I just finished doing my holiday giving, and I encourage you to do the same. Here are the organizations where I sent my dollars:
Someone please build Google Reader + Techmeme
I haven’t seriously opened Google Reader in months. That might be because I’m in law school and have limited time to read besides for courses. I don’t think this is true, though, because I still frequent Twitter, Techmeme, Google News, NYTimes, Facebook…. yeah, I have plenty of time for other stuff. It might be because I have 144 subscriptions, leading my unread count to reach the dreaded “1000+” in a matter of days. But shouldn’t Reader’s “sort by magic” help with that?
I think the real reason that I recoil from RSS these days is because of organization. Let’s do a little history lesson, and then I’ll make a proposal for something better.
Room for Debate: “Do Not Track”
The New York Times has an excellent “Room for Debate” installment on the subject of the F.T.C.’s recent proposal for a “do not track” mechanism for the Web. It features commentary from Jonathan Zittrain, Fred Wilson, Jim Harper, and Jonathan Askin. Definitely check it out. Favorite quote, from Askin:
I come from the “Crazy Eddie” approach to regulation. In order for industry to adopt meaningful online privacy processes and policies on its own, it must fear that the F.T.C. is about to issue an order with the tagline: “We’re the F.T.C., and our policies are INSANE!” That is, if industry doesn’t step up, government will do it for them, and the government solution might be crazy.
“I know it when I frag it”
I just finished reading an article in the ABA Journal about Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the case headed to the U.S. Supreme Court that will answer whether California’s prohibition against selling violent video games to minors violates the First Amendment. The article concluded with this thought, which is just a hilarious image:
Will the justices themselves be plugging in a Play Station or Xbox to try some of the games? In the 1960s and ’70s, when the court frequently heard obscenity cases, some justices and their clerks gathered on “movie days” to watch the sexually explicit films at issue. In the mid-1990s, when the court was reviewing a federal law that regulated Internet indecency, the Supreme Court Library set up a demonstration of the relatively new World Wide Web.
“It wouldn’t be shocking if they did a similar thing here,” Smith says.
Of Copyrights and Campaigns: Fox News Network v. Carnahan for Senate
My second post for the William & Mary IP blog is up. It dives a little deeper into one of the campaign video cases that my previous post covered:
In September, Fox News filed a copyright infringement suit against the campaign of Robin Carnahan, the Democratic then-candidate for Missouri’s U.S. Senate seat. (Carahan was eventually defeated at the polls by Republican Roy Blunt.) The complaint alleged that Carnahan’s campaign “usurped proprietary footage from the Fox News Network to made it appear – falsely – that [Fox News] and Christopher Wallace, one of the nation’s most respected political journalists, are endorsing Robin Carnahan’s campaign.” The ad (which you can watchhere) consists almost entirely of footage taken from Wallace’s interview of Blunt on Fox News earlier this year. In addition to copyright infringement, the complaint alleges invasions of Wallace’s privacy and publicity rights.
There are at least two key issues at stake in this lawsuit. The first is the nature of the rights that Fox News is seeking to protect. Instead of alleging an infringement of economic rights to its work, Fox News focuses its complaint largely around the effect of the unauthorized use of its work on its reputation. Throughout its complaint, Fox News speaks of the ad “compromising its apparent objectivity” and “misleading” its viewers into thinking that it endorsed Carnahan as a candidate.
The aforementioned CDT reports put it best: “These are not copyright interests.”
Click through to read the rest. [Update: It's also now live on State of Elections.]
