Cit Media

Just in case anyone was wondering what I do when I teach at Berkeley, here’s this fall’s class syllabus. It’s a lot of fun to work with Bill Gannon, my co-instructor, and with the superb students at Berkeley.

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Chris Knight says, “Viacom hits me with copyright infringement for posting on YouTube a video that Viacom made by infringing on my own copyright!

Viacom is claiming that I have violated their copyright by posting on YouTube a segment from it’s VH1 show Web Junk 2.0… which VH1 produced – without permission – from a video that I had originally created. Viacom used my video without permission on their commercial television show, and now says that I am infringing on THEIR copyright for showing the clip of the work that Viacom made in violation of my own copyright!

This looks, if the facts are as Knight represents, like the standard, arrogant big-media goof in the copyright war — issuing takedown notices that have been poorly researched. It seems reasonable to assume that Viacom will recognize this and back down, especially now that the case is going to get wide publicity. Then again, the entertainment industry is not exactly known for listening to reason.

And when the weight of big corporations is thrown against the little guy, the rule seems to be guilty until proved innocent. And the cost of proving innocence is high. This imbalance cries out for more effective countermeasures to abuse.

There are penalties in copyright law for using takedown notices frivolously (again, this may not be that specific situation). Perhaps this is the kind of case the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) might want to take up. The organization took Diebold, a maker of defective voting machines, to court several years ago for knowingly misrepresenting copyright infringement, and won a judgement against the company.

Slightly off-topic: Does Knight’s use of Star Wars imagery in his video have any trademark implications?

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John Graham has it running here.

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In a story about Yahoo’s latest executive reorganization, the Wall Street Journal gave credit where it was due, sort ot.

The paper noted that news of the changes had appeared earlier on AllThingsD site and Valleywag. Dow Jones owns AllThingsD. It doesn’t own Valleywag.

I linked to both sites in this posting. The Journal only linked to one. Guess which.

There’s a word for this: cheesy.

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Ken Doctor asks if MinnPost.com is A Broadside of Next Wave Journalism. He observes that the local daily papers have been laying off scores of journalists, for one thing:

All publishers like the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press have done is create a small opening. Yes, they are reeling, but they are still taking in hundreds of million of dollars in ad and circulation revenue and trying to transform themselves for the new Internet age. Still any siphoning off of a high-demographics news audience (one Internet advertisers covet) is bad news for the already-declining online growth rates of the dailies.

Read it all for the best analysis i’ve seen so far of this situation.

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El Tiempo, Colombia’s national daily paper, has been moving at a fairly good speed to incorporate conversational media into its corporate and journalistic DNA. It’s clearly among the leaders in Latin America, if not the leader.

Guillermo Franco, the paper’s online editor, and several of his colleagues gave me a virtual tour of the site’s Participacion area yesterday. It’s impressive.

In addition to about 10 staff blogs, the paper has signed up about 200 citizens in a blog network covering a wide variety of topics. Comments are enabled on stories, and the forums are well-attended. All this attracts a fierce online debate, I’m told, including some angry postings that probably wouldn’t pass muster in most American papers. The politics of Colombia are beyond fierce; they are often literally deadly, and El Tiempo is in the middle of the debate.

The paper has an interesting approach to comment registration and display. A commenter needs only to provide a valid email address to post, but El Tiempo has created a superset of commenters who agree to give more detailed information — including a phone call from the paper — confirming their identity. Comments from the people in the latter group are highlighted on the site under a tab called “Comentarios destacados,” with the others under a tab called “Otros comentarios” — and Franco tells me the quality of the comments from the “destacados” group is high.

El Tiempo has a number of other sites, including several devoted to e-commerce. I’m intrigued with the just-launched vive.in, a site aimed at cultural activities (around Bogota in its first incarnation) with a major social networking component. With little publicity, Franco says, the beta site has already attracted some 5,000 signups.

Keep an eye on what these folks are doing.

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Editor & Publisher: Many Won’t Run Next Two ‘Opus’ Strips With Sex Joke, Islam Reference. At least 25 of the 200 or so “Opus” client newspapers might not run the Sunday-only comic’s next two episodes, which feature Islamic references and a sex joke.

Puritan prudishness and political cowardice: Now there’s a combination that’s just certain to attract more readers.

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I’m in Colombia to give a talk tomorrow at a media conference sponsored by Andiarios, Colombia’s national newspaper association, and the U.S. State Department (which is paying for this trip). El Tiempo, the big local daily paper, ran a pre-conference interview, translated from English to Spanish by the paper’s manager of new media, Guillermo Franco, whom I met when he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard several years ago.

I’ll be talking mainly about citizen media, of course, but in the context of freedom of speech and of the press. Such traditions, which we take for granted in the United States, aren’t as universal in Latin America, among other places where telling people the truth can bring genuine danger to the truth-teller.

It does here. The political situation, which is becoming more stable, is hardly calm, and journalists are on the front lines of the conflicts. As Reporters Without Borders notes in its 2007 report on Colombia, three journalists were killed and many others were forced to leave their regions or even the country after being threatened.

(Corrections to my earlier spelling on Colombian geography. This is inexcusable, and I apologize.)

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The University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism has several job openings: technology training instructor and a couple of Web developers.

The technology training instructor runs workshops for mid-career journalists on new technologies reporters and editors should be using, as part of our Knight Digital Media Center.

The two Web developers work on the various web sites run by the school and its affiliated programs.

Here are links to the job descriptions, including the URL for applying online:

TECHNOLOGY TRAINING INSTRUCTOR

http://journalism.berkeley.edu/jobs/details.php?cat=jedu&ID=5855

WEB DEVELOPER

http://journalism.berkeley.edu/jobs/details.php?cat=newmed&ID=5854

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AP: Chinese blog providers ‘encouraged’ to register users with their real names. Blog service providers in China are “encouraged” to register users with their real names and contact information, according to a new government document that tones down an earlier proposal banning anonymous online blogging. At least 10 major Chinese blog service providers have agreed to sign the “self-discipline pledge” issued by the Internet Society of China, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday.

So it’s yet more Big Brotherism from a regime that considers intellectual freedom a danger to the state.

Anonymity has its place in the world, and a dictatorship is one of those places.

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