Last week, The Washington Post ran a story about Senator John McCain's return to the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation. Commerce Power Shift Could Shake Up Piracy, Broadband Debates speculates how the change from media puppet Fritz Hollings to McCain could affect broadband policy, telecom deregulation, and copyright law. While I agree that it's too difficult to predict how these issues will fare under McCain, I do think fair use rights stand a better chance at McCain-governed hearings than in any session Hollings ever controlled.

This article has been making the rounds of the blogosphere and it's definitely worth your read, but I haven't seen anyone highlight my favorite quote from it yet, so here it is for posterity.

"I never want to underestimate the (MPAA's) ability to lobby these issues," Miller said. "If Jack Valenti had been around at the time of Gutenberg he would have organized the monks to come and burn down the printing press." - Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America

1:44:51 AM    

We're Number Ten. Shift Magazine has posted their top 15 Key and Stupid Web Moments of 2002, and look who made the list! Kuro5hin and Metafilter's April Fools prank made it in as the #10 key web moment of the year, beating out competitors such as the debuts of Google News and The Sims Online. Also mentioned was Kuro5hin's fundraising drive, arguably more important than the prank in the grand scheme of things:10. On April Fool's Day, the community site Kuro5hin.org announces that it has purchased fellow community site Metafilter.com. This turns out to be a hoax, of course. (What wasn't a hoax was when Kuro5hin appealed to its users in June to help it raise the $70,000 it will cost to keep the site afloat. Within one day, they had put up $10,000.) [kuro5hin.org]

This is a good story, but I like some others from the Shift lists, excerpted here:

15 Stupid Web Moments

[...]

7. HOW TO MAKE $$$ FAST!!! JUST BY READING SPAM!!! Harold Hickok of Portland, Oregon, sends an email to a large multinational corporation that's been spamming him. He states he'll be charging them twenty-five dollars for every email they make him read. They keep spamming him. He takes them to small claims court. And wins.

6. "Hey, my foot tastes like Onion!" says the Beijing Evening News after reprinting a satirical article -- claiming that U.S. Congress threatened to leave Washington unless they were built a new Capitol building with a retractable dome -- in their June 3rd edition. It may be excusable for a foreign news service to be duped into thinking America's online spoof tabloid is a reputable source, but it's less excusable when, four months later, Michigan police are also taken in. The Battle Creek sheriff's office issues a press release stating that the Al-Qaeda are involved in a dastardly telemarketing campaign, "making phone solicitations for vacation home rentals, long distance telephone services, magazine subscriptions and other products."

4. In the first week of the new year, Time Canada spoils Apple's big surprise party by posting its top-secret iMac feature on Timecanada.com a week early. By midday the link is down, but resourceful Mac fans around the web have copied the article onto their own sites.

[...]

2. The "Nice try but no cigar" award for 2002 goes to British Telecommunications plc, who start the year off by claiming they own the patent on hyperlinking. ISPs should pay them licensing fees for using links, says BT. Yeah, right. Needless to say, they're laughed out of court.

1. Molson tries to claim rights to canadian.biz. Were they drunk?

15 Key Web Moments

15. Everyone's favourite search engine just keeps getting better. Google launches "Google News" in January (a meta-index of the world's top headlines, updated every day), "Google Answers" in April (think eBay meets support newsgroups) and later "Google Sets" (think Sleepy, Dopey, Grumpy, Bashful, Doc... Shit, what are the other two?)

14. Electronic Arts announces in September that The Sims Online, the massively-multiplayer version of the best-selling videogame of all time, will feature product placement by McDonald's and Intel. The deal allows players to own a Mickey D's franchise and gain happiness points for eating there. (Only question is whether Sims' bladder meters will explode twenty minutes after consumption.)

13. On August 28th, hackers break into the Recording Industry Association of America's website and replace text on their homepage to the effect that the RIAA endorses filesharing. According to reports, visitors could download a dozen pirated MP3s directly from riaa.org.

[...]

9. While commercial web content flounders, weblogs rise to mainstream prominence. Print journalists start taking note, using them as sources. Advertisers target them. Even celebrities get in on the act, as blogging pioneers like Wil Wheaton are joined by Jeff Bridges and William Shatner, among others.

[...]

7. Chinese censorship officials decide to ban access to Google.

[...]

3. On the anniversary of 9/11, people flock to the web to discuss the media coverage and the possibility of an attack on Iraq. Multiple sources, from online newspapers to weblogs to community websites, post everything from timelines to photo essays to ruminations to complete victim databases. Dean Allen posts eight words on textism.com: "Silence, and respect. Anything else is grave-robbing."

2. Lawrence Lessig, author of The Future of Ideas, launches Creative Commons (Creativecommons.org), a non-profit organization that allows artists, writers and programmers to define their own legally-binding copyright terms, for free.

1. New royalty legislation is approved in June, which forces web broadcasters to pay seventy cents for every song they stream to a thousand listeners, effectively killing web radio. Within two months of the decision, hundreds of web broadcasters have folded.
1:41:00 AM    

frankejames writes "This is a very funny piece on how Portland politicians said it was okay for police to seize a citizen's garbage without a search warrant. But when some reporters swiped their garbage (and reported the contents!) they screamed foul play! Read Portland's top brass said it was OK to swipe your garbage--so we grabbed theirs."

1:05:23 AM    

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." (ed. emphasis added)

Ben Franklin wrote those words over 200 years ago, and, as we reach the end of 2002, the state of important liberties around the world appears to be degenerating rapidly, particularly in the area of privacy concerns.

If one of Osama bin Laden's goals, as has been reported, was to trigger crackdowns against freedoms by Western governments, he got the ball rolling quite effectively on Sept. 11, 2001.

The United States now imprisons its own citizens incommunicado, indefinitely and without lawyers or trials, for the duration of what we're told is an essentially permanent state of war.

In the good old days of the iron curtain, we condemned other countries for such actions, calling them human rights violations. Now some of those same nations are our partners of convenience in the war on terror, and our own government has enthusiastically embraced our former adversaries' old tactics.

Both the USA Patriot and Homeland Security Acts include some elements that are arguably appropriate for national security in today's world. But they also include measures that have nothing to do with the fight against terrorism, and that are likely to have wide-ranging and chilling effects on privacy and liberty.

In the business community, where rampant disregard for privacy concerns has increasingly become the norm, it's financial gain, not national security, that's the driving force.

12:59:47 AM