Dan Gillmor's blog

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.

Well, Dell Computer is learning about the web. See the confession at Consumerist, in which the company admits its mistake in demanding that the site take down a posting about its kiosk sales operation. Some things do change.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Avvo's attorney rating system draws fire. Setting up an online rating system that attempts to rank the best and worst attorneys, is kind of like dipping your toes in shark-infested waters. Sooner or later, you are bound to get bitten. That's the situation facing Avvo, the heavily funded Seattle startup that just four days ago unveiled a controversial Internet site that ranks lawyers on a scale of one ("extreme caution") to 10 ("superb"). John Henry Browne, a Seattle criminal defense attorney who in my story on Avvo Tuesday called the service a "joke," is now threatening to sue the company over what he calls a "ridiculously low rating" for him and other attorneys.

My question is whether his lawsuit will call more attention to his not-so-hot rating than if he'd just left it alone. The ratings, according to the posting, are suspect in any case.

Pegasus News: Anti-sunshine bill HB 2564 on Governor Perry's desk Saturday. Under this law, local and state government agencies could track individuals who seek public records and bill them for employee time spent to dig them up. Elected officials, nonprofit corporations, FCC-licensed TV and radio stations and "Newspapers of General Circulation" would be exempt.

Pegasus' Mike Orren calls this a blatant attempt to prevent activists and others from covering what local officials are doing.

The California First Amendment Coalition has won a crucial lower-court ruling that Santa Clara County must provide -- at cost -- its geographic "base map" of real estate boundaries in the county. The county had been saying it would charge tens of thousands of dollars for information collected on behalf of residents, using taxpayer money.

Maps are turning into an essential element of citizen media, via a variety of techniques including mashups. Traditional geographic information systems (GIS) like the Santa Clara County data are being combined with other data to produce new kinds of information.

Here's a link to the judge's ruling (1.4MB pdf).

(Note: I'm on the coalition's board of directors.)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation thinks the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals handed Internet innovators and users of all stripes a huge victory in a case involving a company called Perfect 10 versus Google:  read more »