Category: Issues and Actions

The creation and distribution of content must have equal access for all.

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Issues and Actions

Answers On Why We Need Net Neutrality

La Quadrature du Net (Squaring The Net) is an organization involved in public-policy debates at the French and European Union levels in order to protect the fundamental rights of the citizen in the digital environment.

They provided a clear ad concise defense of why net neutrality is so important. Check out their answers to a survey here.

The Internet’s open architecture aims at guaranteeing the free movement of information through our communications infrastructures. It is only by maintaining this principle of openness that the rights and freedoms of citizens in the digital environment – both as producers and users of informational goods – will develop and flourish.

Network neutrality is the essential guarantee for competition, innovation, and fundamental freedoms on the Internet.

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Issues and Actions

EFF’s Teaching Copyright

EFF’s TEACHING COPYRIGHT was created to help teachers teach copyright in a fair and balanced way.  Check it out.

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Issues and Actions

Citizen Media Law Project

As their site explains:

CMLP’s legal guide is intended for use by citizen media creators with or without formal legal training and focuses on the wide range of legal issues citizen and online media are likely to face, including risks associated with publication, such as defamation and privacy torts; copyright; trademark; access to government information; newsgathering; and general legal issues involved in setting up a business and finding a web host. You can access the guide here. 

Knowing your legal rights and responsibilities is important for anyone who publishes online. The CMLP’s legal guide addresses the legal issues you may encounter as you gather information and publish your work. The guide is intended for use by citizen media creators with or without formal legal training, as well as others with an interest in these issues.

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Issues and Actions

Fair Share: Claim Your Work

Fair Share is ” a free service that enables you to claim your work, watch how it spreads and learn how it is used across the Web.”  Their website states:

If it’s text and published via RSS, you can claim it: Blog posts, poems, recipes, songs, essays, car reviews, game cheats, celebrity scoops, love letters, you name it.

You plug in your RSS feed (full text feeds are strongly preferred), select a Creative Commons license and give us your email address.

We’ll confirm your email address and give you a FairShare feed to add to your RSS feed reader.

Sit back and relax for a few hours while we crank up our engines.

By the time you’ve finished your nap, the different pages on which your work has been reused will start popping into your FairShare feed.

For each page containing your work, we’ll show you how the reuse compares to your license conditions and point you to a handy page where you can see more details.

What does “registered through FairShare” mean?
This is the number of articles or blog posts that have been claimed by our users. FairShare allows you to claim your original work as your own and constantly searches over 35 billion blog and web pages to find where your work has been reused above a certain minimum threshold.

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Issues and Actions

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse

I just got tipped to this via MentalEclectic‘s tweet:

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse is 
a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, George Washington School of Law, and Santa Clara University School of Law clinics.

Do you know your online rights? Have you received a letter asking you to remove information from a Web site or to stop engaging in an activity? Are you concerned about liability for information that someone else posted to your online forum? If so, this site is for you.

Chilling Effects aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities. We are excited about the new opportunities the Internet offers individuals to express their views, parody politicians, celebrate their favorite movie stars, or criticize businesses. But we’ve noticed that not everyone feels the same way. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some individuals and corporations are using intellectual property and other laws to silence other online users. Chilling Effects encourages respect for intellectual property law, while frowning on its misuse to “chill” legitimate activity.

The website offers background material and explanations of the law for people whose websites deal with topics such as Fan Fiction, Copyright, Domain Names and Trademarks, Anonymous Speech, and Defamation.

In addition, we want your help. We are gathering a searchable database of Cease and Desist notices sent to Internet users like you. We invite you to input Cease and Desist letters that you’ve received into our database, to document the chill. We will respond by linking the legalese in the letters to FAQs that explain the allegations in plain English.

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Issues and Actions

$2 Billion For Broadband Expansion

The NYTimes reported today the Stimulus Plan expected to pass the Senate has $2B allocated to broadband expansion in underserved areas.  Currently 25% of the country still does not have broadband, but even still their were Senators who were not supporting this aspect of the bill.

As FastCompany pointed out, broadband expansion has a great ripple effect on the economy: 

more broadband access would create a so-called “network effect” stimulus: Consumers can spend more by buying online, businesses can save money by digitizing their dealings, and the overall speed and cost of communications can be improved. The Internet could bring a whole new host of entertainment, service, utility and products to underserved citizens, both saving them money and encouraging new spending.

I doubt the film industry had anyone actually lobbying for this passage, but it should benefit all of us.  Some short sighted folks will see this as giving greater access to pirates in the boondocks eager to grab for free what they weren’t paying for to begin with.  As the media stokes such hysteria, they are missing the real issue: the lack of a functioning consumer-driven model.

Hopefully this will bring greater focus to all in the entertainment industry to come up with a new model. I firmly believe everyone will be willing to pay for access to high quality content as long as it is available where you want it, when you want it, and how you want it.

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Issues and Actions

A Great Way To Contribute To Copyright Reform

Wired reports:

Nina Paley, director of the award-wining animated feature Sita Sings the Blues, is selling a night with her to the highest bidder in an effort to get her film out of what she calls “copyright jail.”

Read all about it here.