Let me preface this post by reminding folks that IANAL (I am not a lawyer).

Example of White House Flickr Photo

The U.S. government policy on photographs and copyright is pretty straightfoward: photos produced by federal employees as part of their job responsibilities are “not subject to copyright in the United States and there are no U.S. copyright restrictions on reproduction, derivative works, distribution, performance, or display of the work.”

Why, then, is the Obama White House asserting that no one but “news organizations” can use its Flickr photos? Why is it asserting that manipulation is prohibited? Why is it asserting that photos may not be used in “commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House”?

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Last week, we cancelled our cable TV service.  In one fell swoop, we went from 60 to 0.  No more DVR, HBO in HD, nor movies-on-demand.  Also gone: the extraneous 700 other channels that I never looked at.  For the first time since I was a college student, I wasn’t tethered to a coaxial connection.

I told Comcast, no hard feelings.  We kept their broadband and voice services.  I said, we needed more “breathing room” so I could work on my book (presently entitled Trust Me: How to Tell Stories in a Credibility-Starved World).

I was being truthful.  That said, that I’m also saving $1000 a year.  I’m ingesting content specific to my interests (streaming Hulu and Netflix through my Playstation 3).  And I’m putting the savings to media that matters most to me: public radio (KUOW, KEXP), the Seattle Times Sunday paper, and a dead-tree subscription to the Wall Street Journal.

Image from zeropaid.com

Thanks to three recent articles in that same Wall Street Journal, I now also believe there’s a higher purpose to this decentralization of my media choices.  Because once again, large institutions with a vested interest in maintaining their power aren’t too pleased that people like me are making such choices.

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Matthew Stringer produced this video as part of class discussion of Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. Have a look – it’s excellent!

Flip the Media is the best blog ever! Flip the Media will teach you everything you ever wanted to know about social media… and more! In fact, experts say that reading Flip the Media will make you more popular with the opposite sex, reverse male pattern baldness, and even cure some types of cancer!*
*results not typical.

Sponsored posts — endorsements by bloggers in exchange for compensation from marketers, dubbed “blog-ola” for “blogger payola” – have become a reality. Flip the Media is great, but can it really do everything described above? Probably not. To combat deceptive sponsored posts, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced last year that it plans to revise its Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising (“the Guides”) to regulate how bloggers and other social media users endorse products. This could strike a blow to both the companies who crowdsource using social media and the bloggers who supplement their income with freebies. Read more…

Update: Twitter Case As Countersuit

On Monday, a Chicago realty company sued Amanda Bonnen, a (reportedly former) tenant, $50,000 for libel. The cause? She posted a tweet in May that the company considers defamation:

According to the Chicago Sun Times:

Jeffrey Michael, whose family has run Horizon for more than 25 years, said: “We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization.”

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In Britain, Rupert Murdoch’s empire has paid $1.5 million to silence three public figures whose telephones were illegally tapped. In addition, private investigators hired by Murdoch’s newspapers “[unlawfully accessed] confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills.”

In California, Michael Arrington published confidential documents stolen from Twitter. The worst-case scenario under state law appears to be be one year in jail with a $10,000 fine. For the thief, not TechCrunch.

If ever there was an example of law not keeping up with the times, this may be it.

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Blogging has become a popular medium for food writing, as people are passionate about both cooking and eating; there are over 10,000 food blogs, and this number is growing. While most languish in obscurity, some, such as Simply Recipes, receive hundreds of thousands of views. Food blogs attract enough attention to have restaurateurs, chefs and traditional media critics up in arms over what they view as inferior reporting.

Food bloggers get a bad rap, though their negative reputation is ultimately rooted in some truth. Certain blogs steal information and make claims without citation; others bash restaurants without tact or evidence under the guise of being serious critics. Famed Chef Mario Batali wrote (on the food blog Eater), “Many of the anonymous authors who vent on blogs rant their snarky vituperatives from behind the smoky curtain of the web. Read more…

Cyber violence is a serious problem in South Korea. Nearly 200,000 cases were reported in 2007, which is 50% increased than in 2006. Several celebrities committed suicides because they were too depressed about the serious criticism on the Internet. For example, Choi, a 39-year-old actress, was a national sweetheart in South Korea. Bloggers criticized her about her personal life, loan scandals and divorce.  She suffered from depression and ended her life in 2008. The government in South Korea has enforced the real-name verification law this year to prevent irresponsible messages. From April 1^st, 2009, websites which have 100,000 unique visitors per day have to verify users’ identify before they post any content on the websites. Read more…