A recent study concluded that use of social media by jurors is infrequent with the implication that the practice is not a growing problem, but Eric P. Robinson, writing for the Citizen Media Law Center, says that the study takes a far too optimistic stance on the issue.

Given the rampant use of the social media by the general public supplying the juror pools and the difficulty of detecting its use by jurors, Robinson argues that the study’s findings are dubious. -db

From a commentary for the Citizen Media Law Center, February 6, 2012 by Eric P. Robinson.

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BY PETER SCHEER—Successful technology firms pride themselves on their capacity to disrupt the established order. The reference is usually to a technological advance that poses an existential threat to an entrenched industry or way of doing business. Think of Apple Computer’s impact on the cellphone and music industries, Google on the sale and delivery of advertising, or Amazon on book publishing–to name just a few.

But in their recent protests against anti-piracy legislation pending in Congress–the SOPA  bill—high-tech firms demonstrated, for the first time, their awesome capacity for “creative destruction” of a political establishment that they see as hostile to their interests. Literally within hours of Wikipedia going dark and Google’s covering its logo with the black band of censorship, members of Congress were running for the exits, disavowing their previously pledged support for SOPA.

Legislators barely hesitated before reneging on literally decades of accumulated political debts to Hollywood interests, the principal backers of the anti-piracy bill. These politicians cowered before the emergence of a new political institution—more powerful even than the traditional media, the so-called “Fourth Estate,” in its heyday. Call this new institution, the corporate power brokers of Silicon Valley and other digital meccas across the country, the Fifth Estate. Pulling the plug on SOPA was the occasion for their political coming out.

Shrewdly, the Fifth Estate selected a political strategy that relied entirely on symbolic expression. The online anti-SOPA protests involved no threats of violence, no coercion, no overnight camping in public parks or blocking of street traffic during rush hour. Municipalities were not required to pay overtime to police. Tasers guns and pepper spray remained holstered. And there were no injuries.

The Fifth Estate’s tactic of symbolic protest was the essence of constitutionally protected expression.

In this context it is worth noting that the First Amendment rights on display in this debate were secured by the US Supreme Court’s controversial decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. That misunderstood case is reviled in some quarters for its affirmation of the First Amendment rights of corporations. Indeed, in the aftermath of the Citizens United decision, a cottage industry has emerged to advocate legislation (or, God forbid, constitutional amendments) to curb the influence of corporations in the political sphere.

Their good intentions notwithstanding, those who believe corporations have no free speech rights (or that they should have, at most, a second-rate version of the free speech protections for individuals), should realize that only the First Amendment stands in the way of governmental punishment–legislative, regulatory or otherwise–against Google and other Fifth Estate corporations for their inciting of public opinion against SOPA-type legislation.

Think of how many members of Congress, humiliated (or at least humbled) by the anti-SOPA blow-back on the internet, would love to not only punish the Fifth Estate for its political impudence, but to neuter it permanently–for example, by blocking corporate acquisitions,  unleashing antitrust and SEC investigations, or instigating IRS scrutiny.

One does not have to be a Ron Paul supporter to appreciate that, for corporations (like Google, Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft), there is nothing more intimidating than being in the cross-hairs of government law enforcement agencies, egged on by pissed-off members of Congress with power over the agencies’ budget appropriations.

Corporations, no less than individuals, need First Amendment protection for their criticism of government and advocacy of policies opposed by government. They need this protection for themselves, for their employees, and for their shareholders and customers.
—————
Peter Scheer, a lawyer and journalist, is executive director of the First Amendment Coalition (FAC). The views expressed here are his alone, not necessarily those of the FAC Board of Directors.

The blackout of websites, including BoingBoing, Reddit and Wikipedia, to protest the online piracy laws before Congress was successful in igniting opposition against the laws writes Ian Paul in PCWorld.

Paul says that there were 2.4 million tweets on the topic during the first 16 hours on Wednesday and that the Los Angeles Times reported that 4.5 million signed Google’s petition against the laws. -db

From a commentary in PCWorld, January 18, 2012, by Ian Paul.

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Formed by 29 media companies, NewRight plans to act as a clearing house for content produced by major journalism ventures including the Associated Press, Hearst Newspapers, The New York Times Company and The Washington Post Company.

NewsRight wants to sign up aggregators to see if they are willing to pay for news. -db

From a commentary for the Citizens Media Law Project, January 17, 2012 by Victoria S. Ekstrand.

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Google has filed an amicus brief in the appeal of a Righthaven case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals arguing for flexibility in applying the fair use doctrine.

The case under appeal pitted Righthaven against the Center for Intercultural Organizing over the Center’s posting of a Las Vegas Review-Journal article. -db

From the Courthouse News Service, January 16, 2012, by Maria Dinzeo.

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The Electronic Freedom Foundation takes on what it says are distortions of the positions taken by those opposing the online piracy legislation recently introduced in both houses of Congress.

While acknowledging that the tech industry recognizes the importance of copyright as it applies to the Internet, writes Trevor Timm for EFF, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act already allows copyright holders to direct websites to remove copyrighted content. The new legislation overreaches, says Timm, adversely affecting millions of non-infringing users. -db

From a commentary for the Electronic Freedom Foundation, December 13, 2011 , by Trevor Timm.

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A federal district judge in San Jose ruled that a blogger does not have to reveal his identity to the Art of Living Foundation that promotes spirituality lessons of Ravi Shankar. The blogger had published criticisms of the foundation along with one of  their manuals, an act that the foundation said infringed its copyright.

The judge said that so far the blogger’s First Amendment rights outweighed the foundation’s interests. -db

From The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, November 17, 2011, by Chris Healy.

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Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Lamar Smith R-Texas, expressed concerns over the scope of the Stop Online Piracy Act by saying that he was uncertain whether the Justice Department should be allowed to obtain court orders demanding that ISPs prevent users from visiting blacklisted websites, websites accused of infringing on intellectual property.

Under intense fire from the technology sector, it now appears that the bill will be amended. -db

From a commentary in Wired, November 16, 2011, by David Kravets.

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Legislation backed by the entertainment industry to protect copyrights by stopping online piracy , the Stop Online Piracy Act, has support in Congress.

But powerful interests including Google are poised to challenge the law if passed. -db

From a commentary for the First Amendment Center, November 17, 2011, by David L. Hudson Jr.

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Government world-wide are increasingly asking Google for information, causing the company to suggest that new laws are needed to govern Internet data. In the last six months, the U.S. government has made 5,950 requests for information with Google complying with 93 percent of the requests, and when asked to remove items, it complied 63 percent of the time.

Google says the law governing these requests, the 25-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act,  could not possibly anticipate the electronic media world of 2011 and is in drastic need of modernization. -db

From the National Journal, October 25, 2011, by Josh Smith.

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To promote Internet freedom and free speech around the world, the Electronic Freedom Foundation is urging the U.S. government to lift export restrictions on communication tools.

Recently the Obama administration has suspended transactions with the Syrian government as part of U.S. sanctions of the oppressive regime but with the attendant effect of depriving Syrian citizens wishing to protest of access to Google products, Java and such hosting services as Rackspace and SuperGreenHosting. -db

From a commentary for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, September 26, 2011, by Jillian York, co-authored by Cindy Cohn.

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Current laws and codes of conduct aren’t enough to prevent United States companies from helping repressive regimes censor the Internet and control information that have abetted human right abuses, according to a report from a Canadian security firm.

The Global Online Freedom Act, a law under consideration, would prohibit U.S. companies from helping governments restrict the Internet. -db

From the National Journal, September 20, 2011, by Josh Smith.

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Cyberbullies have sullied Internet freedom in defamatory and cruel attacks against innocent citizens that have ruined lives. It is difficult to know what to do about it while defending the American tradition of anonymous speech, especially speech critical of the government.

A Chicago lawyer makes a proposal that he thinks balances the interests of those victimized by vicious attacks and those wanting to preserve free speech. -db

From a commentary in the Chicago Tribune, September 16, 2011, by Peter V. Baugher

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Writing in ZDNet, Sam Diaz says that Google, Facebook and Twitter have the information that could enable them with the help of the analysis of real journalists to identify which blog sites, tweets and news outlets should be labeled “journalism.” Diaz says “news” is different from “journalism” and the latter must be identified and labeled as such because of its value. “Journalism is about fairness, accuracy, objectivity and responsible reporting, as well as values, standards and ethics,” says Diaz.

From a commentary in ZDNet, September 6, 2011, by Sam Diaz.

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BY PETER SCHEER—Google’s $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola is a sign of serious problems for the US economy. Motorola’s strategic appeal to Google is its portfolio of thousands of patents covering mobile phone technologies. But the acquisition of these patents creates no real value for Google. They are in the nature of a massive  premium payment for insurance against suits by competitors and others for alleged patent infringement.

Google is at risk for such suits because the vagueness of patents, a lack of predictability about their  validity in many cases, and ambiguities in American patent law, combine to create massive uncertainty for Google about whether its next big innovation—Google+, voice recognition for the Android OS, Google Voice, video conference-calling, or whatever—will be blocked by a lawsuit claiming infringement of another company’s patent.

To minimize this uncertainty, Google will pay, must pay, billions of dollars to arm itself with patents that it can use to countersue against those who would sue Google. Needless to say, the assets used to buy this weaponry are assets that otherwise could be spent  productively on creating new businesses and hiring the thousands of employees needed to staff them.

In all of this, there is nothing unique about Google’s experience (apart from its scale, of course). The uncertainty facing Google about the threat of patent infringement claims is also facing thousands of other America companies, big and small. They must choose, like Google, to buy horribly expensive insurance–the word “protection,” with its intimations of organized crime, may be a more accurate description–or leave themselves exposed to legal claims that can be ruinous even if they meritless.

Multiply this uncertainty throughout the economy, and the potential impact on economic growth and job growth is huge. Politicians and economists, particularly of the Republican variety, have been quick to blame the US economy’s slow pace of recovery on government uncertainty–uncertainty about the impact on businesses of new federal initiatives (particularly, the Obama administration’s healthcare program), tax policy, and environmental regulations. They should be expressing similar alarm about the considerably less speculative costs (like, exactly $12,5 billion for a single corporate transaction) imposed on the economy by the growing threat of patent litigation.

This is a problem created by government. It can also be fixed by government.

———

Peter Scheer, a lawyer and journalist, is executive director of FAC. The opinions expressed here are his alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the FAC Board of Directors.

Europe is pursuing a “right to be forgotten” on the Web as privacy advocates argue that the lifetime of certain postings ought to be curtailed.

According to the New York Times, Spain has ordered Google to stop indexing Web files related to 90 people who complained to the country’s Data Protection Agency. Among the complainants: a victim of domestic violence whose address was readily available through Google.

The Times said the European Union is expected to propose regulations this year that would give people more control over potentially damaging information.

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With advent of the Google+ policy requiring users to identify by “the name your friend, family or do-workers usually call you,” Jillian York, a director for the Electronic Freedom Foundation argues that the benefits of pseudonyms outweigh the negatives, particularly for gays and other people subject to violence or harassment such as victims of domestic violence and particularly those opposing oppressive political regimes.

York writes, “Those in favor of the use of ‘real names’ on social platforms have presented a number of arguments: that real names improve user behavior and create a more civil environment; that real names help prevent against stalking and harassment by making it easier to go after offenders; that a policy requiring real names prevents law enforcement agents from “sneaking in” to the service to spy on users; that real names make users accountable for their actions.

While these arguments are not entirely without merit, they misframe the problem. It is not incumbent upon strict real-name policy advocates to show that policies insisting on the use of real names have an upside. It is incumbent upon them to demonstrate that these benefits outweigh some very serious drawbacks.” -db

From a commentary for the Electronic Freedom Foundation, July 29, 2011, by Jillian York.

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A federal judge is allowing the National Security Agency to avoid answering the question about a possible relationship between the agency and Google after the China hacking incident of January 2010. The judge said NSA ruled the agency only had  state it can “neither confirm nor deny” that it has a relationship with Google.-db

From a release from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, July 13, 2011.

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An Electronic Frontier Foundation opinion piece argues that Microsoft and Cisco are more interested in abetting China’s repressive regime than taking a stand for freedom.

With Google abandoning the search market in China rather than submit to censorship, Microsoft has recently stepped into the void by agreeing with Baidu to provide Bing web search services in English and to self-censor its search results. After coming under scrutiny for helping create China’s internet firewall and assisting in tracking down the Falun Gong for the Chinese government, Cisco has agreed recently to help build a camera surveillance network in the city of Chongquing. -db

From a commentary for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, July 8, 2011, by Jillian York and Cindy Cohn.

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Facebook hired a PR firm to persuade reporters and privacy advocates to write critical stories about Google’s Social Circle.

Facebook denied that they had acted unethically, “No ’smear’ campaign was authorized or intended. Instead, we wanted third parties to verify that people did not approve of the collection and use of information from their accounts on Facebook and other services for inclusion in Google Social Circles — just as Facebook did not approve of use or collection for this purpose. We engaged Burson-Marsteller to focus attention on this issue, using publicly available information that could be independently verified by any media organization or analyst. The issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way.” -db

From The New York Times, May 12, 2011, by Miguel Helft and Claire Cain Miller.

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange called Facebook the “most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented.”

Assange pointed out that a trove of information about people, their relationships, conversations and locations exists on the social media and that U.S. intelligence agencies could bring pressure on Facebook, Yahoo, Google and others to extract that information. -db

From NextWeb, May 2, 2011, by Matt Brian.

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The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has granted MediaPost’s request for a court document with details of Google’s compliance with an order for it to deactivate a Gmail user’s account. The court ruled the district court had not made the case that the public had no right to access the report.

The dispute originated with a bank who had mistakenly sent sensitive customer data to a Gmail address and asked Google to provide information about the account holder which under the terms of its privacy policy Google refused to divulge without a court order. -db

From MediaPost, April 18, 2011, by Wendy Davis.

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Several public interest groups are lining up for Google in its fight against a lawsuit by Rosetta Stone because they say the suit tries to silence competition and stifle criticism. -db

Online Media Daily
December 6, 2010
By Wendy Davis

First Amendment advocates and digital rights groups have weighed in on Google’s side in a lawsuit by Rosetta Stone challenging the search giant’s practice of allowing companies to use trademarks to trigger AdWords ads.

“Both Google and typical advertisers make fair use of Rosetta Stone’s marks. Therefore, Google is not liable for trademark infringement,” Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation argue in a friend-of-the-court brief filed Monday with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Earlier this year, U.S. District court Judge Gerald Bruce Lee in Alexandria, Va. dismissed Rosetta Stone’s trademark infringement lawsuit against Google, ruling that the search company’s use of Rosetta Stone’s name didn’t confuse consumers.

Rosetta Stone recently asked the appellate court to reverse that ruling. The language learning company argues that it should be able to stop others from “free-riding” on its brand name, and that Google’s practices confuse consumers. Rosetta Stone drew support in its appeal from several outside businesses, including Ford Motor Co. and Viacom.

The public interest groups who back Google argue that Rosetta Stone “seeks to change the scope of trademark law, and to grant itself the right to cripple advertising platforms and silence competitors.”

Public Knowledge and the EFF argue that Rosetta Stone can’t itself decide which uses of its trademark are “authorized.” Rather, they argue, trademark law allows Google to use Rosetta Stone’s name in AdWords because that type of use doesn’t leave consumers confused.

Advocacy group Public Citizen filed a separate friend-of-the-court brief in support of Google.

“Trademark law protects consumers’ ability to distinguish the goods of companies whose quality they have learned to trust, but should not be used to prevent consumers from criticizing or learning about criticisms and competing products,” writes Public Citizen (which is representing MediaPost in an unrelated case).

“The fundamental flaw in Rosetta’s submission is its apparent assumption that any member of the public who uses a search engine to conduct a search using the term ‘Rosetta Stone’ must necessarily be searching for Rosetta’s official site, and only for that site, and hence is likely to experience confusion about whether all of the ensuing search results are linked to Rosetta’s own site,” Public Citizen adds. “The underlying assumption is wrong. To the contrary, it is common knowledge that an Internet user who employs a search engine and uses a search term that is in common use is likely to receive a listing of hundreds or even thousands of websites relating to their search terms.”

Copyright 2010 MediaPost Communications     FAC Content Use Policy

Google has removed a site, RevolutionMuslim.com, after British authorities complained that the site ran a post that included a list of British lawmakers who voted for the Iraq war and called for Muslims to “raise the knife of Jihad” against them -db

The New York Times
November 5, 2010
By Ravi Somaiya

LONDON — A United States-based extremist Islamic Web site was taken down on Friday after the British authorities complained of a post praising a young woman who stabbed and nearly killed a British lawmaker over his support for the Iraq war.

The post included a list of 383 British lawmakers who voted for the war, with instructions on tracking their movements, and it called for Muslims to “raise the knife of Jihad” against them, according to The Times of London, which reported the post on Friday. It also included a link for buying a kitchen knife, the report said.

The site, RevolutionMuslim.com, is no longer available, but Google shows a cached version that predates the post. It is registered in Bellevue, Wash., a suburb of Seattle, and was run this year from Brooklyn.

E-mails and calls to the site went unreturned Friday. But a large disclaimer at the top of the cached version cites the First Amendment right to free speech and states that it is “not affiliated with any terrorist states or organizations.” It says it “condemns all forms of terrorism carried out in the name of freedom and democracy.”

Why the site was taken down was unclear. Legal experts say that it is difficult for the government to force a site off the Internet. But the government could pressure a site operator or service provider to take it down.

The British Home Office said it had raised the issue of the post with the American authorities, and the Metropolitan Police counterterrorism section said it had also made inquiries.

The site drew attention this year when, after an episode of the cartoon “South Park” centered on the Prophet Muhammad, it posted the addresses for the show’s creators next to a picture of the body of the Dutch film director Theo van Gogh. Mr. van Gogh was fatally stabbed and shot in 2004 after making a documentary film about the abuse of women in some Islamic cultures.

A spokesman for the site claimed at the time that the message was not a threat, merely “a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them.”

The stabbing case that was the focus of the recent post ended Wednesday with the 21-year-old attacker, Roshonara Choudhry, being given a life sentence. She stabbed the member of Parliament, Stephen Timms, twice in the stomach at a public meeting in May in what she called “revenge” for the people of Iraq.

She cited RevolutionMuslim.com as one of her inspirations. She found more in the YouTube videos of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Muslim preacher who affiliated himself with the Yemen-based group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. YouTube had received complaints from American and British lawmakers about the videos in recent weeks. On Wednesday, the day Ms. Choudhry was convicted, YouTube removed hundreds of them.

On Thursday, Revolution Muslim published its praise of Ms. Choudhry as a “heroine,” and expressed the hope “for her action to inspire Muslims to raise the knife of jihad against those who voted for the countless rapes, murders, pillages and torture of Muslim civilians as a direct consequence of their vote.”

Miguel Helft contributed reporting from San Francisco.

Coppyright 2010 The New York Times Company      FAC Content Use Policy

Google has 15 days to reveal the identity of a person who posted comments calling a Columbia MBA graduate a “whore,” “a shank,” and “an old hag.” -db

New York Daily News
October 15, 2010
By Jose Martinez

Columbia MBA graduate Carla Franklin went after Google in August in an attempt to unmask her online tormentor, who slimed her under three aliases on its video-sharing site.

The order gives Google 15 days to reveal any information it has on who posted the comments to YouTube videos that featured Franklin.

It came a day after a Broadway star went after Twitter in court to find out who’s been lying online about him catching crabs from an “Avenue Q” cast member.

Copyright 2010 NYDailyNews.com    FAC Content Use Policy

The Federal Elections Commission said that in some circumstances, political candidates can run pay-per-click ads without disclosing who paid for the ad or whether the ad was approved by the candidate. -db

Online Media Daily
October 11, 2010
By Wendy Davis

Handing Google a partial victory, the Federal Elections Commission said that political candidates can, in some circumstances, run pay-per-click ads without including disclaimers in the copy.

But the FEC didn’t completely grant Google’s request, which was for a ruling that search ads are exempt from any disclosure rules the same as bumper stickers, pens or other small items.

In an opinion issued on Thursday, the FEC said it couldn’t agree on whether to completely exempt search ads from disclosure rules, but that pay-per-click ad copy need not include all required information “where the text ad displays the URL of the committee sponsor’s website … and the landing page contains a full disclaimer.”

FEC regulations typically require that political ads include information about who paid for the ad and whether it is authorized by the candidate. But those rules don’t apply when the ads are on items too small for the disclaimers.

Google in August asked the FEC to rule that search ads are exempt from disclaimer rules because of the ad copy’s 95-character limit. “As a result of this severe space limitation, a text ad is fundamentally different from a television or newspaper advertisement,” Google wrote in its request. “Both Google and the advertiser view the landing page as the primary forum in which advertiser-to-customer communications take place.”

The FEC’s decision regarding search ads stands in contrast to actions by another federal agency, the Food and Drug Administration, which last year rebuked 14 pharmaceutical companies that had advertised on search engines.

The FDA warned that the pay-per-click ads were misleading because the ad copy touted the benefits of drugs without also informing consumers about risks and contraindications. Critics of that move said that the character limits make it virtually impossible to convey in a search ad that a particular drug is a potential treatment while also alerting users to its drawbacks.

Copyright 2010 MediaPost Communications    FAC Content Use Policy

Lawyers are getting lots of work interpreting ‘fair use” from filmmakers, artists and writers who want to pull something from another person’s work. -db

Variety
Commentary
September 24, 2010
By Ted Johnson

Hollywood is united in standing up to the proliferation of piracy, but there’s an area of copyright law that leaves the industry perpetually perplexed.

It’s the concept of “fair use,” the protection from infringement claims for certain unauthorized uses of copyrighted material, whether they be clips pulled from news broadcasts for a documentary, fleeting images used in a musicvideo or even paragraphs from a book quoted in a blog.

The rules of what specifically falls under “fair use” were never defined by lawmakers and have been left to the courts to determine. In fact, they are so unresolved that the Copyright Office has some advice for filmmakers, artists, producers, or whoever wants to pull from another’s work: Consult an attorney.

That’s created an acute sense of uncertainty in the digital age; big media seem to fret over a too-liberal use of fair use while smaller players worry that a conservative read on the provision stifles creativity.

“The effect is to create an environment of hesitation and caution,” says Bill Ivey, director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt U. “What it does is place creative individuals of goodwill into a position of noncompliance.”

He argues that while licensing is an option, it is just too difficult for a small business entrepreneur or creator to navigate, particularly when it would be necessary to deal with a large media company where it can be “very tough to get a phone call returned.”

But even big media companies have found themselves on both sides of the fence.

Rather famously, Rupert Murdoch last year declared, in an interview with Sky News Australia, “There’s a doctrine called fair use, which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether. But we’ll take that slowly.”

To be fair, Murdoch was talking of the frustration of seeing Google use headlines and portions of stories from News Corp. properties in its search results.

But that didn’t stop detractors from throwing Murdoch’s words back at him.

One of the latest instances is in a lawsuit filed last month by videographer Media2Air Inc., whose shots of Brad Pitt driving his motorcycle were licensed to the website TMZ. Fox News then pulled from that video for a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor.” Fox News defends it as a clear case of news media fair use, according to Media2Air, which charged, “Fox is engaged in the same bad conduct condemned by its own chairman.”

The tables were turned earlier this month, when Fox News and Chris Wallace filed an infringement suit against the campaign of Robin Carnahan, Missouri’s Democratic candidate for Senate, who used unflattering 2006 Fox news footage of her opponent, Republican Roy Blunt, in campaign spots. Fox claims that the spots leave the impression that they are endorsing Carnahan. To little surprise, Carnahan has claimed fair use.

Fox News declined comment, but Ivey argues that this is “the kind of circular model that emerges when everybody is determined to protect things to the max, unless they want to use something themselves.”

The courts have generally applied a four-factor test to fair use: the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount of the material taken and the effect of the use on the potential market. The First Amendment can weigh heavily in the cases of the news media and political speech, but as Ben Sheffner of the Campaigns & Copyrights blog notes, “There are certainly no hard and fast rules.”

“If someone tells you that fair use is ‘x’ number of seconds, that is all baloney,” he says.

Peter Jaszi, professor at the American U. Washington College of Law, says that he sees the fair use law “thriving in and out of the courts,” where more creators are relying on it “and no one challenges it,” or judges embrace the nuance. An example: In 2008, a publisher of a guide to the “Harry Potter” franchise lost a suit filed by Warner Bros. and J.K. Rowling, but “the judge said most of the book is fair use but in a few cases went too far,” he says.

If only for the publicity and controversy it has generated, one of the bigger showdowns over fair use to watch in the courts is the Associated Press’ suit against Shepard Fairey over the use of the image of President Obama to make his iconic “Hope” poster. The case is set to go to trial in March, but its complexities are not just where infringement ends and fair use begins. Even then, it is not so clear cut. As Sheffner points out, you can’t copyright a fact, in this case candidate Obama, but you can protect a photographer’s vision.

“It’s a tricky enterprise to separate out what are the facts presented in that photograph versus what is the expression of the photographer,” he says.

Maybe the Copyright Office should offer up another message: Good luck.

Copyright 2010 RBI., a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.     FAC Content Use Policy

Google is now showing the number of requests from governments for removing content from its search page, Gmail, YouTube and other services. -db

CNET
September 21, 2010
By Lance Whitney

In the wake of Google’s censorship battles with China and other nations, the search giant has launched a new tool to reveal which governments are blocking its services or requesting information on its users.
The company’s new Transparency Report breaks down the information into two sections.

The Government Requests page offers an interactive map where you can see the number of requests by each government asking Google to remove certain content from its search page, Gmail, YouTube, and other services. Google even reveals how many of those requests it’s actually complied with. This page also details the number of requests for information on specific user accounts that company has gotten from each country.

You can scroll down a chart to see the stats on each country, or click on a specific country on the map to get full details on all its requests. For now, the page offers data for the last two six-month periods, from January to June 2010 and from July to December 2009. As an example, the U.S. made 4,287 requests for user data between January and June of this year. It requested the removal of 678 items, and Google has fully or partially complied with 82 percent of those.

Although the data doesn’t let you peek behind the scenes to show whether Google challenged any of the government requests, the company said in its FAQ that it hopes to provide more of that type of detail in the future.

The second section for Traffic displays the amount of traffic that different Google services get each day. Through an interactive chart, you can also see which services have gone down temporarily or have been permanently blocked by specific countries. For example, select Iran and then click on YouTube, and Google tells you that its popular video site has been blocked by the Iranian government since June 12, 2009, following the contested presidential election.

In light of the turmoil and controversy that Google has faced in its relationship with China, the company is hoping that the new tool can provide a greater flow of information. Discussing the Transparency Report in a blog post, Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond said that Google believes this kind of transparency can be a deterrent to censorship.

Lance Whitney is a contributing editor for Microsoft TechNet Magazine and writes for other computer publications and Web sites. Lance is a member of the CNET Blog Network and  is not an employee of CNET.

Copyright 2010 CBS Interactive     FAC Content Use Policy

By The Associated Press (CP)

BERLIN —The Hamburg state court said the standardized question to users about whether they have the necessary rights to publish material is not enough to relieve YouTube of the legal responsibility for the content, especially because the platform can be used anonymously.

Google is evaluating the 60-page ruling but will appeal the decision, company spokesman Henning Dorstewitz told The Associated Press.

YouTube must not publish those videos any more and provide information to settle the amount of compensation in at least three cases in which Brightman videos were uploaded, it said.

The plaintiff was not identified and a court spokesman could not be reached for comment. The court statement only said the plaintiff has claimed to be the copyright holder for several of Sarah Brightman’s performances.

Copyright © 2010 The Canadian Press.

FAC Content Use Policy

According to an online news pioneer, modern journalism students do not naturally see the social media as an important aspect of their professional repertoire. -db

MediaShift
August 30, 2010
By Alfred Hermida

Social media is such a new phenomenon that it is easy for someone to claim to be an expert in the subject. A search on Twitter throws up all sorts of people claiming to be social media gurus. But at journalism schools, professors are working out how to teach social media to ensure that graduating students are proficient, if not expert, in this new addition to the curriculum.

Students use social media in their daily lives, with Facebook an almost permanent fixture on the computer screen. Yet they tend not to think about social media as part of their professional toolkit as journalists.

If anything, anecdotal evidence suggests that students are resistant to adopting social media, seeing it as a personal activity, rather than as part of their work as a journalist. The pressure is on educators to demonstrate the professional value of social media.

The first step is working out what we mean by social media. After all, there has also been a social aspect to media, whether it was people discussing last night’s TV in the office or clipping a newspaper article to send to a friend. But there is something new about services such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter that let people connect, create, share and mash-up media.

European researchers Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.”
In other words, digital technologies that empower users to interact with each other, and participate and collaborate in the making of media, rather than just consuming media.

Clearly there is more to social media in the classroom than technology. Central to teaching social media is providing an understanding of how these digital tools affect the way students actually do journalism. The issue for many journalism schools is incorporating social media into an established and packed curriculum, within an academic environment where the pace of change is slow.

LESSONS IN BEST PRACTICES

The question of how to teach social media in a way that enhances journalism reverberated at a meeting of hundreds of journalism educators from across North America. The annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in Denver provided a platform to discuss ideas on social media in the classroom. In a sign of the growing recognition of social media, the AEJMC even organized a competition for educators to share some of their best practices for incorporating social media into the classroom. (Read MediaShift’s previous coverage of the AEJMC conference here.)

One idea mentioned by several speakers at the AEJMC conference was the value of incorporating social media into beat reporting. There are various ways that this can be done. Students can use Twitter to monitor the community chatter on issues in their beats through hashtags. They can also identify and follow key people connected to their beat.

But students also need to understand how to assess the stream of information on social media. Real-time services such as Twitter have established themselves as primary sources for breaking news, so it is important to teach students to critically measure and check the validity of information.

Social media is one way of introducing students to the notion of journalism as a conversation. The key lesson here is that these tools are not just another channel to distribute the finished story. Social media can help journalists reach out to audiences, seeking ideas for stories and fresh perspectives on stories they are working on.

One of the challenges here is teaching the different norms and practices on different social media services. For example, just posting a message seeking information is frowned upon. Instead, students are encouraged to be active on social media, showing they are contributing to the conversation rather than just taking.

REPUTATION MANAGEMENT

Social media blurs the line between the personal and the professional, so another important lesson is how to build and manage your online identity. Serena Carpenter at the Cronkite School at Arizona State University has students use Google themselves to research their online identity. She has found students are encouraged to adopt social media when they see themselves appear high up on Google.

In a variation of this, I have students Google each other to find out something they didn’t know about their peer. The aim of the exercise is to make students aware of how future employers might see them.

The next stage is teaching students how to manage their reputation and establish their credibility. Prof. Carpenter has students complete their bio on numerous sites such as LinkedIn and Google Profile using the same photo, credentials and web links.

Social media has also been used for student-centered learning, for example, to educate students about the strengths and weaknesses of online collaboration. Bob Britten of West Virginia University used Google Maps for students to work together to map retirement homes in the area.

Rather than lecture students on the credibility of Wikipedia, Gary Ritzenthaler, a PhD student at the University of Florida, created a wiki for students to collaborate on study notes for an upcoming test. By participating, the students learned about collaborative writing but also became aware of questions about the credibility of content produced by others.

THINKING ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA

Practicing social media is not enough in an academic environment. There has to be a place for student reflection on what they have learned, explaining their understanding of social media. Students should have set out their goals for the use of social media and demonstrate they can assess the most appropriate platforms and services.

Teaching social media is more than showing students the mechanics of Twitter. Rather, they should learn how to build a network of relevant followers and how to interact with them to be a better journalist.

In the classroom, we need to stress that social media technologies do not just offer journalists new ways of doing old things. They offer the potential to explore new ways of telling stories, of collaborating and connecting with audiences, of rethinking how we do journalism.

Editor’s Note: This is the first in our special series at MediaShift, “Beyond J-School,” where we will take an in-depth look at the state of journalism education and training in the digital age. Look out for more articles all this week and next.

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer, currently an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia.

Copyright 2010 Public Broadcasting System     FAC Content Use Policy

Internet giant Google has sparked a fiery privacy debate this week by claiming future teenagers will need to change their names when they reach adulthood to escape embarrassing online pasts.

The Courier Mail

August 20, 2010

By Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson

In a warning experts have labelled hypocritical, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the company knew “roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are”, and the implications of sharing that information could be severe.

Internet analysts warn information sharing will skyrocket in the next 10 years and personal information, opinions, photos and videos are likely to haunt more than just teens.

The results could affect employment prospects and personal relationships, and open internet users to property or identity theft.

Deakin University communications lecturer Ross Monaghan said online service providers like Google and Facebook were “not doing enough to protect privacy because it is in their best interests to collect information about us” for marketing purposes.

Mr Monaghan warned while users might be somewhat protected now, new technology would make it harder to hide information shared on the web.

“Face recognition for photos is not widely available on the web, but in 10 years’ time any photos or videos of you online will be available for searching,” he said.

“Facebook is adding face recognition to their photo galleries quite soon, and if it doesn’t handle that well there could be serious implications for people’s privacy.”

The social networking leader, with more than 500 million active users, also launched a location-based service in the United States this week.

Curtin University information technology lecturer Dr Peter Dell said users publicly sharing their location online “does raise the stakes”.

Sharing details of regular stops could give stalkers a reasonable chance of intercepting a target and could also lead to property crime as users announced they were not at home, he said.

Even so, encouraging people to change their names to escape online histories was riddled with legal and social problems, RMIT information technology lecturer John Lenarcic said.

“I think governments would get a bit irritated with that, because if people regularly changed their names there could be security hassles,” he said. “It’s bordering on irresponsibility to say a large group of people should change their identities.”

Mr Lenarcic instead recommended that internet users should exercise care when sharing information, and monitor children’s use of technology.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said anonymity on the Internet is dangerous, according to a report in the Huffington Post.

August 11, 2010

By International Business Times

In an interview with CNBC conducted at the Techonomy conference earlier this month, Schmidt offered an additional look at his views on online privacy and  anonymity, says the report.

Arguing that anonymity on the Internet is dangerous, Schmidt had reportedly said, “In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you.”

He also said governments may eventually put an end to anonymity. “We need a (verified) name service for people,” he said. “Governments will demand it.”

“Privacy is incredibly important,” he said in another interview, adding, “Privacy is not the same thing as anonymity. It’s very important that Google and everyone else respects people’s privacy. People have a right to privacy; it’s natural; it’s normal. It’s the right way to do things.” But he said there should be limits to privacy.

Beijing agreed to renew Google’s license to operate a Web site in mainland China, months after the company said it would stop censoring search results in China. -SMD

New York Times

July 12, 2010

News

By David Barboza and Miguel Helft

SHANGHAI — The tense standoff that began in January withGoogle’s unprecedented rebuke of China’s Internet censorship rules appeared to ease on Friday with a compromise that might allow both sides to claim a partial victory.

Google said that Beijing agreed to renew the company’s license to operate a Web site in mainland China, months after Google said it would stop censoring search results in China. Google’s challenge of Beijing’s authority, which followed a series of sophisticated online attacks which Google said originated in China, put into question Google’s ability to do any business in the world’s largest Internet market.

Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said Friday that the renewal “was the outcome we were hoping for.”

“We’ll keep doing what we’re doing, and they’ll keep doing what they’re doing,” he said Friday at the Allen & Company media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.

The license, which China could revoke at any time, allows Google to keep its Web site, Google.cn, in China and continue operating some Internet services there. It also allows Google to continue referring users in China to its uncensored Hong Kong-based Chinese language search engine, at google.com.hk.

Hong Kong, a former British colony that is now a special administrative region of China, is governed separately from the mainland. Under the current setup in mainland China, users can conduct a Google search and see the results, but often they cannot open the links because they are blocked by the Chinese government.

“This was an issue made to order for compromise,” said J. Stapleton Roy, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “It is good for China to have Google involved there, and it is good for Google to keep its footprint in China.”

The renewal of Google’s license came two weeks after the company was forced to change its approach of automatically sending Chinese search users to its Hong Kong-based site. Under threat from Beijing that its license would be denied, Google instead began displaying on Google.cn a link to the Hong Kong site that users could click to conduct searches.

Forcing users to take that extra step could cost Google market share in China, where it trails behind Baidu, the local search engine. But China experts said that the approach represents a pragmatic balancing of interests that lets both sides get some of what they want.

Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley, said that Google won because “they get their operating license. Chinese Internet users win because they can continue to access some Google services.”

But Mr. Xiao said the Chinese government also would win, because while it forced Google to move its search service out of China and barred it from automatically redirecting users to its uncensored Hong Kong-based search engine, it also got to show its own people and the outside world that it was willing to balance economic issues and censorship.

“It is unprecedented for a private company to challenge Chinese Internet censorship,” Mr. Xiao said. “In the past, there would have been no doubt that the Chinese government would have punished Google.” For the government, finding a way to keep Google in the country “is a very calculated position that is good for China’s long-term development and openness,” Mr. Xiao said.

While Google’s stand against Chinese government censorship earned Google the good will of free speech and human rights advocates, it also came at a cost.

The compromise will allow Google to keep some of its business in China, but its position there may be weakened. In addition to potentially losing search traffic, Google could be hurting its ambition to expand into China’s booming mobile phone business. Some phone makers and network operators are introducing phones powered by Google’s Android software in China, but they have stripped out Google’s mobile search service from the devices and replaced it with rivals like Baidu. Google, which makes its money placing ads linked to search results, could face a limited audience for mobile advertising.

Google said in January that it was not willing to continue cooperating with Chinese censors after the hacking attempts on its databases and the e-mail accounts of some users. The company said at the time that it might have to shut down its search engine in China if the government insisted that the company continue to strip material that officials consider offensive or politically volatile.

Many analysts were stunned by the moves and questioned whether Google was acting prudently in risking its spot in the world’s largest Internet market.

When the government insisted that Google continue to censor search results, the company tried to simply redirect users to the Hong Kong site. The change had little impact on Chinese users, who could still not access sites that the Chinese government censored. But it shifted the onus of censoring results from Google to China’s filtering system, known as the Great Firewall of China.

But Google’s approach failed to appease Beijing, and Google was forced to modify it again late last month, by offering users a link on Google.cn rather than the automatic referral to the Hong Kong site. The move, though seemingly insignificant, apparently satisfied China.

Renewal is required annually for Google’s license, which officially expires in 2012.

Even before the censorship issue came to the fore, Google was struggling in China to attain the same market dominance it has achieved in many other countries.

The hottest Internet companies in China include Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba — fast-growing local companies that are making huge profits.

Google is not the only American giant that has had trouble in China. Yahoo and eBay have failed to gain significant traction here. And Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked by the government.

David Barboza reported from Shanghai and Miguel Helft from San Francisco. Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting from Sun Valley, Idaho.

While social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter increase their user base,  and search engines like Google continue to grow, many wonder if they will become the gatekeepers of information of the future. – SMD

Social Media and First Amendment

Commentary

July 6, 2010

By  Eric Kuhn, CNN Audience Interaction Producer

Aspen, Colorado (CNN) – The future of free speech will be chosen by lawyers and businessmen at companies such as Google, Comcast and Facebook, not by politicians in Washington or the judicial system.

That is George Washington University Law School Professor Jeffrey Rosen’s “big idea” he delivered at the Aspen Ideas Festival Monday night to an overflowing crowd of the top leaders in business, politics, technology, and law – including former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Rosen named Nicole Wang, Google’s deputy general council, as a company executive who has more say over free speech than most. Wang has the authority to keep or remove YouTube videos. When governments around the world want a video removed, she is woken up to make the decision.

In Washington, political institutions constantly jockey over who has the right to control content on line. The Federal Communications Commission has ruled against Comcast, America’s largest internet provider, for blocking the popular file sharing network BitTorrent. This year, a federal appeals court ruled the FCC had no legal authority to rule against Comcast. The FCC has tried to reintroduce the policy and Rosen says it will be a fight between regulators and Congress to will settle this issue.

“The future of free speech will not be determined by a Supreme Court justice interpreting the first amendment, because the first amendment only binds government,” Rosen said. “It does not bind Google, Comcast and Facebook.”

Directing his message to the “titans of digital communication” in the room, Rosen warned, “the future of the first amendment will ultimately be decided by the decisions you make while doing business.”

After the Chinese government objected to Google’s rerouting users to an uncensored site in Hong Kong, the company struggles to come up with another strategy to continue service in China. -db

The Wall Street Journal
June 29, 2010
By Amir Efrati and Andrew Batson

Google Inc. said it would change how Internet users in China access its search service after the Chinese government objected to its recent strategy of redirecting Chinese users to an uncensored site in Hong Kong and threatened the company with the loss of its license.

It’s unclear whether the small change to Google’s Chinese site will meet with Chinese government approval and lead to the extension of the company’s license to provide online content in China. Google said in a post on its blog late Monday that it had resubmitted its application to renew the license, which comes up for renewal as of Wednesday.

Since its entry into the Chinese-language world in 2000, U.S. search giant Google Inc. has struggled to balance its growth ambitious in the vast but restrictive new market while adhering to a self-held principle: “Don’t be evil.”

Google’s latest move comes three months after the Internet search giant said it would stop obeying the Chinese government’s requirement to censor search results, which It had been following since the China-based site opened in 2006. Since March, instead of providing censored search results, Google has automatically redirected users of google.cn, its mainland Chinese address, to a Hong Kong-based site, google.com.hk, which doesn’t censor search results.

But, according to a Google post on Monday, the Chinese government has told Google that its approach is “unacceptable” and that its Internet license won’t be renewed if it continues the practice. Chinese regulators frown on local Internet sites that link directly to foreign sites outside their control. Hong Kong, because it has a separate legal system, is treated as a foreign country in many areas of Chinese law, including censorship.

In response, Google said it would stop the automatic redirect, requiring that users take the additional step themselves. Visitors to google.cn are now presented with a message in Chinese that says, “We have moved to google.com.hk.” They must then click on an image to get to the Hong Kong site. Google doesn’t filter results on that site, although the Chinese government blocks certain results for users inside mainland China.

Other Google services that don’t require self-censoring by the company, such as maps, translations and music downloads, are still running on google.cn and can be accessed either directly or through the Hong Kong site. The main effect of the change is to make users of Google’s China site go through an additional step to search with Google. To avoid that, they could just sign on to the Hong Kong site directly.

Google also faces regulatory uncertainty in China over its fast-growing Goople Maps service. New rules issued last month require a government license to provide online maps in China, and it’s not clear how Google’s effort to obtain one is proceeding.

Reactions from Chinese Internet users on Tuesday ranged from skepticism that the new effort would work, to sympathy for Google’s trials with the government, to disdain for a company that is losing ground in the market. “Google is further away from us!” read a comment on the microblogging service of Sina, a major Chinese Internet portal. “If you want to leave, just leave!” said another.

Chinese government officials didn’t publicly react to the Google change. Wang Lijian, a spokesman for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said Tuesday that his agency had no immediate comment on the move.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, speaking at a regular press briefing Tuesday, said he hadn’t seen Google’s statement, and he didn’t comment on it directly. “I’d like to stress that the Chinese government encourages foreign enterprises to operate in China according to the law, and we also administer the Internet according to the law,” Mr. Qin said.

For sophisticated Internet users in China, the change seems trivial. “There’s no difference at all. We can still use it via google.com.hk, google.com.tw, google.com,” said Justin Zhang, a Google user in Shanghai, referring to the company’s site in Taiwan as well as its main global site. Even if Google’s license in China isn’t renewed, its services could still be accessed through those offshore sites, he said.

But the change does make using Google more complicated and less intuitive than other Chinese search engines, which could push the company further out of the mainstream of the local Internet market.

According to figures from Analysys International, Google’s market share in China declined to 31% in the 2010 first quarter from 35.6% in the previous quarter, with Chinese rival Baidu Inc. benefiting at Google’s expense. Analysts have estimated that Google’s Chinese business is small and previously accounted for just 1% to 2% of the company’s net revenue.

Google said its new strategy is an attempt to comply with local regulations while still meeting its pledge not to censor search results. “This new approach is consistent with our commitment not to self censor and, we believe, with local law,” wrote David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, in Monday’s blog post. “We are therefore hopeful that our license will be renewed on this basis so we can continue to offer our Chinese users services via Google.cn.”

Finding the right balance between open access to information and local sensibilities has been a challenge for many Internet companies in many countries. In India and Thailand, for example, Google and others have removed material that their governments found objectionable or that violated local laws. In Thailand, Google’s YouTube video service blocks access to videos that might be seen to insult the king, which is against the law there. In some parts of Europe, where Nazi imagery is illegal, Google blocks access to that.

But dealing with China’s extensive online-censorship requirements has been a particular struggle for the company. In January Google cited a major cyberattack in which hackers stole some of the company’s proprietary computer code and spied on the Google email accounts of Chinese human-rights activists.

Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder and its chief of technology, said in a March interview with The Wall Street Journal that after that attack he pushed the company to end its self-censoring of search results in China, arguing that the country’s Web censorship had the “earmarks of totalitarianism.”

Sue Feng, Bai Lin and J.R. Wu contributed to this article.

Copyright 2010 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

The Digital Daily Feed
June 15, 2010
By John Paczkowski

Google’s decision to leave China rather than to allow censorship of its service, whether it likes it or not,  puts the company in the forefront in defending the free flow of information in the global market. -db

The New York Times
Commentary
March 28, 2010
By David Carr

The New York Times
March 23, 2010
By Michael Wines

As expected, Google closed its Internet search service in China and began directing its users to the as yet uncensored service in Hong Kong. -db

The New York Times
March 22, 2010
By Miguel Helft and David Barboza