Home » Articles posted by James A Jacobs (Page 91)
Author Archives: James A Jacobs
DMCA overkill: NASA video of Mars removed from YouTube
Hours after NASA's successful landing on Mars of its Mars rover, one of NASA's official clips from the mission was pulled from YouTube, and replaced with a notice from the video site indicating that the "video contains content from Scripps Local News, who has blocked it on copyright grounds." The video was replaced and Scripps apologized, but it is an example of how the scale are tipped in favor of the "content industry" and even obvious, public-domain content gets caught in the privatization of information trap. EFF has the background on the technology and how it works:
- Mars Landing Videos, and Other Casualties of the Robot Wars, by Parker Higgins, Electronic Frontier Foundation (Aug 8, 2012). [T]he problem likely lies not with the DMCA itself, but with the additional (and voluntary) automated Content ID system YouTube has developed. Content ID uses digital fingerprinting technology to identify duplicate audio and video on YouTube and, depending on the "business rules" configuration of the designated rightsholder, blocks or places ads next to videos. Unfortunately, the robots behind that copyright enforcement machine have the tendency to shoot first and ask questions later, even when it ends up silencing real -- human -- speech. Continue reading
California Suspends Open Meetings Law to Save Money
It costs money (at least in the short run) to make governments open and transparent. Even if open government is better for democracy and cost-efficient and cost-effective in the long run, governments may use the short-term cost as an excuse to curtail openness. OMB Watch reports that, as part of its Budget Act of 2012 (passed in June), California suspended the state's open meetings law for the next three years in an effort to cut state expenditures. The California open meetings law "requires cities and other agencies to publish the agendas of public meetings before they occur and make the minutes of these meetings available to citizens after they occur." As OMB Watch says, "In suspending the law, the state is sacrificing not only a fundamental element of a democratic society, but a vital tool that can actually save money."
- California Suspends Open Meetings Law to Save Money, OMB Watch (August 14, 2012). The state, facing increasingly tight budgets, suspended the law to save money. Under state rules, California is required to reimburse cities and counties for the cost of complying with mandated requirements, which includes its open meetings requirements. However, California has not reimbursed local governments for open meetings costs since 2005, accumulating a debt estimated at $96 million. By suspending the open meetings provision in the Brown Act, California expects to avoid paying open meetings costs for the next three years, as well as eliminate the current debt owed to local governments.
Happy Birthday Freedom of Information!
The National Security Archive at George Washington University is marking the anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act with a special post:
- Happy 46th Birthday, Freedom of Information!, National Security Archive (July 4, 2012). Marking the 46th anniversary of President Johnson's signing the Freedom of Information Act, the National Security Archive today posted a compilation of 46 news headlines from the past year made possible by active and creative use of the FOIA. This representative sample, drawn from hundreds of FOIA stories reported by newspapers, blogs, broadcasters, and researchers, describe FOIA requests that revealed the theft of Jack Daniels whiskey by airport security screeners, the keywords used by homeland security officials to monitor social networking sites, the soil contamination endangering Marines and their families at Camp Lejeune, pre-9/11 attempts to whack Osama bin Laden, and $1.2 trillion of secret Federal Reserve loans to banks, among dozens of other topics that the public has a right and a need to know.
C-SPAN’s essential video record of Congress has new clipping tool
Gary points to a great, newly enhanced tool from C-SPAN that allows you to create and share video clips in its extensive video library of Congressional proceedings and Committee hearings. The tool is available for all of C-SPAN's online video content, which includes Book-TV and Booknotes, C-SPAN specials, interviews, news conferences, White House events, National Press Club speakers, and more. The archive includes every program aired on C-SPAN since 1987, almost 190,000 hours of video!
- The Wonderful C-SPAN Video Library Releases Enhanced Video Clipping Tool, by Gary Price, infoDOCKET (June 22, 2012). All of the material is searchable not only with metadata but also using each word spoken during a program. That's right, transcript search.
- Clipping in the Video Library, by RXB, C-SPAN video library blog (June 22, 2012). Over three million clips have already been created by users.
- C-SPAN Video Library. Here is a four minute sample: a clip on the Volker Rule, taken from the two hour and fifteen minute testimony of Jamie Dimon on July 13, 2012 before the Senate Committee Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, about J. P. Morgan Chase's $2 billion trading loss on May 10, 2012.
Latest Comments