Cairns Blog

iPhone to Enable Citizen Journalism

As James Grimmelmann timely reports on The Laboratorium:

Steve Jobs says:

10:41 am [The Associated Press] call it the Mobile News Network, and it gathers content from many trusted sources. It makes use of the location API by automatically showing nearby sources. Allows news video and photos to be viewed directly through the app. You can even report on news yourself by sending a first-hand report that includes photos and text. The app will be free at the launch of the App Store.  (emphasis added)

And James says:

"This is an amazing platform for citizen journalism, and it’s being delivered by one of the major names in news. Much will depend on what happens to those “first-hand reports,” but if the AP runs with this ball, it could be huge. Imagine an army of citizen-journalists, not just routing around the traditional media, but reporting with them. This is what happens when you give people general-purpose computers, portable anywhere, and hooked up to a worldwide network: amazing things are possible."

Google Goes Minority Report

So why is Google offering free directory assistance at 1-800-GOOG-411?  Turns out it's not what Google can do for you, but what you can do for Google. 

As this article reports:

Google, and online rival Microsoft Corp., are using their free directory services to build vast, digital petri dishes loaded with samples of users' speech patterns. Those patterns are in turn being fed into the companies' myriad server computers, where they are analyzed in an effort to make their respective speech recognition technologies progressively smarter.

Will voice recognition be increasingly used to target advertising?

Future of Civic Media Event

On September 20th, I participated in a forum on "What is Civic Media?" to mark the launch of the new Center for Future Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab.

I had the honor to share the podium with Henry Jenkins, Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities and
Director of Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Muriel R. Cooper Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences,MIT Media Lab, and Ethan Zuckerman, Fellow, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University Law School.

Here's the program description.
Here's Ethan's real-time blogging of the event.
 
The video is up on the MIT World site at http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/486/.  Thankfully, I don't have RealPlayer and won't download it.

Feeding Bureaucracy While Starving Democracy: Government Abuse of Copyright

At the end of September, the federal court in the Eastern District of New York handed down a ruling in the case of City of New York v. Geodata Plus, LLC.  The judge's order granting in part the City's motion for summary judgment upheld the City's assertion of copyright in digitized tax maps.  In so doing the ruling allows the City to use that copyright to restrict availability of politically important information paid for by taxpayer dollars.  This information should, instead, be deemed to be information in the public domain.  Alternatively, if the City objected to GeoData's attempt to earn money based on re-use of the City's tax maps, then it should have released the digitized maps under an open license mandating that the maps be freely re-distributable.  Instead the City wasted public resources on filing suit in federal court.  Releasing under an open license would not preclude the City's Department of City Planning (DCP) from charging for the digitized files and it would prevent others from monopolizing access to the data.  The City bureaucracy is using copyright law to restrict free speech and limit democracy by making public information less available.

Amateur Hour Conference Nov 2

http://www.nyls.edu/amhr

From television (YouTube and Revver) to advertising (Craigslist and consumer-made TV ads), movies (Machinima), photography (Flickr and iStockPhoto), encyclopedias (Wikipedia and UrbanDictionary), and news (blogs and citizen journalism) technology is enabling amateurs to produce and distribute high-quality product that people want to watch, read, consume, buy, and re-use.  This type of media is sometimes labeled “user-generated”, “amateur”, or “peer-produced” content, and there has been a huge amount of discussion on why people produce it.  Any number of commentators have suggested that this is a fundamental change in the way that media is produced, and have foretold a future full of people producing media for the love of it. For all the overblown rhetoric, it’s clear that certain types of many established assumptions in media are now being overturned.

What isn’t as clear is what happens to existing media businesses in the age of the amateur.  What has been the response of these businesses in light of the rise of the amateur, and what should be their response?  Media and entertainment businesses companies are faced with a range of business, legal and management issues that are both new and challenging.  The time is ripe to ask what to do about this, and what happens next.

And so we convened this conference.  It brings together many of the players in this new media environment to discuss the present and future of user generated content and existing media businesses. Among the questions that we will ask are:

    * What are the innovative legal arrangements that can be deployed to channel amateur production and distribution for success and profit?

    * What are the legal risks in giving your output to people who are not under your control?

    * What new business models enable traditional businesses and amateur contributors to collaborate?

    * How can new markets for participatory media be created capitalized upon?

    * What are the latest tools, technologies and online platforms to enable user-generated creativity and successful business?

    * What will the future of media look like, now that certain types of content are dominated by amateurs?

We hope that you enjoy this first Amateur Hour Conference.  By bringing together attendees from law, business and technology, the event promises to be educational and entertaining.

Download AmHr Postcard and Program

New Student Capstone Projects at the Do Tank

Institute for Information Law and Policy Tech Law Lab/Capstone Class 2007-2008

Profs. Grimmelmann, Johnson, Noveck, Sherwin

Introduction:

This year-long course seeks to train a new generation of lawyer: the one who can wield a wider array of tools (law, policy, technology) to solve complex social problems. The lawyer in the digital age must be able to think, not only in traditional legal terms, but also with an understanding of how information and communication work today.  Put another way, the new jurist has to translate the values of law into the world of media, technology and communication. This class aims to inculcate these skills through collaborative work on real-world projects that leverage hi- tech tools to promote civil liberties and social justice, promote open access to law and legal information, foster collective action and deepen democracy.  In this class, students work in small group teams. Each team has a faculty mentor as well as a client. These are all real projects with serious, real-world impact.

Descriptions for: Virtual Company (Johnson), Open Access Law (Grimmelmann),  New York Law School Visual History (Sherwin) and IP Matrix (Noveck) Projects follow.

Linux, and Light Bulbs

Reading the Balking article has reminded me of thoughts that I had earlier in the quarter when reading about the development of the Linux platform, regarding the speech genre of innovation .

How has the process of innovation evolved to this point?

Linux and similar open-source soft launch products are a bit of a conundrum. Why is it that people will contribute time-consuming and complex editions of software to a community, free of charge? This gratis innovation process certainly doesn't match up with traditional models of innovation.

I am reminded of light bulbs. The process of creating the prototypical incandescent light bulb occurred over the course of about one hundred years of discovery and experimentation by at least ten scientists. Thomas Edison did not sit up straight one day in a dark lab and "zap" there was the idea for the light bulb, he bought pre-existing patents from Henry Woodward and a colleague Mathew Evans and created a marketable product.

Whistleblowers

“Three things can not hide for long: the Moon, the Sun and the Truth” – Siddhartha

After digesting the Ligue Contre Racisme v. Yahoo case and the Hactivismo democratic agenda, I began to think about the consequences of traditional political borders on multinationals. Regarding free expression, are they trip lines or are they useful cultural gates that should be honored? In a global era, borders and cultural divides are sometimes easily bypassed. Yet,although business operations in Western Europe and America are generally viewed as highly compatible, when it comes to whistleblowers, protection of anonymous informants is met with a different perspective in the EU than in the US.

When I was in journalism school, one of my favorite professors would tell stories of her time spent in international correspondence. She would detail landing in some far-away city whose name she had just learned to pronounce; she would describe the late nights spent trading war stories and tequila shots with other reporters; she would share tales of tracking down sources in spite of the barriers of language, culture, race, or gender. But most of all, she would reveal the pleasure she had of being dropped off in a country and disappearing from her editors for weeks at a time. In those days, she would explain, frequent communication simply wasn’t an option. She had a satellite phone, but they were expensive and weren’t always reliable. There was this newfangled technology called a fax machine, but they weren’t very accessible because they were only in a few scattered locations. Because editors couldn’t expect regular reports, journalists were given the space and time that they needed to fully develop their stories and confirm their facts. They were able to become ingrained in the story that they were covering, and present their sources and experiences with the complexity and nuance that most articles require. With the advent of technology, this has drastically changed.

Download Early and Often

James Grimmelmann, soon-to-be colleague at New York Law School and longtime fighter of the cyber-good-fight, has a new article up on Social Science Research Network (SSRN) entitled, "SSRN Considered Harmful." 

As the abstract states: "The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) has adopted several unfortunate policies that impair open access to scholarship. It should enable one-click download, stop requiring papers to bear SSRN watermarks, and allow authors to point readers to other download sites. If it does not reform, those who are serious about open access should not use SSRN."

In other words, if I want to post an article with a link in the abstract to another service, such as a wiki where the scholarly community might discuss and debate the piece, I am currently prevented from doing so.  This follows on the heals of earlier restrictive access policies that prevented anonymous login.  To its credit, SSRN now allows downloads without loggin in but it is still a long way from respecting free speech and academic principles.

To signal the importance of open access to scholarly information and to protest SSRN's attempts to lock-up content against the spirit of scholarly inquiry and communication, please download the article early and often!