David Ardia is giving a Berkman lunch talk on the Citizen Media Law Project. David begins by acknowledging his colleagues on the project, which has been student-driven to a large degree. [Caution Live-Blogging: I’m missing things, getting them wrong, etc. You will be able to see the session itself at Media Berkman. ]

David begins by looking at iBrattleboro.com, a citizen journalism, the neurodiversity weblog, and wikileaks. These sites have come to the attention of CMLP because they are citizens media sites that have little or no journalism training, little or know knowledge of media law, and not a lot of money. The CMLP grew out of a desire to provide resources for groups like these. (Dan Gillmor was one of the forces behind this, says David.)

CMLP began in April 2007, got a Knight News Challenge Award in May, published its legal threats database in Nov, launched their legal guide in Jan. 2008, and in Feb. did its first amicus filing (for Wikileaks).

The legal guide site has lots and lots of material in it, covering six topics: forming a business and getting online, dealing with online legal risks, newsgathering and privacy, access to government info, intellectual property, and risks associated with publication. There are 5-10 topics under each of these. There’s a lot there.

David walks through the site. There is a rich variety of ways of finding and browsing. In David’s example, the site explains how to create a non-profit corp., and actually steps you through the process, including the specifics for the fifteen states the guide covers so far.

The legal threats database has 25 attributes by which it can be searched. Users can contribute their own entries, although most come in through email. (They also import data from the Chilling Effects site.) The database does not make judgments about the threats. There are 467 entries in the database. Over half are law suits. They include threats to bring criminal charges (16) or to bring disciplinary action (18); that last is included because the legal system backs up the contracts that permit disciplinary action. David explains that the site takes an inclusive approach since you can easily narrow your queries to the areas that interest you. [A good “miscellaneous” principle!]

Factoids: California, which has 12% of the population, is the source of 21% of the threats. 30% of the legal claims are for defamation. Copyright infringements come in second with 8%.

93 of the law suits are pending. 40 settled. The plaintiffs got an injunction in 16 of the cases and won their cases 13 times. That’s not a lot out of more than 250 cases. David says that these sorts of results are fairly normal for law suits, although (he adds) these tend to be emotion-driven litigations, not money-driven.

David gives us a tour of the iBrattleboro case entry. It’s a very well-organized, thorough research on the topic.

David ends by posing some questions for expanding the database and opening it up. [Tags: citizen_journalism law cmlp chillingeffects ]

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The latest version of Keynote exports files in Powerpoint format that the latest version of Popwerpoint can’t read. Charming.

A discussion board pointed out, however, that if you strip out all the presenter notes from your Keynote file, the exported Keynote file will indeed open in Powerpoint. I tried it on one small file, and it worked.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to strip out all those notes. And I haven’t seen anything from Keynote about an update.

[Tags: keynote powerpoint ]

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I wanted to find out what Microsoft Expression Media — or, as Microsoft puts it, Microsoft® Expression® Media — is, so I did what any red-blooded Netizen would do: I googled it. The top hit is Microsoft’s home page for it. It wants to show me videos, but I don’t want to sit around while being slowly pummeled with Microsoft’s marketing messages. If I’m going to be marketed to, at least let me skim. So, I clicked on the “Why Buy?” link, thinking I’d get a features list. I just want to know what the product does.

Nope. That loads a popup that asks me to install Silverlight (oops, I mean Microsoft® Silverlight®)The popup conscientiously informs me that once installed, Silverlight “updates automatically,” where “update” means I am giving Microsoft the right to load stuff onto my computer without asking or informing me. In addition, the privacy statement says Microsoft will only transfer information it gathers about me and my computer to third parties if it really wants to. (The privacy statement puts it a little more formally than that.)

So, here I am, trying to find out about a Microsoft product, yet I’m being required to install software I don’t want in the first place, and that has the right to mutate itself without my knowledge. And to get this authorized virus, I have to agree to a privacy-violation agreement that scares me.

Can you imagine the snorting that would occur if a start-up company insisted on this?

So, take this as an example of either inept marketing or implicit bullying by a dominant force. Or both. [Tags: microsoft marketing silverlight ]

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Best of luck to Ethan Zuckerman, he of the big heart and huge brain, as he undergoes eye surgery…

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman ]

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Every number is special. Every one. Even you, 64, my little lowest-number-with-seven-divisors. And especially you, 6014, my little square formed by 3 squares that overlap by 1 digit.

[Tags: numbers ]

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Last night I met a guy who I disliked after only a few minutes of conversation. That’s unusual for me. I wanted to get out of his presence, which is also unusual. Weirdest of all, couldn’t figure out why I didn’t like him. There was nothing wrong with him. If you asked me, I wouldn’t be able to come up with a single explanatory factor.

Only after I’d politely exempted myself from his presence did I realize why I didn’t like him: For whatever psychological reason, I found myself becoming competitive, trying to impress him. In his presence, I was an a-hole.

It was me, not him. And it makes me wonder how often the people I don’t like I don’t like because I don’t like who I am with them.

[Tags: miscellaneous ]

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Here’s a slick video of the new, second Difference Engine, built according to Charles Babbage’s 19481848 plans. The narrative is over-heated, but the visuals are nice.

I’ve been continuing to read about Babbage because I think he provides an interesting way to argue that information didn’t exist before the middle of the 20th century. It’s a mistake to view even Babbage’s more advanced machine (the Analytic Engine) as dealing with information, much less as a computer. But I’m not ready to make that argument yet. I’m having a lot of fun researching it, though.

[Tags: babbage history_of_computing ]

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A couple of days ago, a post on a Canadian newspaper’s blog gave me credit for something I didn’t do. Before I could leave a comment correcting the post, the site insisted I register. Registration there is free (in the “no cash changes hands”) sense, but it required me to supply not only my email address and name, but also my sex and age. It also permitted me to enter yet more demographic data, which I declined to do. I didn’t want to have to supply any info, but i really wanted to correct that post. It even made me confirm an email they sent to the address I registered, because, I suppose, otherwise the terrorists have won.

The experience made me worry yet again about the efforts to put individuals in control of their own identity information. That sounds like an unarguable good, since the alternative is unarguably bad: letting others have control over your identity info. But the effect of these good-intentioned efforts will be — I’m afraid — a rapid decrease in personal privacy. For, the personal ID efforts not only give us control over our information, they also make it easy for us to supply it to others. Rather than having to type in our home address yet again, these new ID schemes will enable us to furnish information simply by pressing a button.

Since just about every vendor on the Web would like to know more about you rather than less, why won’t just about every vendor ask for more information rather than less? It’s all just a button press. Of course, you can choose not to deal with vendors who ask for too much info, but most of us will compare that with the post we want to correct, the sweater we want to buy, or the vacation we hope to win, and will just press the button.

We are making it easier to supply personal information without making it harder to ask for it. That should worry us.

Since the efforts to give users control over their personal information will inevitably continue — and the who I know who are involved in this are among the greatest champions of Web openness and personal freedom — here’s a suggestion for making it harder for vendors to ask for more information than they need. Suppose we were to create some rough categories of “asks,” and give them unambiguous names. For example, we could call the ID info that does nothing but verifies that you are who you say you are when buying something the “Credit Card Authorization Swipe.” The “ask” that wants to know your name and email address could be called the “Email ID Swipe.” The one that wants to know your demographics could be the “Marketing Personalization Swipe,” etc. The aim would be to get vendors to use those names with some uniformity, so that we not only would know what we’re giving, but there might be some market pressure (or at least some shame) not to ask for the full demographic roster when someone’s just trying to correct an error in a post. These nomenclature packages could even be graded to indicate how invasive they are.

I’m just thinking out loud here, but if we’re going to make it easy to give out our personal information, we ought to be thinking about the norms, market forces, or rules that would make it harder to ask for that information.

* * *

I’m on the road, so I may be pokey about replying. [Tags: identity id privacy marketing ]

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Rocketboom is running a synopsis of my talk on fame at ROFLcon. (Does that make me meta-famous?)

[Tags: rocketboom roflcon2008 fame ]

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