students about copyright? Unfortunately, in some at least, the most striking lesson is on how best to become an artistic-sharecropper. That at least seems to be the lesson being taught at the University of Hawai'i's Academy of Creative Media. All film students must sign a copyright agreement that either renders their work ‘work for hire’ or assigns completely all copyright in their creative work to the ACM...”
Lawrence Lessig, “On Teaching Artists’ Rights”
“David Lat runs a legal tabloid blog called Above the Law, which provides ‘news and gossip about the profession's most colorful personalities and powerful institutions, as well as original commentary on breaking legal developments.’ No stranger to notoriety in the past, he's recently become the center of attention in a humorous episode involving a leaked 'celebratory anthem' created by the law firm, Nixon Peabody, when the firm made Fortune magazine's 2007 list of the best companies to work for. The song is embarrassingly bad -- As Frank Pasquale of Concurring Opinions puts it, ‘think 'Up With People' meets Sheena Easton meets B of A's version of U2's One...’”
Sam Bayard, “Legal Blogger Threatened by Big Law Firm over Posting of Ridiculously Bad Song”
“During the last six months, since the launch of Global Voices Advocacy, we have been trying to cover the increasingly serious threats to online speech occurring around the globe and the efforts to combat them. We’ve documented the arrest and detention of scores of bloggers and online authors and highlighted several anti-censorship campaigns, reports of Internet censorship, blocked blogs and websites. Our coverage so far has included stories on 25 nations, as well as exclusive interviews with activists and bloggers focused on free speech issues, in addition to an in-depth survey of online censorship cases that rarely receive media attention...”
Sami Ben Gharbia, “GV Advocacy: Toward a Global anti-censorship Network”