Movement for the Liberation of Old Papers
Erik Ringmar, professor of social and cultural studies at the National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, wants others to join him in putting restricted government documents on the web. I say this is awesome! There's certainly precedent for this kind of activism: Jared Benedict liberated a bunch of USGS maps and just last week, I uploaded the Iraqi Perspectives Report to the Internet Archive. Anyone else out there set free a government document? Leave us a comment.
So, I've taken it upon myself to start an organisation called MLOP, the "Movement for the Liberation of Old Papers". What I do is hack into restricted websites, download the documents I'm interested in, and then use my favourite open-source paint program to remove the copyright statements from each page. Next I assemble the pages into one single pdf file and upload it to the Internet Archive, where it will become universally available to both researchers and citizens. Yes, it does take a bit of time, but it's a very worthy cause (and I have a hardworking research assistant to help me). I feel strongly about this, and I'm prepared to live with the legal consequences of my actions. This, after all, is the new frontier of civil rights - the right of access to information. How else can corruption be stopped and falsehoods exposed? How else can people in power be held accountable? I'd go to prison for the old parliamentary papers if I had to. Ever after I would proudly brag about having liberated an old House of Commons report from the clutches of market capitalism.Continue reading
Court Invalidates Part of Copyright Remedy Clarification Act
Mary Minow writes that a significant part of the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act of 1990 (CRCA) has been struck down by a California Southern District Court ruling. In 2006, a marketing research firm sued the CSU system. It alleged that San Diego State University, which had been hired in 2004 to perform annual fiscal impact analyses for the Holiday Bowl games (SDSU had been hired because the marketing research firm, which had performed the analyses previously, had increased its fees), had misappropriated and plagiarized the marketing research firm's earlier reports. The CRCA reads, in part, that "Any State, any instrumentality of a State, and any officer or employee of a State or instrumentality of a State ... shall not be immune, under the Eleventh Amendment ... from suit in Federal Court ... for a violation of any of the exclusive rights of a copyright owner ...." In theory, this means that states are now in the clear from being targeted by the federal claims that the CRCA was worded to allow. As the District Court ruling states, "The CRCA was passed with the intent to subject states to liability for copyright infringement." The major wrinkle is that the ruling appears to protect only state agents or employees who are acting in their "official capacity." As Minow's post points out, there are any number of steps that a plaintiff could take to establish legally that a state employee was not acting in his or her "official capacity." The most germane step would be that an individual sued under federal law (and the CRCA being federal law) can be classified as having acted in his or her "individual capacity" if the plaintiff can establish that an alleged violation was in contravention of protected federal copyright. The ruling, Marketing Information Masters Inc. v. The Board of Trustees of the California State University System (.pdf), is here. More pleadings in the case are available here. Continue reading
Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering
A new book is out entitled, "Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering" edited by Ronald Deibert, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain from the Berkman Center's OpenNet Initiative. This is a must-have for libraries -- many of whom deal with filtering at the personal computer level -- in order to inform the public on the more insidious filtering of internet traffic that happens at the country or backbone level. "Access Denied provides the definitive analysis of government justifications for denying their own people access to some information and also documents global Internet filtering practices on a country-by-country basis. (Jonathan Aronson, Annenberg School for Communication, USC)" The site includes country profiles for those countries "in which it was believed that there was the most to learn about the extent and processes of Internet filtering." Read the BBC review and the Review in Nature. Continue reading
NY Times publishes some FOIA documents
In an investigation on how the Bush administration uses retired military officers to promote its message on the Iraq war, the New York Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantanamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation. The story based on these documents (Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon's Hidden Hand By David Barstow, New York Times, April 20, 2008) is supplemented online by "Audio, video and documents that show how the military’s talking points were disseminated" (How the Pentagon Spread Its Message and a "Document Archive," which allows users to read and download documents and parts of documents. Of the 8000 pages, only a few are available online, but these include emails, a "Talking Points Memo," excerpts from a Transcript of meeting with Mr. Rumsfeld, and a Pentagon document that reports "Monitoring of Analysts." Together, the audio-visual presentation and the documents are a small model for how newspapers could be using the power of the web to enhance their coverage and utility. I would certainly like to see all 8000 pages online! The story itself is a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes of the daily news.
Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as "message force multipliers" or "surrogates" who could be counted on to deliver administration "themes and messages" to millions of Americans "in the form of their own opinions." ...Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.Continue reading
Prosecutors argue for “unprecedented” court secrecy
In an odd addendum to the corruption case of (now former) Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, prosecutors are arguing that once the executive branch says something is classified, courts are virtually powerless to review or disagree. The arguments are in the case of Thomas Kontogiannis, a New York financier who admitted to one charge of laundering bribe money for former Rep. Cunningham.
- Cunningham figure's plea deal was sealed, By Greg Moran, San Diego Union-Tribune, April 20, 2008
While portions of the case remain secret, a batch of previously sealed court filings was released this week that show the government arguing what media law experts said was an astounding position.... In essence, prosecutors argued that once the executive branch says something is classified, courts are virtually powerless to review or disagree. That is true, they argued, even when the information is part of court records - which historically have been considered open under the First Amendment.Continue reading