The Chronicle of Higher Education: College Groups Challenge Copyright Office on Exceptions to Digital-Copyright Law. The groups made a similar but unsuccessful appeal two years ago. But this year, in a departure, the groups are faulting the standards the Copyright Office uses to determine whether exceptions to the anti-circumvention provision should be granted. [Tomalak's Realm]

In a letter to the Copyright Office, the groups say that a section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, known as the "anti-circumvention provision," needs to be revised to permit "fair use" of copyrighted material for research and teaching.

Researchers and scholars maintain that they must be able to bypass the access-control devices and view digital texts and images without fear of breaking the law. The groups note that academic users have long been able to view nonelectronic copyrighted material under existing fair-use provisions of copyright law.
10:27:48 PM    

I just wanna take a shot at this. There are some great paragraphs to excerpt. I'm not sure that I need to add anything, but to point up the important parts, and maybe mouth off a little below.

The Media Bias Myth [Daypop Top 40]

OPINION: LATimes.com

The Media Bias Myth Liberal? Conservative? It[base ']s not about ideology. The real battle is over the proper role of journalism.   By Neal Gabler

AMAGANSETT, N.Y. -- Say something loud enough and frequently enough and a good many people will believe it is true. For decades, conservatives have howled that most major TV news sources, including ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN, and three major U.S. newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post, have a pronounced liberal slant. This year, former CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg hit the bestseller lists with a book titled "Bias," which described the liberal sins of network news, and conservative pundit Ann Coulter had another bestseller with "Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right." As Goldberg put it, "The old argument that the networks and other 'media elites' have a liberal bias is so blatantly true that it's hardly worth discussing anymore."

So, how do you explain the "liberal" media's failure to rebuke Sen. Trent Lott for the string of pro-segregationist pronouncements that came before his infamous gaffe at Sen. Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party? Or the media's curious lack of interest in George W. Bush's windfall at Harken Energy and indifference to his stonewalling a Securities and Exchange Commission report investigating the episode? Or their unwillingness to challenge Vice President Dick Cheney on his cozy relationship with the energy industry while he was drafting the country's energy policy?

It sure doesn't sound like a liberal media. Rather, it sounds downright conservative, which is what some liberals are saying. In their view, the conglomerates that own most of the news media are promoting their own interests, and those interests tend to be conservative.

But there is a third and more disturbing possibility in which both sides have gotten it wrong. Looking at it philosophically rather than ideologically, the real media war today isn't between liberals and conservatives but between two entirely different journalistic mind-sets: those who believe in advocacy, and those who believe in objectivity -- or, at the very least, in the appearance of objectivity. And what we are witnessing is not just a political skirmish but a battle for the soul of American journalism.

[...]

The dirty little secret of network newscasts, and of most major newspapers, is not that they are manned by liberal proselytizers. It is that they are trying to attract the widest possible viewership, or readership, and that doing so necessitates that they be as inoffensive as possible. That is why investigative reports seem so toothless, gumming away at government boondoggles or consumer fraud or corrupt politicians that are unlikely to infuriate either the left or the right.

[...]

What is true for the networks and mainstream mass-circulation newspapers, however, is not true for cable television, the tabloids or the Internet. For one thing, cable is not restrained by the Federal Communications Commission to serve the public interest. For another, cable television news is "narrowcast": It appeals to a relatively small segment of the population, and it must tailor its approach to attract and hold its viewers. This tends to reward advocacy of any sort, liberal as well as conservative. But it has proved especially hospitable to conservatism, because conservatism is much more lively than liberalism and that much more entertaining. Also, conservatives are more ideologically unified than liberals and thus enjoy listening to their ideas being reinforced. In short, cable news networks like the Fox News Channel, MSNBC and CNBC provide advocacy in the service of ratings. (emphasis mine, ed)

Of course, advocates disclaim that they are anything of the sort. They assert they only seem partisan compared with the real propagandists of the mainstream press. "Fair and balanced" is the motto of the conservative Fox News Channel, where I appear as a panelist on "Fox News Watch." The motto is just as disingenuous as it sounds. The mainstream press is an easy target for advocates precisely because it cannot take sides without surrendering its impartiality, so it sits there and takes it. This permits the Orwellian paradox of Coulter spewing some 200 pages of conservative name-calling against liberals while contending that liberals are always name-calling against conservatives, or the paradox of Coulter complaining of liberal bias while appearing regularly on the very networks she attacks.

[...]

Just compare Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings to O'Reilly, Brit Hume, Chris Matthews and Kudlow and Cramer. Though he calls his show a "no-spin zone," Fox's O'Reilly grills his guests, smirks at their answers and shakes his head in disbelief when he hears what he regards as a liberal opinion. MSNBC's Matthews was once an aide to Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill, but he too plays the cable game by roasting liberalism on a spit that spins as fast as a jet turbine. Similarly, Hume on Fox can barely conceal his agony when he has to report a criticism of President Bush. For these guys, Bill Clinton and Tom Daschle, not Osama bin Laden and his ilk, are the real threats to America.

More important, since they are not playing by the same rules as the practitioners of objectivity, the advocates are able to intimidate the networks and newspapers. Lest they lend credence to charges of bias, mainstream news outlets seem to be bending over backward to prove they are not liberal and harbor no animus toward the Republican administration, even though the political spectrum has shifted so far right over the last decade that thinking once considered centrist is now seen as liberal.

Indeed, this intimidation may be the real objective of the advocates. Though partisans on both ends of the political spectrum seem to love journalistic bloodletting, they don't just want to bash the media. They want to use the media's goal of objectivity to render them even more feckless.

It is hard to beat zealots when they are fighting with swords and you are fighting with ploughshares.

I part company with Neal Gabler a bit on the construction of "objectivity," altho I left a lot of those chunks out, as I don't believe the term is essential for his argument to have teeth. At least he fully owns up to the storied past of journalism as a highly biased and advocacy-driven mouthpiece through the better part of its history.

Gabler's analysis of both right and left claiming bias is right on target, however, as well as the impotence of the media non-response in the face of strident talk radio and the absurd ravings of Ann Coulter, who can hardly be taken seriously by anyone with a straight face.

One non-entity was apparent throughout: CNN was rendered invisible. Not network, but not lumped in with cable either. How peculiar. How would Gabler characterize CNN then (minus the dude in the bowtie, we would assume, since he is very odd, but then James Carville with a bag on his head is odd too)?

I wrote a review of Bias on Amazon a year ago or so, saying yes, the author was right, there is bias in media, but it is a deeply conservative bias, not a liberal one. I am appreciative of Gabler's attempt to find the third pole and let me out of a false dilemma fallacy. Is this sort of like naming the Incumbent Party as more powerful than Republicans and Democrats in elected office? I love the image of the 4th Estate as some impotent old gummer, sitting and drooling while the polemicists and advocates foam at the mouth.

I have to mull these ideas over a while, let them sink in. There is a thought in here, about the non-existence of objectivity, of course, all academics would snort at that. But fairness and a Jeffersonian ideal of the free exchange of ideas that can still hold sway without buying into the windowpane theory of language, these are the things that guide me. They are the very same goals that guide ethnography, if the field of journalism would deign to pay attention to anything but itself. I am embarrassed at how undertheorized the discipline is. The only field worse is creative writing.

Then there is this thing that implies weakness in the face of stridency, or rather, strident polemic. Does the Jeffersonian ideal, the free exchange of ideas, leads to truths (not capital T Truth) in what I would rather call my Salad Dressing Theory of Truths, where ideas are all mixed up, and a thing like a truth is what prevails, what wins the idea competition, what rises to the top like oil to the top of salad dressing?

It is overly idealistic, I know, and a theory that suffers in my studies of polemic and extremism on the Internet, the most excellent site for such study. This is the echo I hear in the editorial above. The complaint about advocacy rhetoric being a sword while fairness-driven (or bland ratings-driven) journalism being a ploughshare overstates the case, I think. Both online and in the media, loud voices are given power with claims of intimidation just because those who would stand against those voices lack the simplest kind of courage, the courage to dissent.

It underestimates the power of ploughshares, if the metaphor is apt. If words and rhetoric are compelling, rising to the top, can they not also happen to be quiet truths as much as the loud, ranting ones? Must all advocacy shout and call names? Persuasion and rhetoric being what they are, quiet compelling truths ought to be able to beat out illogical, shrill shouting by folks with poor ethos, among reasonable people, I guess.

In the context of Internet discussions, where hogging the floor and shouting don't upstage as easily as they do face to face, where interruption and alpha behavior can be more easily countered, how does reason compete against wild-eyed raving? We already know the answer to that question. Extremist polemic and greater self-selected groups preaching to their respective choirs dominate the Nets.

Do we give up on reason and critical thinking? Would cultural studies folks say, "well this is the world as we are called into it, and if poor judgment is a national obsession, along with lack of proof or argumentative support, then as a culture this must be where we choose to live, eh?" Of course I say bullshit to that. We will soon watch people go to war and die for poor reasoning, for a naked Emperor, for believing the Sun revolves around the Earth. This is not our culture. This is our national Dark Ages, our national embarrassment.

Just today, I found myself having to apologize for some of the godawful poor reasoning being forwarded around in email, apologize to some Europeans on US-dominated listservs who find themselves reading such things with growing incredulity, wondering how truly ignorant and willfully blind Americans have become. (As an American, I can cynically call them "suckers," but I am not as kind to my fellow citizens as the Europeans I know are-- these are righteous suckers buying a bill of goods being sold to them by spurious rhetoric are the worst kind, and as a teacher I taught rhetoric from the point of view of self defense as often as I taught it from the point of view of the rhetor. Still, I bear responsiblity for the lack of critical faculties in folks duped by rhetoric with all the other teachers who have failed.)

It is embarrassing to have to apologize for people who are the products of school systems I taught in at different levels. It is embarrassing for the collective ignorance of US culture to be paraded out on the airwaves in some of the more laughable advocacy rhetoric that is out there, stuff so illogical you have to laugh, except folks around you aren't laughing, they are listening and nodding. You know? Pinch yourself, cuz it is fucking surreal.

So maybe my faith in well-reasoned, fair, and quiet rhetoric is misplaced. Maybe we live in an ignorant dark age of big sticks, big dicks, loud monster shouters. No one would send a hobbit to Mount Doom through our loud racket about freedom only being possible at the point of a gun, about force being the only rhetoric that matters. No hobbit could walk through the US and not have the Ring of Power taken from him and given directly to President George Dubya Bush to smite his enemies, and the enemies of his father.

Miasma
3:14:05 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    

Duh. Let us all go back and retake that undergrad Press Law class, shall we?

Miasma

DMCA: Dow What It Wants to Do. A long-standing, popular ISP in New York may be taken down by its host in the wake of a parody site it hosted that knocked Dow Chemical. Michelle Delio reports from New York. [Wired News]

1:13:04 AM