IT Director for a non-profit in Washington, DC. Man About Internet.
AACS licensing authority censors Cory Doctorow’s class blog by ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes -- Knowing that AACS is a failure, all that the AACS licensing authority can do is control who links to the information on the crack.
Via Backingwinds
FARK.com just underwent a major site redesign, and lost among the clutter is their new legal policy. One would intuitively think that simply posting a photograph to the forums over at FARK.com would not mean that one is surrendering their copyright to FARK.com for all time, but it would appear that that is no longer the case:
Fark.com is the legal owner of all copyright interests of Fark.com content. Each and every submission to Fark.com carries with it an implied assignment of the entire copyright interest in the submission. In exchange for the content and publication of that submission on Fark.com, Fark.com grants back to the submitter a non-exclusive, non-transferable and royalty-free license to republish that submission in any and all forms.
Essentially, this means that posting any of your content to FARK, be it photograph, text, or whatever, immediately and forever transfers your copyright ownership to the owners of FARK.com. If, for example, you post a photo, they are free to sell rights to your photograph to others or to use it without permission in any way they deem fit, including advertising. The owners of FARK are "generous" enough to grant you back a license to use your own photo as you wish, but you are forever barred from selling licenses on the photo, as you (A) no longer own the copyright, (B) have only been granted a non-transferable license, and (C) FARK has generated a Royalty Free license, meaning that the image can never be Rights Managed again. The owners of FARK now own your image, not you.
Mark Frauenfelder:
Naomi Wolf wrote an essay about the ten steps a corrupt government takes to create a fascist state, and provides examples of what the Bush administration is doing to fulfill the requirements of each step. Some of Wolf's examples are quite a stretch, but others are spot on.
1 Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
2 Create a gulag
3 Develop a thug caste
4 Set up an internal surveillance system
5 Harass citizens' groups
6 Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7 Target key individuals
8 Control the press
9 Dissent equals treason
10 Suspend the rule of law
Link (Thanks, Rachel!)It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."
As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
(Via Boing Boing.)
Xeni Jardin:
The package is being described by some as "unprecedented," and by others as "a spree killer's EPK." Cho is now tagged by some as "the first Web 2.0 psycho killer," and the net result may be a possible template -- even a challenge -- for aspiring mass murderers.
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LISTEN:
"The Virginia Tech Shooter's Digital Mark." Link to archived audio (Real/Win). Here's an MP3 Link. Or, listen to this report as an MP3 in the "Xeni Tech" podcast (subscribe via iTunes here). NPR "Xeni Tech" archives here.
Also check out a related commentary about how to properly print and pronounce Korean names, filed yesterday by NPR "Day to Day" producer and contributor Ki-Min Sung: Link to audio.
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This isn't just about disintermediation, intermediation or even "the media". It's about no longer depending on The Media alone. Naturally, the media still have roles to play. They are just no longer the only ones playing those roles.
When Cho walked around shooting people, those in the best position to help each other were right there. The media that mattered most then, in real time, was direct contact by voice, hand signals, and mobile phones. People helping other people. That's still true now.
Again, I'm not saying that The Media are bad, or wrong. Just that we no longer live in a world where we get our best information only from top-down few-to-many sources. This is about AND logic, not OR.
Also, I am not saying that disclosing this stuff won't have bad consequences. It will certainly have many consequences. So will concealing it.
(thanks, Dave Winer).
Here's a related piece Yang wrote for Salon.com: Link to "Killer reflection." ("Cho and other Asian shooters were portrayed as "smart but quiet" and "fundamentally foreign." What do these stereotypes reveal, and what do they obscure?")
The past 48 hours have been one long, ongoing demonstration of what Jill Godmilow, in both her incomparable film What Farocki Taught and her essay “What’s Wrong with the Liberal Documentary?, labels “the pornography of the real”:
The “pornography of the real” involves the highly suspect, psychic pleasure of viewing “the moving picture real” … a powerful pornographic interest in real people, real death, real destruction and real suffering, especially of “others”, commodities in film. These “pleasures” are not brought to our attention. The pornographic aspect is masked in the documentary by assurances that the film delivers only the actually existing real — thus sincere truths that we need to know about.
[...]I think of storytelling as a kind of citizenship, so I don’t blame people for wanting to know the stories unfolding in Blacksburg, nor do I blame journalists for telling those stories. Still, how one gathers the facts, why you gather them, and the way you tell them can’t be separated from the story you’re telling.
Link, and here's another post from his site.
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Previously on BB:
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READER COMMENTS: your responses and related discussion after the jump.
Steven Silvers says,
Where there's tragedy, there's a press release selling something. Less than 48 hours after the shootings, a national telecom company issues a press release blaming Virginia Tech management, and suggesting that the murders would not have happened if the school had purchased its call-alert services. Link.
CJ says,
Perennial LOL generator Fox News endorses the opinion that the devil made Cho Seung-Hui kill several people. It's rambling, reactionary, involves several ellipses, and is just generally insulting to everyone that might even so much as look at the URL.
Drew says,
Here is a story about police in the Sacramento area looking for a copycat who threatened to, "carry out a rampage that 'will make Virginia Tech look mild.'"
PeaceLove says,
Among the tragedy coming out of Virgina Tech this week is the loss of 22 year old Dan O'Neil, a talented musician. His website contains some beautiful songs you might want to check out: Link.
Adam Selvidge says,
Chris over at cynical-c has a list (with links) of who the media is blaming for the VT shootings, including, but not limited to: It’s the fault of violent video games. It’s the fault of movies. It’s that no other students were armed. It’s the cowardly students who didn’t rush the shooter. It’s the first victim’s fault It’s secularism’s fault. It’s the Muslims’ and/or foreigners’ fault.
Brad Flora says,
What's Google charging the NYTimes for "VTech Shooting" ads? The Times and Washington Post have, rather pathetically, started buying search result ads from Google to funnel traffic to their VTech shooting coverage. Whose bright idea was this and what's Google charging them? AdWords offers an answer, as detailed in this post, but how accurate is it? And what does this mean for how big news will break in the future? Link.
Andrew Jimenez says,
I know media coverage of the Virgina Tech shooting is probably overwhelming at this point, but I just posted on my blog an opinion piece on the coverage thus far--in particular, today's (yesterday, now) Newsday--as well as glorification of killers in general. Link.
Jeff says,
Yesterday, I accused MSNBC of glorifying the Virginia Tech shooter by putting his PR package across their Web site cover page. Today, I got an interesting comment on my blog from Jim Ray, one of the editors there (I used to work there many years ago).
"It's never easy when a media organization becomes part of the story, but we're not some monolithic block taking marching orders from our corporate overlords. There are real people making real decisions about how to handle these situations and I, for one, am proud of how we handled this one."
But if you look on Ray's blog for yesterday, he has a screenshot of ABC screenshotting MSNBC's scoop ABC News posted a screen grab of our site on their homepage today. Rock the meta!"
This does nothing to back up the idea that NBC handled this in a responsible manner.
I agree these materials belong in the public domain, at some point. But the front page should feature photos of victims. The killer and his PR package should be relegated to the back.
By publishing these on the front page, MSNBC gave every other media outlet a pass to republish them. They won't publish graphic photos from Iraq ... so why this?
Link.
(Via Boing Boing.)
Xeni Jardin:
Mark Ebner, a longtime (10 years and counting) journalistic nemesis of the Church of Scientology, reports that proselytizers from that organization are on the way to Blacksburg, Virginia (as is reported to have occurred immediately after 9/11, and Katrina): Link. The conversion campaign is titled, "The Way to Happiness."
Previously on BB:
(Via Boing Boing.)
Xeni Jardin:
BP says,
One of the victims in the VT shooting was Christopher James Bishop (Jamie Bishop), a German Instructor. He was teaching German language but was also a skilled Academic Tech Liaison who knew his way around applications.He kept a site of his work and projects here (Link) along with a portfolio. Some of the design work is pretty impressive, and he cites influences including Neil Gaiman and Frank Miller. His illustrations are in the portfolio under ‘illo’ and his flash and web work might be of interest to bb readers. (see his use of flash to teach lyrics to a German rap song, here: (Link).
The NY Times has a short piece about him here (Link).
His father is the [Hugo & Locus Award winning] science fiction writer Michael Bishop.
Previously on BB:
(Via Boing Boing.)
