Cit Media

The Podcasting Legal Guide calls itself “a general roadmap of some of the legal issues specific to podcasting.”

Great work by all.

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Thanks again to Columbia University for inviting me this week to give the annual Hearst New Media Lecture. The audience was terrific and asked great questions (I don’t have a transcript of that part, sorry.) What follows is the talk as I wrote it out, beginning after the various thank-yous to the folks who invited me (special thanks to Sree), though I did stray frequently from the written text. I’ll add the appropriate links as I get the time.

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NY Times: Microsoft, NYT partner on newspaper software. Aiming to offer newspapers a new digital publishing alternative, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Friday touted a software program that tries to make publications easier to read on a computer screen.

Questions:

• Do very many people really want to read the paper’s journalism this way?
• How much will the newspaper(s) charge?
• Will this product include digital restrictions management (DRM) that, for example, prevents saving the stories or copying a section for further (fair) use?
• What is the itch being scratched here, other than herding readers into a system that can be more easily monetized but is less convenient and very likely much more restrictive?
• In other words, what’s really in it for the customers?

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NY Times: Publisher to Recall Harvard Student’s Novel. Just a day after saying it would not withdraw “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life” from bookstores, Little, Brown, the publisher of the novel whose author, Kaavya Viswanathan, confessed to copying passages from another writer’s books, said it would immediately recall all editions from store shelves.

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Robert Niles at Online Journalism Review asks, “Can newspapers do blogs right?” — and some prominent online journalists offer responses.

As someone who wrote a newspaper blog for more than five years, I can assure you that the answer is Yes.

The fact that newspapers sometimes screw it up is meaningless, or close to it. Newspapers also screw up the “regular” journalism, too, from time to time. That doesn’t seem to deter them.

The only un-fixable mistake is when you fall off the horse and then refuse to jump back on.

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Lance Dutson (Maine Web Report): State Contractor Files Federal Lawsuit Against Me. So here I am, one man against the state and its contractors, put in the position of shutting up or being pounded by their deep pockets and a wild misconception of what the court system is supposed to be used for. One person who has exposed a cavalcade of incompetence and who has to choose to allow it, or face an onslaught of personal attack and legal action.

The Boston Globe, in its story (the paper has known about this man and his situation for weeks, but apparently only got intererestd when the lawsuit was filed), quotes many of the usual suspects including my Berkman colleague John Palfrey, who observes that the plaintiff has to surmount a big legal hurdle here.

But what if this case is, as many suspect, an example of a deep-pocketed plaintiff trying to shut someone up — someone who can’t afford a long legal defense? That’s certainly a possibility here.

The situation points up the need for bloggers to realize their speech is subject to such actions. We get no pass when it comes to defaming people, and we shouldn’t.

But it also points up the need for sanctions, ones that hurt, against the plaintiffs when they file suits on specious grounds with the obvious goal of shutting people up or punishing them for telling the truth. Unfortunately, judges almost never penalize the plaintiffs or their lawyers in such cases, and that’s why the law is tipped against the defendants; defending yourself, even when you’re entirely in the right, can be too expensive.

I’m glad to say that the Media Bloggers Association is asking for help and its attorney, Ronald Coleman, is joining the case. (I’m a charter member of this organization.)

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Over at my Bay Area blog, here’s my comment on today’s news that McClatchy will sell the San Jose Mercury News and three other papers, in a differently structured deal that strikes me as a bit smelly.

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Guardian: BBC unveils radical revamp of website. The BBC today unveiled radical plans to rebuild its website around user-generated content, including blogs and home videos, with the aim of creating a public service version of MySpace.com.

The proof will be in the doing, of course, but this will be a fantastic experiment to watch — and cheer, if it works.

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I’m heading to New York for tomorrow evening’s talk at Columbia University. Hope to see some of you there…

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Dave Winer: Next steps for BitTorrent. Breadth of support is the most important thing BitTorrent needs. We need easier and more servers and clients, more non-infringing content, and more commitments from the tech industry, government, and eventually, of course, the entertainment industry. It’s a very rational, open technology, quite useful, and with a little more effort it will become a fixture in the toolkit for Internet developers, publishers and users.

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