Posts under ‘Issues’

Terry Heaton: A blogging pioneer calls it quits. And so extortion has won a victory, and the blogosphere has lost a pioneering voice. Peggy is brusk and competitive and has made her share of enemies, but nobody deserves the kind of personal attacks this site apparently distributed. Were the attacks libelous? Or merely insulting? I […]

James Love: A UN/WIPO Plan to Regulate Distribution of Information on the Internet. But what the broadcasters and the webcasters really want has nothing to do with protecting copyrighted works. They want to “own” the content of what they transmit, even when they are not the creative party, and even if they can’t acquire such […]

Global Voices Online has excerpts from Arabic-language blog commentary on the Mohammed cartoon fight.

From the Mohammed Image Archive: While the debate rages, an important point has been overlooked: despite the Islamic prohibition against depicting Mohammed under any circumstances, hundreds of paintings, drawings and other images of Mohammed have been created over the centuries, with nary a word of complaint from the Muslim world. The recent cartoons in Jyllands-Posten […]

This story in Editor & Publisher, about American media’s unwillingness to print or broadcast the cartoons that have so dramatically inflamed many in the Muslim world, speaks volumes about the industry’s lowest-common-denominator approach to its audience. From the article: Doug Clifton, editor of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, agreed that the offensive nature precluded running […]

The Nation: The End of the Internet? The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online. The modest hyperbole in this […]

I’m at the second Al Jazeera forum in Doha, the base of operations of the Arabic news broadcaster that is about to launch an international network in competition with CNN, BBC and others. Later today, I’m speaking on a panel about blogs and other grassroots media. My Berkman Center colleague, Ethan Zuckerman, another speaker here, […]

From Dave Farber’s Interesting People mail list: Here’s what censorship does. Compare Google China: http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen Google the rest of the world: http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen

Timothy Noah (Slate): Did Nan Talese Lie To Oprah? – What did James Frey’s publisher know and when did she know it? Yes, Talese learned about the particular fabrications exposed by The Smoking Gun (there were more than two) “at the same time” that Winfrey did. But Talese had reason to believe Frey hadn’t told […]

Beltway Blogroll: A Luxurious Junket For Bloggers. Bloggers no doubt will justify the trip by highlighting the transparency of the junket. For one year, they must link to the Bloggers in Amsterdam disclosure statement, which itself notes the transparency “mantra.” But curiously, the bloggers just started talking about the trip yesterday — and not all […]