Judge: File-swapping tools are legal

Fascinating -- and surprising -- breaking news: RIAA, MPAA Lose Suit Against Streamcast and Grokster. From News.com and Slashdot reaction. Here's the judge's opinion (PDF format). Copyfight is on the case, too.

New on OJR

New on OJR:

TV Stations May Finally Get the Point: TV stations have been pretending that their Web counterparts don't exist. But now that advertisers are seeing that they can reach consumers at online news sites, that is likely to change, and sooner than you think.

Weblogs Unite to Protest Detained Iranian Blogger: When Iran detained journalist and blogger Sina Motallebi, it stirred up a protest that's united the Persian and Western blogospheres. But will publicity help or harm him? Top Persian bloggers weigh in.

Lessig on copyright

Stanford prof. Larry Lessig continues to make the rounds on the subject of intellectual property. Yesterday he gave a talk at Northwestern University titled "Is Intellectual Property Copyrightable?" And yesterday he appeared on a taped segment on PBS's NewsHour to discuss piracy and movie & music file trading.

In his talk at Northwestern, a poster on Dave Farber's mailing list reports, Lessig said legislation will be introduced in two weeks or so (perhaps by Rep. Zoe Lofgren) that would require copyright holders to pay $1 to continue copyright protection rather than have property automatically be protected without any kind of registration.

It's a worthy idea, given that so much material is held out of the public domain by default. I doubt Congress will act on it, however.

Management by blog

In Business 2.0 Jimmy Guterman explores how companies might use blogs to help manage their businesses. Worth a read, especially for those in mid- or upper management.

Springsteen on the Dixie Chicks

Here's a courageous statement from Bruce Springsteen on the plight of the Dixie Chucks, who are suffering boycotts of their work by the pro-war jingoists (including faux-patriotic corporate interests) throughout the land:

The Dixie Chicks have taken a big hit lately for exercising their basic right to express themselves. To me, they're terrific American artists expressing American values by using their American right to free speech. For them to be banished wholesale from radio stations, and even entire radio networks, for speaking out is un-American.

The pressure coming from the government and big business to enforce conformity of thought concerning the war and politics goes against everything that this country is about - namely freedom. Right now, we are supposedly fighting to create freedom in Iraq, at the same time that some are trying to intimidate and punish people for using that same freedom here at home.

I don't know what happens next, but I do want to add my voice to those who think that the Dixie Chicks are getting a raw deal, and an un-American one to boot. I send them my support.

Bruce Springsteen

Carl Bernstein steamed over DeepThroatUncovered.com

Guess who wants to discipline the journalism professor whose class created a website to deduce the identity of Deep Throat? None other than Carl Bernstein.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports:

Washington - The Illinois journalism program that had students try to find the identity of the Washington Post's "Deep Throat" informant "should be disaccredited" and the teacher who oversaw the project "should be spanked," said Carl Bernstein, one of the reporters whose stories on the Watergate scandal led to President Nixon's resignation.

"The last thing students in a journalism class should be doing is trying to find out who other reporters' sources are," said Bernstein, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine who broke the stories with colleague Bob Woodward. "They should be learning how to protect sources."

Bernstein's flat-out wrong, of course. If anything, the Univ. of Illinois journalism class is doing a public service by helping to analyze the tactics of one of journalism's most storied investigative teams. And yes, Carl, that means seeing what kind of footprints you left behind.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the pointer.

Meantime, professor Eric Meyer, who helped oversee the project, reports on the online-news list:

In its first two days, the site generated 2,978,517 hits and was visited by 58,333 unique users. ...

Although nearly all reporters who wrote stories about the project visited the site -- and in most cases got copies of the story by e- mail -- the only major organizations that published direct links to the site (that we could find) were the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and Yahoo News. One of those organizations did not initially provide a link. It was added midway through the publication cycle by a former student now working as a producer there. ...

The site was manually designed and executed by 13 students. They used no special database templating systems other than standard Apache server-side includes. What they chose to research and feature and how they chose to design those elements was completely up to them. They worked on the project for less than three weeks.

More on censoring journalists' blogs

Sheila, the ever-savvy blogger for Projo.com, shares some thoughts by email about the line she has set up between her newspaper blog and personal blog, in the wake of the Hartford Courant's clampdown on its travel editor's personal weblog.

How it shakes out for me:

If I have something to say that would involve the "parallel world of the paper," I say it on the paper's blog as a columnist.

The only resource of the paper I use on my personal blog is a few links to clips of my own work that I've fished out of the archives and put on the projo.com website.

Outside activities that are not appropriate to my journal blog go to lennon2.com: A link to brother's project, bringing the USS Saratoga to Quonset Point as a museum. The acknowledgment that I make the union website, within a stark template. A few old clips. Flowers and vacations and personal comments in the big conversation. Photos. Disclosure, really, more than most columnists show.

I didn't subtitle my Journal blog "Bottom-up" journalism from the pros for readers as much as to remind myself where I am when I open that file.

I "simul-blog" some posts that straddle and have wider appeal.

My personal blog languishes a lot. ...

The happy ending here might be to get Denis's blog into the newsroom and "converged" on the road with his travel writing.

That's a good suggestion -- one that I'm sure the Courant will ignore. More and more, with a few exceptioins (such as Sheila and Dan), I'm finding that journalists' personal weblogs are more interesting, insightful and fun to read than the blogs sanctioned by news sites. (See Glenn Reynolds vs. Glenn Reynolds on MSNBC for one example.)

Meantime, feel free to add your own comments here or on Denis Horgan's blog, where readers are expressing shock and awe at the Courant's hubris.

Regarding the suggestions by some readers on Denis' feedback page that journalists ought to write personal weblogs anonymously, or under a pen name: That's a terrible idea, unless it's done with the consent of the news publication's management. Such subterfuge, while understandable, can easily lead to misunderstandings of intent, and result in a suspension or firing -- as already happened once in Texas.