Dan Gillmor's blog

Here we go again -- a new attack on anonymous speech, misusing the facts ripped from the current headlines about a case of one person's slimy online attacks on another. So, as what Maureen Dowd today called the "Case of the Blond Model and the Malicious Blogger" gains publicity steam, Dowd and too many other commentators seem to be missing some key points and drawing the wrong lessons.

To refresh your memory, if you haven't heard about it, this case involves Liskula Cohen, a model who was on the receiving end of some vile comments next to suggestive pictures, posted under a pseudonym on one of gazillions of such blogs at Google's Blogger service. Cohen's lawyer persuaded a judge that the posts were arguably defamatory, and the judge ordered Google to turn over the email address and other logged information it had about the blogger. The company, after first denying Cohen's request and saying she'd need a court order, then complied and handed over the information. The data trail led back to a Cohen acquaintance named Rosemary Port. Cohen, in a demonstration of her own better instincts, said she would forgive Port instead of suing her. 

That's where this nasty little incident might have ended. Unfortunately it appears to be heading off in new directions.   read more »

Jason Kottke notes the new robots.txt file at whitehouse.gov — down to a single “disallow” from more than 2,400 yesterday.

(Cross-posted from the Center for Citizen Media Blog.)

StinkyJournalism.org: The Unspoken Peril for "Citizen Journalists" Surprise! You Owe the IRS Some Gift Tax!

Is the “donation” of a citizen’s content (video, articles, commentaries, images) to for-profit media outlets that exceeds a fair market value of $12,000 in any single year subject to gift tax? Judging from the IRS guidelines, the answer is “yes.”

This is a surprise, and an unwelcome one.

Before people panic, however, we should keep in mind that — given the typical freelance rates paid by media outlets these days — you’d have to spend a lot of time sending stories to large media organizations before you’d be even potentially liable for gift taxes.

The good news is that it won’t affect in any way the occasional contributor, or even a frequent contributor to nonprofit or low-traffic sites, and it has no bearing whatever on your own work on your own blog, period.

More important, it’ll help get people thinking harder about financial implications in general. The business model that says “You do all the work and we’ll collect all the money” has always been a lousy one, not to mention unfair. Now, if that turns into “You do all the work, we’ll take all the money and you’ll pay taxes on what we don’t pay you,” the citizen journalists will look even harder at this unbalanced state of affairs.

(Cross-posted from the Center for Citizen Media Blog.)

LA Observed has a post about how KRON TV in San Francisco disinvited the authors of a new book from a talk-show appearance after discovering that the book, No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-hour News Cycle, takes shots at the crappy state of local TV news. My initial reaction was incredulity. I mean, how clueless is that kind of move?

Then I read the entire item, which includes an outraged email from the authors — Howard Rosenberg, formerly of the LA Times, and Charles Feldman — in which they write, among other things, the following line:

Government censorship is not nearly as bad as is corporate censorship–especially by a company that serves the public—or ought to.

I find myself hoping that the email by the authors is a fake. If it’s real, the authors need a refresher course in First Amendment 101, not to mention reality. The most likely explanation for the authors’ ridiculous statement is that a) they were pissed; b) they wrote their outraged note in haste; and c) they didn’t proofread it before they sent it along.

Why ridiculous? Journalists should understand that only governments can censor. Other entities can make it difficult to get heard by large numbers of people, but that is absolutely not the same thing as being forbidden to publish at all.   read more »

One of the most intriguing current media legal cases pits GateHouse Media, which owns a pile of newspapers in New England (and elsewhere) against the New York Times Co., owner of the Boston Globe and Boston.com. I’ve been looking at this from both sides’ perspectives, and this is not as simple as it looks on first glance.

A disclosure: I’m a New York Times shareholder. But if the facts are true as alleged in GateHouse’s complaint, I’m leaning toward taking GateHouse’s side on this — even though I think GateHouse is making a strategic mistake in the first place — for reasons I’ll explain below.

This is a copyright fight at heart, about Boston.com’s Your Town sites, local aggregations of information and news for surrounding communities. The Your Town project, which I believe is a good idea, has three towns up now and the Globe has plans for dozens more.

GateHouse, meanwhile, has been operating sites — before Your Town got started — called Wicked Local. Both of these sites aggregate from various sources, sending traffic to the sites they point to, which is part of why many of us consider aggregation generally positive for everyone involved. So far so good.

GateHouse doesn’t buy that when it comes to what Your Town is doing: copying some headlines and story ledes from Wicked Local and GateHouse news sites (a “lede” is the start of a story) onto the Your Town pages.   read more »

I’m a signer of a letter on a new site called “An Open Transition,” where a group of folks led by Larry Lessig:

• celebrates the incoming administration’s decision to put a Creative Commons license on its Change.Gov transition website, thereby allowing anyone to share, remix and otherwise reuse and copy the material there;


• and asks that this philosophy be extended widely in the new administration, and around the government in general.

Politico has a short story on this here.

The AP reports, "Palin derides anonymous critics on Fox as cowards," a reference to a recent Fox News segment in which a correspondent relayed a variety of negative attacks from, he said, members of the McCain campaign staff against Sarah Palin.

No matter what you think about Palin in general, she's right in this case. It's a perfect example of why anonymous critics should not be taken seriously -- in fact why they should often be flatly disbelieved.

Consider the source. Remember the avalanche of lies that emanated from the McCain campaign this fall? These folks were spewing untruths as a matter of routine. Now we're supposed to suddenly start trusting them? Strike one.

Even though Palin betrayed a remarkable ignorance to go along with her arrogance, the notion that she doesn't know Africa is a continent can't be taken seriously. Strike two.

And then there's the refusal of the person who allegedly said this to allow his or her name to be attached to the slander. Strike three.

This isn't precisely like an anonymous comment on a blog, where we don't know anything about the person posting it. In this case we know -- or, rather, we've been told by a news organization that itself is often untrustworthy -- that the comments came from a dishonest political campaign.

The anonymous comment on a blog or news article deserves less than no credibility. The Palin attacks, given the source, deserve about as much trust: zero at most.

(Note: I'm sorry to see that so many journalists have reported this garbage as if it was news. They're playing directly into the hands of the slimy folks.)

As Salon notes in "Skype sells out to China," the eBay-owned service has collaborated with a Chinese company to enable spying on the allegedly encrypted messages that Skype users send each other to and from, and within, China. This disgusting sellout should surprise no one.

Skype and its corporate parent, eBay, have been evasive about whether the product is truly secure. There’s ample reason — including this admission attributed to an Austrian law-enforcement agency — to suspect that the company has created backdoors for police.

Skype, for its part, has never outright denied that it has done so. Nor has it shown its encryption algorithms in an open way to outside experts for verification and analysis. I take this as an admission that you can’t trust Skype’s encryption, period.

This is important to citizen-media people for several reasons. First, plenty of regimes make it downright dangerous to indulge in truly free speech. Skype has been a favored tool for many people who believed the built-in encryption somehow would protect them.

Second, it’s another example of the way companies from the West collaborate with the globe’s most dictatorial regimes — and it makes abundantly clear that we need an open-source communications toolset that we can trust.

Skype is better than no encryption at all. But do not imagine for a minute that you can fully trust this company, because you can’t.

Carl Malamud, a hero in providing access to information, has posted online the 38-volume California Code of Regulations, over which the state claims copyright ownership. He's been doing things like this for a while, but the California code is a big deal in every respect.

The Santa Rosa (Calif.) Press Democrat has the story.

I have a column running on the Guardian’s website. It’s entitled “Freedom of information” — and is reprinted below:

What does a Swiss bank that does business in the Cayman Islands have in common with a Hong Kong actor who jets around the globe? They are object lessons this month in a reality that anyone handling information needs to understand. Like toothpaste squeezed from a tube, information, once out in the wild, is all but uncontainable.

The Julius Baer Bank is a protagonist in the now-famous Wikileaks case. The bank’s lawyers managed to persuade a US federal judge, Jeffrey White, that the first amendment of the US Constitution had no meaning, obtaining an injunction and follow-up order that, among other things, required blocking the visibility of the domain wikileaks.org in the internet’s Domain Name System (DNS). A former bank employee had posted documents on the anonymous whistle-blowing website, allegedly describing shady dealings - hmmm, Cayman Islands, Swiss banks - on behalf of clients.

“The orders don’t just direct the take down of existing content, they also enjoin any future publication of the material,” says David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society (of which I’m a co-founder). “Even more significantly, the second order requires anyone who receives notice of the order to refrain from publishing, distributing or linking to the documents.”   read more »

Glenn Greenwald accurately explains the grotesque result of laws that seek to curb that amorphous problem of “hate speech” — a concept that turns free speech on its head. And unlike many of his colleagues on the political left, Greenwald explains why he’s defending people whose speech frequently deserves contempt:

People like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant are some of the most pernicious commentators around. But equally pernicious, at least, are those who advocate laws that would proscribe and punish political expression, and those who exploit those laws to try use the power of the State to impose penalties on those expressing “offensive” or “insulting” or “wrong” political ideas. The mere existence of the “investigation,” interrogation, and proceeding itself is a grotesque affront to every basic liberty.

How many times can we say this? If you care about your own free speech rights, you must defend the rights of people whose speech makes your blood boil.

(Cross-posted from the Center for Citizen Media Blog.)

Follow the links from Electronic Frontier Foundation page on the bizarre Manalapan v. Moskovitz lawsuit to see a local government running wild against free speech. The town is suing to get the identity of -- and all kinds of other information about -- a critical anonymous blogger.

Anonymous speech should generally be taken less seriously than speech where the speaker stands behind his own words, and I think this is such a case. But anonymous speech is part of a long and vital tradition in America, and this is also such an example.

Someone should show these officials the Bill of Rights. Kudos to the EFF for pursuing this case.

Talking Points Memo: Right-Wing Bloggers Launch Campaign -- With MoveOn! -- Against Fox News Over Debate Footage. A coalition of right-wing bloggers and MoveOn that helped force several networks to allow public use of their political debate footage last spring has just launched a similar campaign against Fox News.

Good for all of them. Fox News' position is untenable from almost any point of reference.

UPDATED

NY Times: Verizon Reverses Itself on Abortion Rights Messages.

Saying it had the right to block “controversial or unsavory” text messages, Verizon Wireless has rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon’s mobile network available for a text-message program.

But the company reversed course this morning, saying it had made a mistake.

“The decision to not allow text messaging on an important, though sensitive, public policy issue was incorrect, and we have fixed the process that led to this isolated incident,” Jeffrey Nelson, a company spokesman, said in a statement.

If this doesn't sound the alarm in a serious way, free speech in America is in clear and present danger. We communicate increasingly via digital networks of various kinds, and Verizon's position that it can decide what kinds of speech get through is beyond scary: It's downright dangerous.

Verizon is now claiming that its policy is designed to prevent unwanted messages -- when this was nothing of the sort. People had to sign up. The deception is transparent.

There are just a few major telecom carriers left. We cannot allow them to decide what we can talk about on these networks.

Chris Knight, who's been unfairly treated by media giant Viacom, now says: YouTube has restored my clip.

Syracuse.com: SU student questions VA security actions. A Syracuse University graduate student taking photographs outside the VA Medical Center says she was questioned and ordered to delete several images by hospital security officers Thursday afternoon. Mariam Jukaku, 24, of Michigan, said the officers also photocopied her university ID and driver's license and asked if she was a U.S. citizen. She wonders if her appearance played a part in how the incident was handled.

Let's be clear: The security officers had no authority to order this woman to do anything of the kind. And if this incident occurred as described (there's no reason to doubt it), it's entirely probable that appearances were part of the reason.

These kinds of paranoid acts by officials do nothing to increase security -- nothing. They only provide a demontration of what others have called "security theater" -- the pretense of protection that does more harm than good.

Chris Knight says, "Viacom hits me with copyright infringement for posting on YouTube a video that Viacom made by infringing on my own copyright!

Viacom is claiming that I have violated their copyright by posting on YouTube a segment from it's VH1 show Web Junk 2.0... which VH1 produced -- without permission -- from a video that I had originally created. Viacom used my video without permission on their commercial television show, and now says that I am infringing on THEIR copyright for showing the clip of the work that Viacom made in violation of my own copyright!

This looks, if the facts are as Knight represents, like the standard, arrogant big-media goof in the copyright war -- issuing takedown notices that have been poorly researched. It seems reasonable to assume that Viacom will recognize this and back down, especially now that the case is going to get wide publicity. Then again, the entertainment industry is not exactly known for listening to reason.

And when the weight of big corporations is thrown against the little guy, the rule seems to be guilty until proved innocent. And the cost of proving innocence is high. This imbalance cries out for more effective countermeasures to abuse.

There are penalties in copyright law for using takedown notices frivolously (again, this may not be that specific situation). Perhaps this is the kind of case the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) might want to take up. The organization took Diebold, a maker of defective voting machines, to court several years ago for knowingly misrepresenting copyright infringement, and won a judgement against the company.

Slightly off-topic: Does Knight's use of Star Wars imagery in his video have any trademark implications?   read more »

John Dvorak: Google Pulls Plug, Everyone Misses Point. The scary part is that we are not talking about some flaky, small underfunded company. We're talking about Google, a behemoth. This tells me that if Google can throw in the towel and abandon one of its online-related services, then anyone can do it—and they will. And then they'll all point to Google. "Well, if Google can do it after it made promises, then we can do it." It can happen anywhere. You have all your family photos online? Good luck with that. Your blogging software and blog are all online? Have a nice day. Your business is completely reliant on online systems? How does your insurance policy look?

The case here is about customers' ability to use a service they purchased. Google is reneging on its promise. But the bigger issue is in the latter part of this quote -- whether the photos, text, videos, financial information and other things you put online are yours, or whether they end up belonging, in practice if not principle, to the company you use to store and/or display them. For citizen media creators contributing their work to a variety of sites, this is not a trivial issue. The portability of data is one of the absolutely crucial problems in a world of online-everything. You cannot absolutely depend on online vendors to protect your information, despite their best intentions (and most of them have very good intentions). If you can't download your data to your own computer, in a form that lets you use it elsewhere with not too much hassle, then you should be clear: It's not really your data after all. Should there be a law about this? I suspect, in the end, we may need one.

Press Gazette (UK): MPs outlaw satire in New Zealand. New Zealand's Parliament has voted itself far-reaching powers to control satire and ridicule of MPs in Parliament, attracting a storm of media and academic criticism. The new standing orders, voted in last month, concern the use of images of Parliamentary debates, and make it a contempt of Parliament for broadcasters or anyone else to use footage of the chamber for "satire, ridicule or denigration".

This sounds so outlandish that I can't believe it's true. We'll keep an eye on this and let you know.

BBC: Malaysia cracks down on bloggers. The Malaysian government has warned it could use tough anti-terrorism laws against bloggers who insult Islam or the country's king.

I remember visiting Malaysia in late 2001, and being assured by people in business and government that the Internet was going to truly remain a free-speech zone (unlike the highly regulated traditional media). I also remember an online journalist telling me that this would last as long as the Net was being seen only by a tiny minority of the citizens. He was right.