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Monday, May 30, 2005
Blogs -- Not as bad as the "traditional media" portrays them
Barry Sussman of the Nieman Watchdog Project -- a web tool that provides questions that the press should ask -- things blogs can be very useful to the media. He says they ask some of the questions that need to be asked, and keep journalists and press organizations on their toes...
Joichi Ito of Neoteny discusses how bloggers are changing the face of journalism... He begins by pointing out that just because bloggers are "amateurs" not "professionals" doesn't mean they can't be reliable or useful. He says just because he don't get paid doesn't mean his work isn't as good as the professionals. He tries to make that same comparison with sex, saying sex you pay for is not necessarily better than sex you don't pay for.
He goes on to show some of the more innovative examples of blogs today, and ends with a video clip making fun of the way the Republication convention last year used terror to scare the public. The US government is trying to stop this kind of thing, he says, by enacting laws that prevent file sharing and the use of public figure images...
Tarek Atia
Posted by john burke on May 30, 2005 at 10:09 AM | Permalink
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Comments
Greenwald asked to license 1 minute from 60 minutes NBC said no. Initially they said something like "it doesn't make the president look very good."see
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.08/view.html?pg=5
Posted by: Joi Ito at May 31, 2005 7:25:01 AM
I've recently seen both Dan Gillmor's and Larry Lessig's presentations, and I agree that once you publish something (make it public) there's no way you can argue for not making it available for fair use.
But I think what's missing from the discussion around the broader topic are the concepts of attribution and what the equivalent of a set of quotation marks might be for audio and video.
Not to mention the lack of a sense of humor! Is someone really likely to be persuaded that Blair and Bush sing love songs to each other?
Posted by: Rosalea Barker at May 31, 2005 6:48:34 AM
Let me also add that the anti-P2P stuff will stifle video exchange. Also, recently pushed back by the FCC, the broadcast flag is trying to make it impossible to record television on things on hard disk recorders. Hollywood is trying to protect video content broadly through copyright legistlation and regulation of software and hardware and news media will be covered by copyright as creative works and "content" owned by networks and will legally and technically be protected in ways that text is not.
Posted by: Joi Ito at May 31, 2005 12:15:26 AM
The example I cited was network TV not giving access to exclusive interviews that they had of Bush to Greenwald, a documentary producer, under the grounds that they were protected by copyright. Which is true, but my feeling is that fair use should be extended to video as liberally as it is extended to text. Lessig makes this argument well, but I think that we are accustomed to citation and attribution in deliberating using text, but this form of remixed and sampling video and audio is still much more protected by copyright.
Posted by: Joi Ito at May 31, 2005 12:06:27 AM
"The US government is trying to stop this kind of thing, he says, by enacting laws that prevent file sharing and the use of public figure images..."
Whether or not that is exactly what Ito said or just your interpretation of it, and whether or not the reason Ito gives for the US government "trying to stop this kind of thing" is actually the reason, it is ironic in the extreme that Thomas Jefferson's attempt to *stimulate* innovation by protecting intellectual property for a short period of time has facilitated the use of IP laws to stifle innovation.
Here is the relevant part of the US Constitution, for those who aren't already familiar with it:
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 (the "Intellectual Property Clause" also called the Patent and/or Copyright Clause) of the United States Constitution states, "Congress shall have the Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Posted by: Rosalea Barker at May 30, 2005 10:11:31 PM
