Cit Media

The Open Net Intitiative global Internet filtering study was posted this morning, and it’s an incredible piece of work. From the BBC story on the launch:

The level of state-led censorship of the net is growing around the world, a study of so-called internet filtering by the Open Net Initiative suggests. The study of thousands of websites across 120 Internet Service Providers found 25 of 41 countries surveyed showed evidence of content filtering.

Not surprisingly, Google Maps and Skype were among the most-censored material.

Before Americans get smug about things, let me remind folks that while our federal government doesn’t do all that much of this stuff –a noteworthy recent exception is banning social networking sites from computers where the military has any influence — there’s all kinds of censorship taking place at state and local levels.

Schools and libraries around the country are routinely censoring computers to prevent kids from seeing even the most remotely objectionable material. It’s to the stage in many places where a student trying to gather material for a school report will be unable to find even relevant and useful sites.

Censorship is growing everywhere, it seems — and that includes America.

Meanwhile, congrats to my Berkman Center colleagues and others who worked on the project.

UPDATE: And props to Seth Finkelstein, frequent commenter here, who has been doing great work in this area for years.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation thinks the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals handed Internet innovators and users of all stripes a huge victory in a case involving a company called Perfect 10 versus Google:

The decision covers a wide-range of online copyright issues from in-line linking to fair use to the DMCA safe harbors and post-Grokster liability. Perfect 10 had sued Google for copyright infringement, claiming that its “Image Search” tool illegally reproduced and displayed P10 photos when it returned thumbnail results and framed third-party websites in response to search terms. It also claimed that Google was liable for contributing to Internet user infringement when users would look at pictures online that they had found via Google Image search.

Law blogger Eric Goldman is less sure of the sweeping nature of the ruling, saying:

It overturns the most pernicious part of the district court opinion holding that Google was directly infringing for displaying thumbnails in its image search. On the other hand, it opens up the possibility of new secondary liability by the search engines. However, on balance, this opinion is much better for the search engines than the lower court opinion, so it’s a mild win for them.

Wall Street Journal: Why China Relaxed Blogger Crackdown. Now, the Ministry of Information Industry, the agency responsible for the policy, has abandoned plans for a law requiring all Chinese blog service providers to ask their users for verifiable personal details before they can start blogging. Instead, the government is going for the soft approach.

An outbreak of common sense in Beijing’s halls of power…

Self-help for unnerved newspaper people includes feeling good about themselves, opines the New Republic:

How can newspapers recover their mojo? For starters, they should stop sounding apocalyptic. Their business is in much less of a crisis than you might imagine. The long-term decline in newspaper readership can be largely attributed to the death of the evening paper. The circulation of morning papers has actually risen by about 60 percent since 1980. And, for papers like The Washington Post that have shed print readers, Web traffic has grown at an astonishing pace. And profit margins at most papers remain high. As The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki pointed out last year, the McClatchy newspaper conglomerate, which purchased Knight Ridder last year, has healthier profit margins than, say, ExxonMobil.

Yet the issue is not profit margins, though they do matter. It is the unmistakable recent trends, which include ad revenue drops, serious circulation falls (at morning papers) and the simple fact that young people almost never buy newspapers.

The monopoly days are over, and the business model is unraveling at an accelerating rate. Newspaper business people understand this now. The New Republic should take note.

He explains:

This isn’t just about the demand side getting the power to supply. It’s about moving from use to manufacture, from passivity to engagement.

The Washington Post and others are reporting that the Pentagon is blocking soldiers’ access to YouTube, MySpace and 11 other social-media sites. The reasons: bandwidth pressures — an entirely bogus claim — and worries about the “disclosure of combat-sensitive material,” a more understandable consideration.

Combined with tighter restrictions on soldiers’ blogging, the plain intent by the military is to lock down what people in the field can tell the rest of us. Not surprising, perhaps, but disappointing.

UPDATED

About a decade ago, Bill Gates was telling people that Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal and other media properties, was a mismanaged brand. He was right then, and Rupert Murdoch is making that point now with his bid for the company.

Murdoch is a modern media baron in the style of the worst yellow journalists of the past. He would be a dreadful proprietor of the Journal, which carries a banner of honorable, tough journalism — apart from the editorial pages, of course — that makes it one of the treasures of press integrity today.

Gates is a robber baron, a throwback to the predators of the late 1800s and early 1900s who almost destroyed American capitalism with their hunger for wealth and power in a time when government cared little for a fair or honest marketplace. Yet in the right circumstances, Gates would be the ideal buyer of Dow Jones. Let me explain.

As the newspaper business model continues to unravel, one of the key issues before us as a society is how we’re going to preserve great journalism. Newspapers, more than any other media form to date, have been — for all their obvious flaws — the most important source of great journalism.

Several newspaper companies, such as Nelson Poynter’s St. Petersburg Times in Florida, have been put into public trusts with both media and educational aims. In a perfect world, Dow Jones’ Bancroft family would do the same. But while it’s clear that the various relatives are unhappy about selling to a Murdoch, they’re not interested in giving up the wealth, either.

Bill Gates needs no more wealth. He has been slowly but surely turning his life from predator to humanitarian, the latter via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that is doing wonders for public health around the globe.

The foundation also has an educational mission, a less known but important operation in its own right. Suppose the foundation, with a new infusion of Gates’ personal wealth, were to buy Dow Jones and turn it into a public trust along the lines of the Poynter Institute, where the profits from the newspaper subsidize the educational mission.

What would be the that aim for a new kind of Dow Jones? Economic education — something that is woefully lacking in America and most other places. The possibilities would be endless.

Would Gates be willing to apply some of his wealth for this goal, and to apply some of his business acumen to helping the Journal leverage its assets for such a worthy purpose? Would he and his foundation name trustees who’d preserve the essential editorial independence that has made the Journal so great? Those, of course, are the multi-billion-dollar questions. But there is no question that journalism and the public at large would be well-served.

I’ll bet the Bancrofts would sell the company for this purpose, and for considerably less than the premium Murdoch is offering. (I own a small amount of Dow Jones stock and would happily forego the additional gains.) They’d get plenty of money, without extracting the last possible pennies, and they’d have the satisfaction of seeing the institution built by their family remain the vital part of American journalism — and protector of truly free markets — that it has been for some time.

UPDATE

In a letter to the Bancrofts, Murdoch tries to assuage the family that he’d ensure the integrity of the Wall Street Journal’s news pages. But he prefaces his promises — mere words — with this:

I don’t apologize for the fact that I have always had strong opinions and strong ideas about newspapers; but I have also always respected the independence and integrity of the news organizations with which I am associated.

Oh, please. Murdoch and his underlings have frequently interfered with the journalism. And at least some of those news organizations are emblematic for their visible lack of integrity.

A better approach for Murdoch would have been to admit that he’s interfered with his various properties, and only then promise not to do it in this case.

This article, “10 Things We Hate About Apple,” caused a mini-revolution inside of PC World, a magazine that is part of the IDG empire. Harry McCracken, the editor in chief, quit in protest when the story was killed but returned when it was reinstated and the publisher reassigned to other IDG duties.

It was a victory for McCracken, obviously, but also for editorial integrity and journalism.

I’ve been playing with Nokia’s latest mobile device — the N95 — and consider it a breakthrough in digital media.

Oh, it’s a phone, naturally. But it’s so much more, including WiFi, GPS, MP3 recording and playback, a 5-megapixel digital camera and MPEG 4, 30-frames-per-second video recording and playback, Web browsing, email and, of course, text. There’s more, but you get the idea.

The journalistic potential for the N95 is simply enormous. My UC-Berkeley students took some phones Nokia loaned us to New Orleans to work on a class project (more on that very soon), and I have plans for several cool experiments in the near future.

I wish it had a full QWERTY keyboard, and I’m sure that a slight re-design could make that happen. But for now I believe this device has carved out the sweet spot in the mobile digital content arena.

Look for a much more detailed report soon.

LA Times: Local news reporting outsourced to India. James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the Pasadena Now website, hired two reporters last weekend to cover the Pasadena City Council. One lives in Mumbai and will be paid $12,000 a year. The other will work in Bangalore for $7,200.The council broadcasts its meetings on the Web. From nearly 9,000 miles away, the outsourced journalists plan to watch, then write their stories while their boss sleeps — India is 12.5 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time.

“A lot of the routine stuff we do can be done by really talented people in another time zone at much lower wages,” said Macpherson, 51, who used to run a clothing business with manufacturing help from Vietnam and India.

For the money he’s paying, he could hire local bloggers. They’d do it better, with more perspectives — and have the advantage of, uh, being there.