Tag: free speach

From the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF08)

Repost from:
http://www.personaldemocracy.com/blog

Daily Digest: Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutley.
By Nancy Scola, 06/24/2008 – 3:54pm

This is Day Two of the 2008 Personal Democracy Forum and we’ll be (mostly) devoting the Daily Digest to a recap of what’s going down at the conference, being discussed in the halls, and heating up the back channels. We’ll return to our regular digest format tomorrow.

Visual presentation virtuoso Larry Lessig at a text-only mid-morning press conference here at PdF ’08: “I’m a little lost because I don’t have slides.”

Google evangelist and wise guy Vint Cerf: “PowerPoint corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”

(Yes, we know Larry uses Keynote in his presentations. But still, that’s a great line.)

Bad weather kept keynoter Elizabeth Edwards away from New York City in body but she was still able to appear at PdF ’08 via Skype, which preformed remarkably well. The upside of Elizabeth staying in North Carolina? Her husband, John, popped into view of Elizabeth’s laptop camera [here’s a photo] and stuck around to say a few words. The New York Times‘ Katharine Seely reports on the tech-focused discussion between Elizabeth and the PdF crowd.

NPR’s Sunday Soapbox “field vlogger” Jacob Soboroff conducted video interviews with MySpace IMPACT’s Lee Brenner, the Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington and Open Left’s Matt Stoller. Also in NPR land, Soapbox’s senior producer Davar Ardalan responds to Jay Rosen’s take on notes on “semi-pro” journalism presented at a PdF panel yesterday morning and posted to TechPres last night, saying that digital integration “brings with it many philosophical questions about editorial control and the ethical rules we have all been trained to follow.”

Over on the tech blog ArsTechnica, Julian Sanchez responds to yesterday’s discussion over the modern media’s “fake neutrality,” to borrow a phrase from Arianna.

Silicon Alley responds to McCain advisor Mark Sohoo’s defense yesterday of his candidate’s relationship with the Internet. The Guardian UK also has coverage of the session under the in-no-way-judgmental headline “Republicans Admit Obama is Winning the Online Battle.” Ooh, this just in: source material — video of the exchange between Mark and John Edwards’ online staffer Tracy Russo that has had people talking since.

CNN’s iReport has a station set up here and the conference and has gone live with interviews and coverage with attendees.

Virtual reality pioneer Mark Pesce gave a keynote this morning on “hyperpolitics — American style” that both Twitter and room tone seemed to indicate was very well-received. If the reporting on the speech strikes you as slightly fuzzy, that’s because I unfortunately arrived at the talk where there was only about three minutes left; no worries, though, because Mark has generously posted the full text of his presentation.

PdF’s Alison Fine has great coverage of Doug Rushkoff talk on “The New Renaissance” and Morely Winegard’s presentation on the civic engagement of the millennial generation.

PC World covers the unveiling of Internet for Everyone, a new Free Press-engineered push for universal broadband launched at PdF ’08 this morning. Nancy Scola (hey, that’s me) has a quick guide to the the bite-sized arguments made by the project’s supporters, from Vint Cerf to Writers Guild East president Michael Winship to TechPres contributor David All.

CNET’s Caroline McCarthy reports on Larry Lessig’s exhortation to the PdF crowd to not fall into the “four-year trap” of keeping a close watch on politics and politicians only when election time rolls around.

Nancy Scola (again, me) reflects upon a session featuring Mayhill Fowler where the OffTheBus contributor called for bloggers to agree to some “code of the road” that creates a safe, off-the-record space for press.

ThePoint.com’s Alex Steed is doing some granular liveblogging of the conference.

Of course, there’s more going on than we can possibly capture. So check out the Twitter stream tagged #pdf2008 on Summize.

1st Amendment? Never heard of it, says FCC

repost from

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/Media Re:public

encouraging collaborative, practical research and analysis of the new media (r)evolution

Persephone Miel – June 24, 2008 @ 5:08 pm · CAPPUCINO, Politics

The FCC says they want to make it easy for someone to deliver wireless broadband for free. But, as we say here at Berkman, there is free as in beer, and free as in speech. And the FCC’s new idea is UNFREE as in speech. Why? Because the license for the spectrum they want to auction requires a mechanism that “filters or blocks images and text that constitute obscenity or pornography and…any images or text that otherwise would be harmful to teens and adolescents. For purposes of this rule, teens and adolescents are children 5 through 17 years of age. As someone pointed out in a gahering here at Berkman just now, that puts the United States right up there with China. Further, the rule states, “should any commercially-available network filters installed not be capable of reviewing certain types of communications, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, the licensee may use other means, such as limiting access to those types of communications.”

The problem is the ruling makes the Internet like broadcast television or radio, where we still can’t use George Carlin’s seven words, when it really should be like the telephone, where it’s none of your @O#*$U# business what I want to talk about. I am neither a lawyer nor a technologist, but I know this is BAD. I read the text (actually I just searched for the word “pornography” and read that bit) and then went here to tell the FCC how I felt. (The comments submission form is very tricky, the 2 relevant dockets are 07-195, and 04-356, but I found it rejected my attempts to put them in myself (got an error message after submitting) so I clicked on proceedings and search for them.

That’s the basic Internet freedom part.

There’s also the sleazy background part about the M2Z, the company that’s pushing this. Business Week points out that one of the two founders of M2Z is a former FCC official. The company’s site encourages visitors to send letters to Congress and the FCC tell them to support “free, family-friendly, nationwide broadband.” Wendy suggested they rename it the “free, family-friendly, FILTERband.”