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Bill in Congress Gives Ownership of Weather Data to First TV Station Reportig It
We're surrounded by free factual information, but there's a bill in Congress that would lock it all up. The Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act (DCIMA, H.R. 3261) extends extremely broad copyright-like protections to collections of factual data - data like the price of a TV, the temperature in Arizona or information collected during scientific research. DCIMA would allow companies to sue anyone who interferes with their ability to profit from data that they collect. In other words, academic researchers, public libraries, Internet innovators and other database users would have to pay up if someone else claimed to have assembled the data first. This is not only unnecessary, it's bad policy.

posted by LoZo 8:02 PM

 

CBS Fumbles the Super Bowl ... Censors MoveOn.org's ad

[NOTE: The following advertisement was placed in The New York Times by MoveOn.org]

Les Moonves, the CEO of CBS, is refusing to run one of our MoveOn Voter Fund commercials during the Super Bowl, because it criticizes President Bush's $1 trillion in budget deficits. This is the same Les Moonves who recently refused to air a docudrama mildly critical of President Reagan.

Mr. Moonves' kowtowing makes a certain sense: President Bush just reversed an antitrust rule that would have forced CBS and Fox to sell some of their lucrative local stations. On the other hand, the First Amendment is still presumably in force.

CBS claims they simply don't air 'controversial' ads during the Super Bowl. Yet they had no problem with ads featuring serial killers, or nudists with their genitals digitally altered, when CBS last broadcast the Super Bowl in 2001.

Our Voter Fund commercial is dignified and factual. It was one of 1,500 public interest commercials submitted in a national contest, and was selected as the winner by a jury of leading filmmakers, as well as the public, which cast two million votes.

This is about more than just a commercial; it's about political censorship. CBS was once the network of Edward R. Murrow. Apparently it's a long way from Murrow to Moonves.

JUDGE FOR YOURSELF. SEE OUR VOTER FUND TV SPOT AT WWW.MOVEON.ORG

[COMMENT: You also might want to check out the story about MoveOn taking two of the submitted ads down from their Web site. What goes around comes around. Maybe MoveOn should also be chastised for censoring some ads.]

posted by LoZo 1:51 PM

 

CBS Guilty Of Political Favoritism In Rejecting Moveon.Org Voter Fund Ad
Network Allows White House Anti-drug Ad As it Lobbies for Favors from Bush and Congress . . . Public Asked to Contact CBS Local Stations to Protest
CBS Television and its parent company Viacom are guilty of political favoritism in its selective enforcement of network policies governing advertising around the Super Bowl, MoveOn.org charged today.

CBS notified the MoveOn.org Voter Fund that it will not allow the winning spot from the organization's recent 'Bush in 30 Seconds' TV ad contest to be aired during the annual football extravaganza, which is expected to draw 130 million viewers in the U.S. and a billion worldwide. The network claims to have a long-standing policy against running issue ads that may be controversial.

According to trade sources, an issue ad by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy will be aired during the football game - but not the MoveON ad, 'Child’s Pay,' which focuses on the ballooning federal deficit. An ad from People for Ethical Treatment of Animals also was rejected. Previous White House anti-drug ads broadcast during the Super Bowl stirred controversy by linking drug use to support for international terrorism.

'It seems to us that CBS simply defers to those it fears or from whom it wants favors - in this case, the Bush White House,' said Eli Pariser, campaign director for MoveOn.org. 'This is the same CBS that recently backed down when the Republican National Committee made a stink about its mini-series on former President Reagan and his family.

'And this is the same CBS that has lobbied hard and will benefit from recent changes by Congress in Federal Communications Commission restrictions on the ownership of local TV stations,' he noted.

Yesterday Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) made a similar point, noting that CBS and Fox networks would have been forced to sell stations they owned had not Congress made the change both networks and the White House wanted: allowing one owner to reach up to 39% of the total national broadcast audience. 'Why did they pick 39%? So these two conglomerates could be grandfathered,' McCain, who chairs a committee overseeing the industry, said on the Senate floor.

Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle called the change 'a special interest giveaway that directly harms the national interest.'

The MoveOn.org Voter Fund ad states one undeniable fact: that Bush, by creating a huge federal deficit, is leaving a painful legacy to future generations. The ad, created by Charlie Fisher of Denver in a nationwide competition where more than 100,000 members of the public voted, pictures children doing difficult work - washing dishes in a restaurant, cleaning an office building, hauling trash, standing on an assembly line - with the tag line: 'Guess Who's Going to Pay Off President Bush's $1 Trillion Deficit?'

It's a position that has bipartisan support. Yesterday 40 House Republicans kicked off a campaign to pressure the White House to reduce its deficit spending. Democrats have attacked the president in the presidential primary campaigns, accusing him of reckless tax policies creating a spiraling debt.

MoveOn.org called on the public to contact local CBS affiliates and ask them to run all issue ads, without favoritism. MOVF received support yesterday from an unlikely source. Fox network curmudgeon Bill O'Reilly commented: 'I was surprised that CBS turned this down. It's not offensive, makes a legitimate point politically.'

MoveOn.org is an online organizing project created to bring ordinary people back into the political process through its focus on public education and advocacy around important national issues. The MoveOn.org Voter Fund is a 'Section 527' political committee created to comply with the new federal campaign finance laws. It run ads and engages in other efforts to expose the policy failures of the Bush Administration. MoveOn.org is mounting this protest as a nonpartisan effort on behalf of all public interest groups seeking fair and open access to the media – not just its Voter Fund.

posted by LoZo 6:30 PM

 

Open Source Democracy ... a new book by Douglas Rushkoff
The above link will take you to the text-only version of Douglas Rushkoff's new book that is available as a part of the Gutenberg Project. The following is a brief excerpt:

The very survival of democracy as a functional reality may be dependent upon our acceptance, as individuals, of adult roles in conceiving and stewarding the shape and direction of society. And we may get our best rehearsal for these roles online. . . . In short, the interactive mediaspace offers a new way of understanding civilisation itself, and a new set of good reasons for engaging with civic reality more fully in the face of what are often perceived (or taught) to be the many risks and compromises associated with cooperative behaviour. Sadly, thanks to the proliferation of traditional top-down media and propaganda, both marketers and politicians have succeeded in their efforts to turn neighbour against neighbour, city against city, and nation against nation.While such strategies sell more products, earn more votes and inspire a sense of exclusive salvation (we can’t share, participate or, heaven forbid, collaborate with people whom we’ve been taught not to trust), they imperil what is left of civil society. They threaten the last small hope for averting millions of deaths in the next set of faithjustified oil wars. . . . As the mainstream mediaspace, particularly in the United States, becomes increasingly centralised and profit-driven, its ability to offer a multiplicity of perspectives on affairs of global importance is diminished. In America, broadcasting the Iraq war meant selling the Iraq war. Each of the media conglomerates broadcast the American regime’s carefully concocted narrative, so much so that by the time the war actually began a Knight Ridder poll found that half of Americans believed that Iraqis had participated directly as hijackers on 11 September 2001. The further embedded among coalition troops that mainstream reporters were, the further embedded in the language and priorities of the Pentagon they became. Dispatches regularly referred to the deaths of Iraqi soldiers as the ‘softening of enemy positions’, bombing strikes as ‘targets of opportunity’, and civilian deaths as the now laughable ‘collateral damage’. This was the propagandist motive for embedding reporters in the first place: when journalists’ lives are dependent on the success of the troops with whom they are travelling, their coverage becomes skewed. But this did not stop many of the journalists from creating their own weblogs, or blogs: internet diaries through which they could share their more candid responses to the bigger questions of the war. Journalists’ personal entries provided a much broader range of opinions on both the strategies and motivations of all sides in the conflict than were available, particularly to Americans, on broadcast and cable television. . . . For an even wider assortment of perspectives, internet users were free to engage directly with the so-called enemy, as in the case of a blog called Dear Raed, written by what most internet experts came to regard as a real person living in Baghdad, voicing his opposition to the war. This daily journal of high aspirations for peace and a better life in Baghdad became one of the most read sources of information and opinion about the war on the web. . . . Clearly, the success of sites like Dear Raed stems from our increasingly complex society’s need for a multiplicity of points of view on our most pressing issues, particularly when confronted by a mainstream mediaspace that appears to be converging on single, corporate and government-approved agenda. These alternative information sources are being given more attention and credence than they might actually deserve, but this is only because they are the only ready source of oppositional, or even independent thinking available. Those who choose to compose and disseminate alternative value systems may be working against the current and increasingly concretised mythologies of market, church and state, but they ultimately hold the keys to the rebirth of all three institutions in an entirely new context. . . . The communications revolution may not have brought with it either salvation for the world’s stock exchanges or the technological infrastructure for a new global resource distribution system. Though one possible direction for the implementation of new media technology may be exhausted, its other myriad potentials b eckon us once again. While it may not provide us with a template for sure-fire business and marketing solutions, the rise of interactive media does provide us with the beginnings of new metaphors for cooperation, new faith in the power of networked activity and new evidence of our ability to participate actively in the authorship of our collective destiny.

posted by LoZo 12:04 PM