Center for Citizen Media

Heading out to Cambridge today. Back online later…

UPDATED

Jon Fine (Business Week) Putting The Screws To Google. What if 2006 is the year big media players take aim at Google’s (GOOG ) kneecaps? No, not with more lawsuits; the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers — on behalf, in part, of BusinessWeek’s parent company, The McGraw-Hill Companies (MHP ) — and Agence France-Presse have already sued the search behemoth. Rather, picture this: Walt Disney (DIS ), News Corp. (NWS ), NBC Universal, and The New York Times (NYT ), in an odd tableau of unity, join together and say: “We are the founding members of the Content Consortium. Next month we launch our free, searchable Web site, which no outside search engines can access.” (A simple bit of code is all it takes to bar all or some major search engines from accessing a site.) “From now on we’ll make our stuff available and sell ads around it and the searches for it, but only on our terms. Who else wants to join us? Membership’s free.”

I kind of hope they do this, even though I think it’s a foolish idea. There’s be a great deal of other journalism and “content” available to readers, listeners and viewers — some of it of high quality indeed.

New kinds of discovery, recommendation and reputation systems are emerging for online material. It’s likely that people who want to learn about the news will find enough to be happy even without the major media’s full stories being available.

Moreover, one immediate result of the new walled garden would be this: a collection of digests, created by people who care about the topics, telling us enough of what they’ve said that we might not care enough to go to the original source.

It’s easy to sympathize with old media’s desire to recapture some of the value that Google is taking away through commodification But this is the classic cutting off the nose to spite your face.

Update: Jeff Jarvis says, sarcastically, “Beware the Googeyman” — read it.

I’m at the American Bar Association’s Communications Law conference, at a mock Senate hearing about the so-called “Free Flow of Information Act,” a bill that went before Congress last year but went nowhere. Some of the people who testified, including former NY Times reporter Judith Miller, is “testifying” before one former senator, Slade Gorton, and Bush’s former solicitor general, Theodore Olson, and several other folks.

As the faux testimony makes clear, there’s a clear and present threat to journalism right now as federal prosecutors and judges are showering subpoenas on reporters at an unprecedented pace. The chilling effect is unavoidable. But how to address this? The hearing sheds far more fog than light.

I waited a long time for anyone to mention citizen journalists. Gorton did, asking Miller, “Should the New York Times…have this privilege but a blogger should not?”

Miller didn’t answer. No one else has answered it, either. No surprise.

Someone else snidely asks if 9 million bloggers should be covered, and Al Jazeera. Olson: You’re asking the government to license who’s a journalist. (Correct.)

Finally an answer: No, bloggers shouldn’t be protected. “This is not about the rights of journalists, but the rights of sources,” says one witness, a law professor, totally missing the point.

In state laws, says First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, no one talks about licensing. He would expand the privilege (and expand the language of the bill) to apply to individuals who “gather information to disseminate to the general public” (language from a court case) — a First Amendment protection. That runs into practical problems, he says, including using this as an argument against protection of any kind.

The book Naked Conversations, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, has been released. I read an advance copy and recommend it to business people who want to get a better feel for why business blogging matters.

Australian Broadcasting: Frey, Oprah stand by controversial memoir. James Frey says he stands by the “essential truth” of his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, after accusations were levelled that significant parts of the Oprah-approved best-seller were fabricated. Frey chose CNN’s ‘Larry King Live’ show to defend his memoir and at the end of the show, Oprah Winfrey phoned in to say that she remained happy to recommend the book, despite the controversy.

This guy’s “essential truth” is essential BS. Defending himself this way, Frey looks even worse.

Had he called this what it is — a novel — to begin with, he’s have been more honest. A lot more.

Later this morning I’ll be on a panel at the American Bar Association’s Communications Law conference. The title of the panel: “Who Owns The News? Attempts by sports organizations and entertainers to control coverage.” It refers to the tendency of these industries to lock down journalism on what they do, at all levels — essentially to control what people can say about the performances, images and even statistics.

This is an increasingly tricky question, in large part because of the increasingly controlling use of copyright law by (of course) the entertainment industry and the sports leagues. Here’s an example from the Williams law firm’s blog: “Who Owns Baseball Statistics?” — a case in which Major League Baseball is launching lawyers at people who indulge in the widespread online fantasy leagues. These are some of the most ardent fans baseball will ever have.

I’m going to offer no legal advice, because I’m not a lawyer. But I will say some of the following.

First, given the unhealthy preoccupation Americans seem to have with professional entertainment and sports, part of me would be pleased to see these industries annoy their best customers sufficiently that the customers decide to spend their money elsewhere. I don’t expect that.

Second, the journalist in me is appalled by the way the sports and entertainment folks are using copyright law — abusing it, in my view — by claiming ownership of what look to me like basic facts. I know it’s more complicated than that, but there’s something perverse about telling people that the statistics your players generate by playing the game are owned by the league.

Third, and most important, the game is basically over, if you’ll pardon the expression. The democratization of media means that journalists are being supplemented by folks who are covering events themselves. Banning digital cameras, as some have tried to do, is futile as cameras shrink (and disappear into clothing, for instance) and have higher quality in taking pictures and videos. Bloggers will ignore the restrictions pro journalists may have agreed to. And so on.

This should be interesting, anyway.

The Conversations Network is “a non-profit online publisher of recordings of spoken-word events.”

It’s the brainchild primarily of Doug Kaye, whose IT Conversations site has become a must-listen for people who care about technology. Now he’s gone broader — and will be looking for volunteers to help. I encourage you to take a look and sign up.

I’ll be leading the weekly Fellows Luncheon at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society (Harvard Law School) next Tuesday. There’s also a webcast.

The Guardian has a front-page story, “Spielberg loses out at the push of a button,” about problems British critics are having when they try to view a limited-edition DVD of his new movie, Munich, for an awards contest:

Developed by Cinea, a subsidiary of Dolby, the players permit their owners to view encrypted DVD “screeners”, but prevent the creation of pirate copies. Munich screeners were encoded for region one, which allows them to be played in the US and Canada, rather than region two, which incorporates most of Europe.

The faulty DVDs only reached Bafta members on Saturday, which meant the film had already missed out on the first round of voting on January 4. In a further twist to the tale, a previous batch mailed out before Christmas were reportedly held up by customs officials in the UK. “It’s been quite a cock-up,” said one Bafta member, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

What’s faulty, of course, is the region coding itself. It’s a longstanding method of market-fixing that the movie industry uses to keep prices higher in some areas than others.

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The Ledger (Lakeland, Florida) News Coverage of Speech to Be Limited. When Sean Hannity, the Fox Network commentator, speaks at Southeastern University Friday night, his words won’t reach a wide audience. The news media will be allowed to watch and take pictures of the first few minutes of Hannity’s hourlong speech. After 10 minutes, all members of the media will be escorted out of the special section in which they will be kept and taken outside the chapel so that Hannity can continue his speech to the audience.

I just got email from someone who’s thinking about covering this himself via his blog. My response: “Go for it.”

I’m hoping several bloggers attend, in fact. These kinds of restrictions are ridiculous in the age of citizen media, and even Hannity and his network ought to know that.