Apple has declined to appeal its loss in last year’s Apple v. Does decision. Instead, Apple has complied with the court’s order to pay the winners nearly $700,000 in legal expenses. As I put it in Ars:
Apple had asked the courts to compel two Mac rumor sites, Apple Insider and O’Grady’s PowerPage, to disclose the names of their sources for a series of stories on an an unreleased Apple audio device. In its lawsuit, Apple argued that amateur websites are not eligible for the legal protections afforded to professional journalists under the First Amendment and California’s shield law. But the court rejected this argument, ruling that “We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish ‘legitimate’ from ‘illegitimate’ news,” and that the defendants’ sites appear “conceptually indistinguishable from publishing a newspaper, and we see no theoretical basis for treating it differently.”
In an email interview with MacNN, EFF staff attorney Kurt Opsahl wrote that like their print counterparts, online journalists “must be able to promise confidentiality in order to maintain the free flow of information. Without legal protection, informants will refuse to talk to reporters, diminishing the power of the open press that is the cornerstone of a free society.”
The court awarded the defendants more than twice their actual legal expenses in order to deter companies like Apple from harrassing journalists with lawsuits. Not only does the decision set an important precedent regarding freedom of the press online, but the financial award will also enhance EFF’s ability to defend free speech online.
The idea that the Democrats are the party of free speech and the great protectors of our nation’s First Amendment heritage has always been a bit of a myth. In reality, when you study battles over freedom of speech and expression throughout American history you quickly come to realize that there are plenty of people in both parties would like to serve as the den mothers of the American citizenry. That being said, it is generally true that there have been a few more voices in the Democratic party willing to stand in opposition to governmental attempts to regulate speech in the past.
But I’m starting to wonder where even that handful of First Amendment champions has gone. Sadly, examples of Democrats selling out the First Amendment are becoming so common that I’ve decided to start a new series to highlight recent examples of Dems actually leading the charge for increased government regulation of speech and expression. I want to stress that I’m not trying to pick on Democrats here, rather, I’m just trying to point out that–unless there is a sea change in their approach to these issues by Democrats in coming months and years–both parties now appear to be singing out of the same pro-regulatory hymnal. This constitutes an ominous threat to the future of free expression.
Today, as part of this new series, I’ll be focusing on the Democratic-led efforts to revive the hideously misnamed “Fairness Doctrine.”
I would quote this Ars article, but really, a picture is worth a thousand words:
As the priceless tagline to the story puts it: “Obscenity complaints to the FCC jumped 40,000 percent between August and September 2006. Shame on you, September! Don’t you know that our children are watching?”
What’s happening here, obviously, isn’t that the major networks decided to start running porn during prime time in September. Rather, groups like the Parents Television Council put out an action alert describing the filthiest moments in television they can find, and their members (the vast majority of whom probably didn’t even watch the show) send form letters to the FCC.
According to Julia Angwin of The Wall Street Journal, social networking giant MySpace.com will soon be offering parents free monitoring software to help them keep tabs on their child’s online activities.
“Parents who install the monitoring software on their home computers would be able to find out what name, age and location their children are using to represent themselves on MySpace. The software doesn’t enable parents to read their child’s e-mail or see the child’s profile page and children would be alerted that their information was being shared. The program would continue to send updates about changes in the child’s name, age and location, even when the child logs on from other computers.”
MySpace is in a difficult position right now and I think this was a wise move. The company has been under intense pressure from lawmakers, especially state AGs, to take more steps to protect kids online. But it remains unclear whether this move will satisfy the AGs since they are more interested in forcing MySpace to age-verify all their users using public databases and then raising the minimum age of those who can use the site at all.
Last summer, I debated two of the AGs mentioned in the WSJ story–Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper–and explained why age verification is misguided and just won’t work anyway:
MEMPHIS, Tenn., January 13, 2007–A new House subcommittee chaired by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, will turn its oversight to a range of government agencies, particularly the Federal Communications Commission, Kucinich announced here on Friday night.
Kucinich, a 2004 candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination who stated his intention to run again in 2008, said that his committee will hold holdings criticizing the FCC on the issue of media ownership.
In a speech before the National Conference for Media Reform here, unexpected visitor Kucinich announced his chairmanship of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the House Government Reform Committee.
The new subcommittee, Kucinich said in the speech, would be a platform to hold “hearings to push media reform right at the center of Washington.”
“You are the message,” he said to the cheering crowd.
This week I’m out in Las Vegas covering the grand-daddy of all industry trade shows–the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). It’s an amazing spectacle to behold and it’s impossible to even begin to summarize all the great gadgets I’m seeing and issue panels that I’m covering. But over the next few days I’ll try to share a few highlights.
Although things really don’t get into full swing until Monday morning of the event, Sunday featured several panel discussions about the future of the gaming industry. Faithful readers will recall my love of video games and my manycolumns on gaming issues.
I attended 5 different panel discussions. The first two proved the most interesting to me. They were entitled “Broadband Games Expand: From Casual to the Networked PC Universe” and “Entertainment as Franchise: Games Cross over into Music, TV, Cable, Movies, Mobile, Advertainment & Custom Branded Experience.” The other panels were on massive, multiplayer online games, mobile gaming, and cross-platform branding / advertsing. Here are few highlights:
I’d like to call out an interesting development from the past week that is a great example of how the Internet can do an end run around traditional regulation–in this case, federal broadcast indecency rules.
As described very well in this NY Times article in yesterday’s Arts section, Saturday Night Live had a decently funny skit (my friends have thought it to be either hilarious or plain stupid) involving a parody of two boy band singers, one played by Justin Timberlake. The skit was called “Special Treat in a Box” and involved a song about giving a holiday present to their girlfriends–their male anatomy, wrapped up in a box.
Over the air, NBC had to bleep out the 16 references to the anatomy (think other name for Richard)–but, SNL simultaneously released an uncensored version that made its way to YouTube. Over 2 million people had viewed it on YouTube alone, according to the article.
Lorne Michaels, SNL’s producer, predicted that other shows might more actively offer material online that isn’t suitable for prime-time broadcast. But in a telling state of the regulatory climate, and its chilling effect on the distribution of content (the easily offended think this is a good thing), according to the article:
[Michaels] cautioned in an interview that the strategy of treating Internet users to the equivalent of an authorized “director’s cut” of his late-night show “will be the exception” going forward.
Don’t want to piss off anyone with power in Washington, DC, or else Internet content could one day receive a not-so-special regulatory treat from the FCC.
The FCC got a wake-up call yesterday in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City. The agency was there in court defending its recent actions in various indecency enforcement cases against Fox Television. Specifically, the question at hand was whether of not the use of a fleeting explicative should be categorically barred from the airwaves and punishable by massive fines if they are uttered. (You can find the video of the trial on C-Span’s website).
The 3-judge panel showed very little patience with the FCC and asked some sharp questions about its stepped-up crusade to regulate broadcast speech. (The case is Fox Television v. FCC and, as I mentioned here before, I filed a joint amicus brief in the case along with my friends at the Center for Democracy and Technology.)
Before a packed courtroom, FCC attorney Eric Miller was grilled by Second Circuit Judges Rosemary Pooler, Pierre Leval and Peter Hall on numerous issues. Here are a few highlights:
I spend a lot of time arguing with media critics who would like to see various types of content censored in the name of protecting children. Video games are usually at the top of their regulatory wish list. Some of these critics claim that video games are, at a minimum, creating a generation of slothful youth. But others make more grandiose claims that video games are training today’s youth to essentially be cop killers or serial murderers. That’s the conclusion of one book I read recently with the title (I’m not kidding) “Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill.” The authors of this over-the-top book argue that there is “a clear cause-and-effect relationship between screen violence and violent behavior.”
But it just isn’t true. As I documented in this recent study, juvenile murder, rape, robbery and assault are all down significantly over the past decade. Overall, aggregate violent crime by juveniles fell 43 percent from 1995-2004. And there are fewer murders at school today and fewer students report carrying weapons to school or anywhere else than at any point in the past decade. Other juvenile trends are improving, too. Alcohol and drug abuse among high school seniors has generally been falling and is currently at a 20-year low. Teen birth rates have hit a 20-year low in 2002 and fewer teens are having sex today than they were 15 years ago. High school dropout rates continue to fall steadily, as they have for the past 30 years. And although the teenage suicide rate rose steadily until the mid-1990s, it began a dramatic decline after that that continues today. (All these statistics are thoroughly documented in my study).
But let’s set aside these meddlesome things called facts for a moment and ask a different question: Are the “games” that kids play today really more dangerous than the games older generations played when they were children? Are the electronically-rendered games that kids play today really more dangerous than the games children played back in the “good ol’ days”?
What got me thinking about this website that one of my PFF colleagues brought to my attention entitled “The 10 Most Dangerous Play Things of All Time.” It’s a humorous look at some of the most dangerous toys and games of the past few decades. And when I say dangerous, I mean seriously dangerous toys–as in death, dismemberment or poisoning. That kind of dangerous. And I’m proud to say that even though I owned and played with 3 of the toys on the “most dangerous” list, I made it out of childhood alive and unharmed! Nonetheless, the list is frightening.
Well, here we go again. As I have said again and again and again and again and again and again, our public policy makers persist in the mistaken belief that the solution to the online predator problem is more Internet regulation instead of stiff sentences for offenders.
The non-solution du jour is an proposal that has been introduced both in Congress and now my home state of Virginia which would require sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses or IM address with the government. Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) introduced a bill (S. 4089) in Congress last week that contains this provision. And, according to today’s Washington Post Virginia Attorney General Robert McConnell will soon be introducing a similar e-mail registration bill. In theory, after the federal or state government officials got the predator’s e-mail or IM address, they would give social networking sites like MySpace.com access to the database to cross-reference it with their users. Again, in theory, this would allow social networking sites to weed out the bad guys.
Except, of course, that there is nothing stopping the bad guys from simply signing up for a different e-mail address somewhere else! I mean, come on, this proposal doesn’t even pass the laugh test! I don’t know about you, but I have multiple e-mail accounts and often switch providers and change my address to evade spammers. A determined predator is going to do the same thing once this law is passed. In fact, they probably already have multiple accounts today to throw people off their trail.
Again, when will our government do the right thing and put these scumbags who hurt children behind bars for a long, long time? Instead, our lawmakers now just give them a slap on the wrist and let them walk after just a few years of hard time, meaning they are out on the streets and behind keyboards again too soon. This 2003 Department of Justice study reported that the average sentence for child molesters was approximately seven years and, on average, they were released after serving just three of those seven years.
That is outrageous, and until we get serious about bringing bad guys to justice and locking them up for a long, long time, we’re never going to get this problem under control.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.