Threats to Internet Freedoms (consolidation thread)

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Re: Threats to Internet Freedoms (consolidation thread)

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Feb 04, 2013 2:47 pm


February 2, 2013

Data Protection Laws, an Ocean Apart

By NATASHA SINGER


OVER the years, the United States and Europe have taken different approaches toward protecting people’s personal information. Now the two sides are struggling to bridge that divide.

On this side of the Atlantic, Congress has enacted a patchwork quilt of privacy laws that separately limit the use of Americans’ medical records, credit reports, video rental records and so on. On the other side, the European Union has instituted more of a blanket regulatory system; it has a common directive that gives its citizens certain fundamental rights — like the right to obtain copies of records held about them by companies and institutions — that Americans now lack.

Even so, United States officials maintain that the divergent approaches are equal. “The sum of the parts of U.S. privacy protection is equal to or greater than the single whole of Europe,” says Cameron F. Kerry, general counsel of the Commerce Department. He is overseeing an agency effort to help develop voluntary, enforceable codes of conduct for industry groups, like app developers, whose collection and use of consumer data are now unregulated.

Europe begs to differ.

“Yes, we share the basic idea of privacy,” says Peter Hustinx, Europe’s data protection supervisor. “But there is a huge deficit on the U.S. side.”

Alas, the data-control divide appears to be widening.

A year ago, the European Commission proposed comprehensive reforms to strengthen online privacy rights — changes that could have big repercussions for American technology companies and marketers that operate in the European Union. American officials, trade groups and tech executives have responded by taking frequent treks to Brussels and other cities, where they have urged regulators and legislators to reconsider the one-regulation-fits-all-data approach. What’s at stake, American industry representatives say, is nothing less than a free and commerce-friendly Internet.

“The ecosystem of the Internet is very delicate,” says Kevin Richards, senior vice president of federal government affairs at TechAmerica, a trade group that represents companies like Google and Microsoft. “It’s not wise to have an overly broad, prescriptive, one-size-fits-all approach that would hinder or undermine the ability of companies to innovate in a global economy.”

European Union members already have data protection laws in place, based on a directive from 1995 that laid out principles for the collection of personal information. The proposed new rules would strengthen some existing provisions. They would standardize data protections across the 27 member states. They would also provide some new rights, such as “data portability” — the right of consumers to easily transfer their text files, photographs and videos from one social network, or e-mail or cloud storage service, to another. And they would subject companies that violate the rules to penalties of up to 2 percent of their annual global revenue.

Asked for comment, Viviane Reding, the vice president of the European Commission and the architect of the proposed regulation, said in a statement: “The main problem is that our rules predate the digital age and it became increasingly clear in recent years that they needed an update.” She continued: “That is why I have proposed a root-and-branch reform of the E.U.’s data protection rules — currently under discussion in the European Parliament and the Council of the E.U. — that will both protect citizens’ rights and facilitate business in the digital age.”

BUT some provisions seem too rigid to United States officials and trade groups. They argue that the American approach — sector-specific privacy laws, in addition to industry self-regulation and enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission — is more nimble.


Yeah, nimble. Just like derivatives trading. Nimbles for me, none for you.



“We hope that Europe will move in the direction of those multistakeholder standards, and not standards which are not flexible and don’t move at Internet speed,” says Mr. Kerry, who has taken at least four trips to European cities in the last year to discuss these issues.

From the perspective of some European legislators, however, United States representatives seem more interested in protecting commerce than consumers. The full-court American effort may have backfired, they say, pushing some European officials toward even broader measures. Last month, Jan Philipp Albrecht, a representative of the European Parliament who reviewed the draft regulation, proposed additional rights for citizens — like the right not to be subject to consumer profiling.

“My impression is that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Commerce Department are mostly just following the interests of Silicon Valley,” he says. “This leads to heavy pressure on the European regulator, I can say.”

But Mr. Kerry says the United States must make its views known if the systems are to work in concert.

“I know that some people have raised eyebrows at our involvement; I make no apologies,” Mr. Kerry says. “We in the United States and countries and businesses around the world are stakeholders in this process. This has an important impact on the global economy.”

The solution to this trans-Atlantic clash may simply be American ingenuity.

Last year, President Barack Obama proposed a “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights” that would give Americans many of the same baseline protections that the draft European rule proposes to reinforce. These include the right of access to records that companies hold about them, the right to correct those records and the right to have limits on the personal data that companies collect and keep. Administration officials said they would work with Congress on legislation based on those rights and to extend oversight to industries not currently covered by federal privacy laws.

A coalition of more than a dozen American advocacy groups said it would send a letter on Monday to senior Obama administration officials, seeking a meeting to ensure that American policy makers’ efforts in Europe “are not averse to the views expressed by the president.” The coalition includes the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy.


“Does the Obama administration really want to be on the opposite side of the European effort to upgrade and modernize its privacy law which is at its core about the protection of a fundamental freedom?” asks Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

European officials hold out hope that Congress will enact baseline consumer privacy protections for Americans.

“This development — which is much welcomed in Europe — shows that we have much in common,” Ms. Reding of the European Commission said in her statement, speaking of the privacy bill of rights. “Convergence is springing up and synergies are possible.”

E-mail: slipstream@nytimes.com.

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Re: Threats to Internet Freedoms (consolidation thread)

Postby justdrew » Wed Feb 06, 2013 7:58 pm

Maybe it's time for non-conservative parties to work together?

Canadian Business Groups Lobby For Right To Install Spyware on Your Computer
Wednesday February 06, 2013

The deadline for comments on Industry Canada's draft anti-spam regulations passed earlier this week with a group of 13 industry associations - including the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian Marketing Association, the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association and the Entertainment Software Association of Canada - submitting a lengthy document that, if adopted, would gut much of the law. The groups adopt radical interpretations of the law to argue for massive new loopholes or for the indefinite delay of several provisions. I will focus on some of the submissions shortly, but this post focuses on the return of an issue that was seemingly killed years ago: demands to permit surreptitious surveillance by the copyright owners and other groups for private enforcement purposes.

During the anti-spam law debates in 2009, copyright lobby groups promoted amendments that would have allowed for expansive surveillance of user computers. Coming on the heels of the Sony rootkit scandal, the government ultimately rejected those proposals (the Liberals had plans to propose such amendments but backed down), leaving in place an important provision that requires express consent prior to the installation of computer software. The provision states:

8. (1) A person must not, in the course of a commercial activity, install or cause to be installed a computer program on any other person's computer system or, having so installed or caused to be installed a computer program, cause an electronic message to be sent from that computer system, unless
(a) the person has obtained the express consent of the owner or an authorized user of the computer system and complies with subsection 11(5); or
(b) the person is acting in accordance with a court order.

The law adds several wrinkles to this general requirement, including the need for clear and prominent descriptions of the functionality of the software in certain circumstances (including the collection of personal information, changing user settings, or interfering with user control over their computer) and exemptions for programs such as cookies, HTML code, and javascripts.

The industry groups are now demanding that the government overhaul these requirements. Its preferred approach is to simply kill the provision altogether by referring it to a "Review Body", which it says could be a task force or another public consultation, before taking effect. In other words, despite considerable debate and approval on this specific provision by Members of Parliament from all parties, these industry groups still want it placed in legislative limbo.

Alternatively, the groups want at least ten kinds of computer programs excluded from the express consent requirement. The very first should set off alarm bells for all Canadians:

a program that is installed by or on behalf of a person to prevent, detect, investigate, or terminate activities that the person reasonably believes (i) present a risk or threatens the security, privacy, or unauthorized or fraudulent use, of a computer system, telecommunications facility, or network, or (ii) involves the contravention of any law of Canada, of a province or municipality of Canada or of a foreign state;

This provision would effectively legalize spyware in Canada on behalf of these industry groups. The potential scope of coverage is breathtaking: a software program secretly installed by an entertainment software company designed to detect or investigate alleged copyright infringement would be covered by this exception. This exception could potentially cover programs designed to block access to certain websites (preventing the contravention of a law as would have been the case with SOPA), attempts to access wireless networks without authorization, or even keylogger programs tracking unsuspecting users (detection and investigation). Ensuring compliance with the law is important, but envisioning private enforcement through spyware without the involvement of courts, lawful authorities, and due process should be a non-starter.

The Canadian Chamber of Commerce and other business groups want to ensure that the anti-spam law does not block their ability to secretly install spyware on personal computers for a wide range of purposes. In doing so, these groups are proposing to turn the law upside down by shifting from protecting consumers to protecting businesses. The comment period on the draft regulations may have closed, but it is not too late to tell Industry Minister Christian Paradis or your local Member of Parliament to reject demands that would gut the anti-spam bill and legalize spyware for private enforcement purposes.
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Re: Threats to Internet Freedoms (consolidation thread)

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Feb 12, 2013 9:10 pm

Speaking of apocalypse...



http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/08/ ... lity/print

Weekend Edition February 8-10, 2013

The Communications Trust’s Plan to End Media Freedom
The End to Net Neutrality


by DAVID ROSEN

Verizon, AT&T and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are spearheading a three-pronged attack against net neutrality, the open Internet and other open forms of digital communications. If they succeed, telecommunications will be further “deregulated” and, thus, further privatized and monopolized. As a consequence, telecom services will get more expensive, local requirements subordinated to the whims of huge corporate monopolies, competition and innovation will suffer and U.S. world ranking in terms of broadband speed will further decline.

Last year, many within the broad tech, Internet and media communities – as well as ordinary citizens — organized to halt the Hollywood studios and record companies from pushing new “anti-piracy” laws through Congress. The battle against SOPA-PIPA is a model campaign for the next battle against the Communications Trust to preserve net neutrality, an open Internet and America’s very communications future.

One front in the campaign to end net neutrality is being pushed by Verizon. In 2011, it initiated a federal suit against the FCC’s authority to regulate digital communications. Currently, the FCC adheres to what is known as the “Open Internet rules,” an extension of the analog-era 1934 Communications Act. They require all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) — like Verizon – to maintain “net neutrality” standards, thus treating all data equally and barring them from slowing down or blocking websites.

Verizon argues that in the new world of digital communications, it is morphing from an old-fashioned “common carrier” or distribution pipe into a publisher, somehow analogous to CNN or the New York Times. It insists that FCC regulatory practices violate its 1st Amendment right to edit, prioritize or block its customers’ access to Internet content. Many reject this contention.

In 1995, Verizon was created out of the merger of Bell Atlantic (covering New Jersey to Virginia) and the New York Bell operating company, NYNEX (covering Maine through New York). In 2000, it acquired the independent phone company GTE and, in 2005, it acquired MCI, followed in 2008 with the acquisition of another independent, AllTel. The FCC challenge may foreshadow Verizon’s long-term plans to follow in the footsteps of cable companies like Comcast and TimeWarner and integrate content ownership with near-monopoly control over distribution.

The federal D.C. Circuit Court is expected to rule on this sometime soon. It is a pretty conservative and somewhat split Court. In December 2012, it supported the FCC’s regulation of Verizon Wireless over data roaming services. However, in 2010, it ruled that the FCC could not stop Comcast from blocking BitTorrent’s video sharing program. Stay tuned.

A second front is being pushed by AT&T and involves new Congressional legislation that would essentially end all regulatory obligations. AT&T insists, “this [traditional] regulatory experiment will show that conventional public-utility-style regulation is no longer necessary or appropriate in the emerging all-IP ecosystem.” No accountability – problem with your bill, too bad; slow bandwidth speeds, good luck; rural customers, get f**ked; schools, hospitals, police stations, pay up or good-by.

To cover-up this campaign, AT&T’s PR flacks recently promoted a new “$14 Billion” investment plan to upgrade its network. The nation’s leading media outlets — the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Reuters, Fox News, Los Angeles Times, Forbes and Bloomberg – all gave it prominent coverage. None of the established media asked the most obvious question: What have the telecoms, telco and cable, been doing for the last 20 years?

Two decades ago the telecoms promised to build Al Gore’s “Information Superhighway” and were deregulated to do so. Since then, they’ve pocketed an estimated $350 billion to build a post-modern digital telecom system. What do we have today? A 2nd-rate communications system! Further deregulations – toothless regulation – will likely only make things worse.

A third front is taking place outside the Washington beltway. ALEC “model legislation” ending traditional telephone company accountability requirements has been adopted by 23 states. This legislation removes a host of current obligations, including providing basic service filing pricing information, meeting quality-of-service standards, provid basic service, provide Lifeline services or operate as the “carrier of last resort.”

* * *

The telecommunication industry is loosely regulated monopoly. Broadly speaking, wireline phone and cable companies are “natural monopolies,” industries that require high start-up investment costs to build the infrastructure required to offer the services they provide. Such monopolies are traditional in electricity, water and natural gas, regulated by federal, state and/or local entities. As such, these regulated monopolies face limited if any competition.

Once upon a time, AT&T, the old Ma Bell, was a regulated monopoly. In 1984, it was broken up into seven regional monopolies and two long-distance providers. Over the intervening three decades, “deregulation” has led to ever-greater telecom market consolidation. The new Ma Bell duopoly of AT&T and Verizon dominate phone and wireless services.

Cable is “regulated” as another natural monopoly. Local governments regulate or oversee cable services through franchise agreements. Over the last half-century, the cable industry grew into a network of micro-monopolies, with (for the most part) a single operator controlling a local territory. Today, the more local the “regulator,” the less authority it has. Like the telcos, cable companies face little to no meaningful competition.

The phone and cable companies run two different types of natural monopolies, one “open,” the other “closed.” The best way to understand the difference is by considering the TV set top box. Because the telco network is “open,” one can purchase a separate 3rd party Internet set top box from Apple, Roku or Boxee and access Over-The-Top (OTT) TV programming. However, one can’t do the same with cable service that is, in effect, “closed.”

In 1996, the FCC requested the cable industry to “open” the cable box to 3rd parties. It has steadfastly resisted repeated efforts to open its network to 3rd set-top boxes providers. In October 2012, the FCC further strengthened the hand of the cable companies by granting them the right to encrypt broadcast channels or 1st tier programming. It did this ostensibly to block consumers from “stealing” cable programming. (Comcast is working the Boxee on an approved 3rd-party box.)

Way back when, both phone and cable providers used copper wires to run their very different networks. Telcos employed “twisted pair” to carry analog voice signals while cable companies used “coaxial” cable to offer analog television programming; wonderfully appropriate for the analog age, twisted pair didn’t support video and coax didn’t support voice. The telecom world was simple.

Well, those technology days are over, but telecom companies won’t give them up. With digital communications, all data is 1s and 0s. This should, in principle, encourage competition. Yet, it has led to the very opposite, decreased competition. The most revealing example of this process is the decisions by both AT&T and Verizon to cease building out their respective “next-generation” networks, U-Verse and FiOS, respectively. As of December 2012, FiOS had 4.7 million subscribers; as of September 2012, U-Verse had 4.3 million TV and 7.1 million Internet subscribers. More troubling, Verizon has entered into a $4 billion non-compete, “joint marketing agreement,” with TimeWarner and other cable companies.

* * *

The Communications Trust of telcos and cable companies, not unlike the giant media conglomerates, are moving to exercise greater control over telecommunications. Their strategies are noteworthy.

One involves regulating data traffic. Telcos endlessly complain about data bottlenecks and the need to impose restrictive data management methods to better regulate online traffic. This is their oft-repeated claim to end net neutrality. The basic problem with this argument is that, while the telecom network “backbone” is robust, the “last mile” to one’s home is woefully inadequate to support high-speed broadband. And why is it inadequate? This is the question, the industry, the Congress nor the media will ask. Why? The telcos still rely on the old “twisted pair” copper phone line and haven’t really invested in upgrading the last mile.

A second strategy involves gaining greater control over content, its ownership and/or copyright. This was most clearly evident in last year’s battle over SOPA and PIPA, Congressional bills pushed by the Hollywood studios and record labels under the guise of “anti-piracy” legislation to control what streams on the web. Verizon’s challenge to the FCC’s regulatory authority is a comparable effort.

A third approach is for the giant conglomerates to gain greater control over the market through vertical consolidation. A generation ago, AT&T was broken up and now a new “Ma Bell” of AT&T and Verizon is back bigger and badder then ever. Also a generation ago, GE pioneered the model of corporate control over content. It successfully integrated (i) content creation with NBC production, (ii) content distribution through NBC broadcast channels and Owned & Operated stations) and (iii) content reception through GE TV sets.

Today, a new era of vertical integration is taking shape. Cable companies Comcast, TimeWarner and Cablevision have proven that integrating content and distribution fattens the bottom line. The capstone of this new business model is Comcast acquisition of GE’s old content business, NBC-Universal. Similar efforts seem to part of the long-term development strategies of Apple and Google. One can only wonder if AT&T or Verizon will move into the “content” business by acquiring Sony Entertainment or Yahoo, both stumbling companies?

The telecom trust is moving to impose data caps to neutralize net neutrality requirements and to end the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), the underlying telecom system. These efforts further the consolidation of communications by the monopolies.

Last year people successfully organized to fight SOPA-PIPA legislation. This year, public interest and other groups are organizing to fight effort by telecoms to further privatize telecom service and block all regulatory oversight. The AARP, Rural Strategies and others effectively resisted efforts by telcos in Kentucky and Ohio to raise rates and limit service. Groups in New York and Washington, DC, are organizing to take on the telecom trust at both the state and federal level. Stay tune.

David Rosen writes the blog, Media Current, for Filmmaker and regularly contributes to CounterPunch, Huffington Post and the Brooklyn Rail, check out http://www.DavidRosenWrites.com; he can be reached at drosennyc@verizon.net.

We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

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I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: Threats to Internet Freedoms (consolidation thread)

Postby Grizzly » Thu Mar 07, 2013 12:36 pm

http://www.nextnature.net/2010/01/suicidemachine/

Sign Out Forever

An earlier post on Next Nature learned that The Good People behind Webwill provide us with a service to extend our lives on social networks after our physical death. But what if you wake up one day and realize that your physical life is too short to be spent tweeting, liking and friending people you could also hang around with in real life? What if you don’t want to be part of these social network tribes anymore? The answer: commit web 2.0 suicide!

Now there is the Suicide Machine, a website that deletes all personal information from your social networks and defriend all your contacts for you and will leave you forever disconnected from your online social networks. According to the Good People behind the Suicide Machine:

Everyone should have the right to disconnect. Seamless connectivity and rich social experience offered by web2.0 companies are the very antithesis of human freedom. Users are entraped in a high resolution panoptic prison without walls, accessible from anywhere in the world. We do have an healthy amount of paranoia to think that everyone should have the right to quit her 2.0-ified life by the help of automatized machines.'

Some people perceive committing suicide in real life as a selfish, even cowardish act, as the ‘easy way out’. But what to think of committing web 2.0 suicide? There certainly is something to say for living one’s live outside of social networks owned by corporations. But there is also something naïve to the whole enterprise, as the makers state:

‘Try calling some friends, take a walk in a park or buy a buy a bottle of wine and start enjoying your real life again. Some Social Suiciders reported that their lives have improved by an approximate average of 25%. Don’t worry, if you feel empty right after you committed suicide. This is a normal reaction which will slowly fade away within the first 24-72 hours.’

As if our real-life social networks aren’t completely dependent on technology like phones and cars (and winemaking!) already. Still, Suicide Machine adds to the debate around social network sites. And be it online or offline, dead or alive: we are definately going back to the tribe. Commit now!


“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: Threats to Internet Freedoms (consolidation thread)

Postby Allegro » Tue Apr 09, 2013 10:58 pm

Searching around for images of music and physics, this image of a 2006 document was in the mix. Other than a listing for Matthew Kramer as a Graduate Student Instructor on the following mediawiki page, verification of the document was not found; however, the content is richly RI apropos.
Code: Select all
http://labs.physics.berkeley.edu/mediawiki/index.php/Advanced_Syllabus
Image
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Re: Threats to Internet Freedoms (consolidation thread)

Postby hanshan » Wed Apr 10, 2013 9:46 am

...

^^

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics


Semiotics, also called semiotic studies and including (in the Saussurean tradition) semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. However, as different from linguistics, semiotics studies also non-linguistic sign systems. Semiotics is often divided into three branches:

Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata, or meaning
Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures
Pragmatics: Relation between signs and the effects they have on the people who use them

Semiotics is frequently seen as having important anthropological dimensions; for example, Umberto Eco proposes that every cultural phenomenon can be studied as communication.[1] However, some semioticians focus on the logical dimensions of the science. They examine areas belonging also to the natural sciences – such as how organisms make predictions about, and adapt to, their semiotic niche in the world (see semiosis). In general, semiotic theories take signs or sign systems as their object of study: the communication of information in living organisms is covered in biosemiotics (including zoosemiotics).


...
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Re: Threats to Internet Freedoms (consolidation thread)

Postby Project Willow » Fri Apr 19, 2013 10:29 pm

I realize that Boston is on everyone's mind, and apparently other body parts, but meanwhile, CISPA has passed the house 288 to 127.

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Re: Threats to Internet Freedoms (consolidation thread)

Postby Simulist » Fri Apr 19, 2013 10:52 pm

The internet is the greatest surveillance tool ever conceived.
"The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego."
    — Alan Watts
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Re: Threats to Internet Freedoms (consolidation thread)

Postby divideandconquer » Fri Apr 19, 2013 11:20 pm

OOps wrong thread
'I see clearly that man in this world deceives himself by admiring and esteeming things which are not, and neither sees nor esteems the things which are.' — St. Catherine of Genoa
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Re: Threats to Internet Freedoms (consolidation thread)

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Apr 20, 2013 1:49 am

Fuck.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: Threats to Internet Freedoms (consolidation thread)

Postby justdrew » Sat Apr 20, 2013 2:21 am

it passed the house last time too. so-called "Conservatives" (mostly republicans, all Authoritarian fools) are for it, people with brains are against it.

stop electing clowns
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Re: Threats to Internet Freedoms (consolidation thread)

Postby Laodicean » Fri Apr 26, 2013 7:41 am

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Music, MOOCs, and Copyright

Postby Allegro » Wed Oct 09, 2013 12:00 am

More on music, its online, video performances, Internet Freedom, and lawyers :shock:. Highlights mine. Some links in original.

_________________
Music, MOOCs, and Copyright: Digital Dilemmas for Schools of Music
New Music Box, Ellen McSweeney | September 25, 2013

    I first heard about Coursera a year ago when I was carpooling to a gig with my friend Kate. She told me about a personal finance class she was taking. The class was free, the course materials were really great, and she was attending every Saturday.

    “Oh wow!” I said. “So where’s the class?”

    Turns out, the class was online. Kate was enrolled in a MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) at Coursera, one of the internet’s largest providers of online classes. Although I didn’t know it at the time, MOOCs are one of the biggest hot-button acronyms in education today. They’ve been hailed as both a revolution in access to information and a harbinger of corporatized educational doom.

    At first glance, the opportunity to take free online courses from some of the country’s most prestigious universities—Coursera partners with schools like Stanford, Princeton, Rice, and Yale—sounds great. My friend Kate represents a relatively noncontroversial MOOC student: an educated adult taking a class in a non-university, not-for-credit setting. She’s what proponents of MOOCs would call a “lifelong learner,” and an ideal beneficiary of free, high-quality online education.

    But for some educational stakeholders, organizations like Coursera—which is for-profit, funded by venture capitalists, and doesn’t classify itself as an institution of higher learning—represent a threat to higher education as we currently know it. MOOCs are particularly controversial when they are offered for credit in the setting of a university degree program. Holding up MOOCs as a fast, cheap alternative to a traditional college education—which for most American students comes with a heavy price tag—could result in a two-tiered class system in which rich students get face time and poor students get screen time.

    MOOCs also raise concerns about attempting to replace or devalue real, live university professors. California legislators recently rejected a controversial bill which would have outsourced some entry-level state university courses to for-profit companies like Coursera and Udacity. The bill was uniformly opposed by professors in the California State University system.

    In light of all this possibility and controversy, I was interested to learn that my alma mater, the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University, had become involved with the MOOC wave. I reached out to Cynthia Cyrus, my former dean and musicology professor who is now associate provost for undergraduate education. Cyrus has a career-long passionate interest in scholarship’s presence on the web. When she first arrived in the provost’s office in 2011, hardly anyone was talking about MOOCs, she said. Since then, MOOCs have become the focus of a national education debate, and Cyrus has helped oversee and develop the university’s partnership with Coursera. Cyrus described the work as exhilarating. “It’s not very often,” she noted, “that someone gets to start a whole new division of the university.”

    In my conversation with Cyrus, I learned a great deal about the particular copyright challenges that schools of music face when it comes to using recordings and other media in the context of online learning. We also discussed how Vanderbilt is choosing to relate to the complex ethical questions that MOOCs raise, offering a window into the important decisions that higher education institutions across the country are making.

    Berklee MOOCs

    Ellen McSweeney: Vanderbilt initially wanted to have five Coursera offerings—one from each school. Is the Blair School of Music course up and running?

    Cynthia Cyrus: One of the Blair School faculty is lined up and ready to teach for Coursera, and that was supposed to be one of our first five offerings. But the copyright questions in music are so much a higher hurdle to cross over that we haven’t actually brought that particular course to fruition.

    Some of the other schools teaching for Coursera try to skirt copyright issues by linking to things on YouTube. But Vanderbilt’s policy is that if it’s a violation of copyright in one arena, simply linking to someone else doesn’t get us out of that moral dilemma. We’re trying to be really mindful about the ways in which musicians are compensated as we move forward in this digital medium.

    EM: What would your ideal solution be for the copyright issues that music MOOCs are facing?

    CC: The strategy that I’d really like to see come to fruition is for Coursera to do negotiations with one or more of the music aggregators to say, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could get access to the iTunes list, where students could listen for free during the course and then purchase it later if they’d like?” This is similar to what’s been done with textbooks. That’s my ideal, whether it’s iTunes or Naxos or maybe even a BMI or ASCAP relationship. I think it would be best for all concerned if we have a broad musical catalog to draw on for these teaching purposes.

    The second model, which will be [Vanderbilt’s] default if we can’t get Option A to work, is to simply negotiate copyright for each and every example that the faculty member wants to use. But that’s a huge amount of money and a large amount of work
    . Last year, with no staff supporting the Coursera project, that was simply not an option, which is why the Blair course is still on hold.

    EM: Face-to-face university professors can use musical examples without copyright concerns. Why aren’t the use of musical examples in Coursera considered fair use? Is it because the Coursera is for-profit?

    CC: It’s not just that they’re for profit, but also that they haven’t defined themselves as an institute of higher education. There is no case law to determine whether there is fair use in this area, and nobody wants to be the one to provide the case law! But there’s a real need, not just for Coursera, but many different providers of intellectual knowledge, to be fluent in the idioms of 21st-century culture that aren’t in any of the protected categories under U.S. law. There’s a real absence of legal framework for handling these kinds of issues.

    That’s one of the reasons, if you look at the Coursera course list, there’s quite a list of things that can be taught without copyright-protected musical examples. Faculty members must deliberately restrict what materials they use as illustrative examples.

    It drives me nuts a little bit. Without structural and legal support, we’ve categorized an entire area of culture as being off limits for MOOCs. And I have issues with that, coming from a school of music. Although it does remind me that there’s a reason that I like to work on [materials created by] dead people! The 15th-century nuns are not going to object to what I’m out there printing.

    EM: There are major ethical concerns surrounding MOOCs—about who’s funding them, who’s taking them, and whether they’re trying to replace higher education altogether. Where does Vanderbilt stand on those questions?

    CC: Vanderbilt is treating Coursera as outreach, as a means of global penetration, and as a way to reach out to alumni and support continued engagement with the university community. None of our classes are available here for credit, and that’s an important distinction.

    The model that the state of California was contemplating is worrisome on a couple of levels. First of all, using one school’s intellectual capital to meet your own institutional agenda is a way of ceding your authority as an institution of higher education. Coming from my faculty background, that makes me uncomfortable. The idea of taking, for example, our one-credit nutrition course out of the Vanderbilt environment and having another institution say, “Boom, you complete that course, you get one credit!” is problematic. That needs to go through a university’s faculty governance. Faculty should always be the ones to determine whether a course is meeting their educational vision. Here at Vanderbilt, we haven’t asked any of our faculty to review the MOOCs in a for-credit environment. That’s not what a Vanderbilt degree is about.

    While none of our Coursera offerings are for-credit, faculty can use materials developed for Coursera as part of their face-to-face courses. Faculty have been able to do “flipped” classroom teaching, which means that students do passive learning—like watching lectures—at home. Professors then use class time for group activities and active learning that hasn’t always been possible, given the constraints of the schedule.

    We’ve also done quite a bit of experimentation with what we call “wrapping,” in which a Vanderbilt professor can use a MOOC as part of their own course content. Professor Doug Fisher did this with one of [Coursera cofounder] Andrew Ng’s courses. Doug taught a class that was “wrapped” around Ng’s lectures. Doug’s course drew on those as a body of common knowledge and a jumping-off place for the students.

    The crux of the issue is that what one does in a college class is more than acquire content. MOOCs are great for the content part, but the community insights, the ability to synthesize material, those higher-order processes happen because you are studying a common area. They are not themselves the common area of study. And the thing we know from longitudinal studies of students is that they don’t remember the content, but they do retain the intuitions that they developed while working through that content. That’s the part that we could lose when schools are relying too heavily on digital media.

    EM: What do you see other schools of music doing with their MOOC offerings?

    CC: Berklee College of Music has a number of Coursera courses, and they have opted mostly for subject matter that doesn’t require too many copyright-protected musical examples: Jazz Improv, Intro to Music Production, Songwriting, Intro to Guitar. There are a variety of music courses out there, but each one of them has had to invent its own solution to the copyright problem. Schools of music are not yet working cohesively as a team to get these issues worked out.

    Curtis [Institute of Music?] has a course live now on Beethoven Piano Sonatas, and another one on Music History through Performance that goes live in October. There, I think, they are probably capitalizing on out-of-copyright works. I don’t know what their solution would be for the 20th or 21st century. With older repertoire, they have to worry about performer permissions, but they don’t have to worry about the permissions of composers.

    EM: Right! I’m writing this article for a contemporary music community audience, and realizing that we may have particular barriers to participating in the MOOC wave.

    CC: Right. It is entirely possible that when we get into pulling courses together, people will be generous with permissions. However, most of the people we negotiate permissions with are lawyers. It’s not the musicians saying yes, I want to compromise and be part of this social good. We’re dealing with lawyers. To me, lifelong learning audiences need to and want to be engaged with the musical details of the music that they’re choosing to hear live. But it’s awfully hard to get through the hurdles of how to get that up and online without stepping on somebody’s toes.
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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John Philip Sousa | Opposition to recording

Postby Allegro » Fri Oct 11, 2013 1:22 am

RESOURCE

Highlight mine. Links in original.

< begin Wiki excerpt >

    Opposition to recording | [John Philip] Sousa held a very low opinion of the emerging and upstart recording industry. In a submission to a congressional hearing in 1906, he argued:

      These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.

    Law professor Lawrence Lessig cited this passage[36] to argue that in creating a system of copyrights in which control of music is in the hands of record labels, Sousa was essentially correct. Sousa also was credited with referring to records as “canned music,” referring to the fact that cylinder records were sold in cans.

    Sousa’s antipathy to recording was such that he often refused to conduct his band if it was being recorded. Nevertheless, Sousa’s band made numerous recordings, the earliest being issued on cylinders by several companies, followed by many recordings on discs by the Berliner Gramophone Company and its successor, the Victor Talking Machine Company (later RCA Victor). The Berliner recordings were conducted by Henry Higgins (one of Sousa’s cornet soloists) and Arthur Pryor (Sousa’s trombone soloist and assistant conductor), with Sousa quoted as saying,[37] “I have never been in the gramophone company’s office in my life.” A handful of the Victor recordings were actually conducted by Sousa, but most were conducted by Pryor, Herbert L. Clarke, Edwin H. Clarke, or by four of Victor’s most prolific house musicians: Walter B. Rogers (who had also been a cornet soloist with Sousa), Rosario Bourdon, Josef Pasternack, and Nathaniel Shilkret.[37] Details of the Victor recordings are available in the external link below to the EDVR.

< end Wiki excerpt >
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
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Re: Threats to Internet Freedoms (consolidation thread)

Postby MayDay » Sat Jun 28, 2014 7:02 pm

http://www.districtdispatch.org/2014/06 ... es-senate/

Scary “Zombie” Cybersecurity Legislation Lives Again in Senate


Posted on June 26, 2014 by Adam Eisgrau — No Comments ↓

With the popularity these days of all things “zombie,” it was inevitable DD supposes that Congress would want to get in on the craze. The legislative proof first went by the killer name “Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act,” or CISPA. It first started terror­izing privacy advocates and others who believe in the Fourth Amendment back in 2011 as H.R. 3523.

CISPA was ostensibly designed to allow telecom­munications companies and others in a position to detect cyber threats to share that information with the government in real time without fear of prosecution for violation of privacy protection statutes like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, among others. The bill’s definition of a cyber threat was written so broadly, however, and the bill included so few controls on which other federal state and local law enforcement and other agencies such information could be shared, that ALA and a broad coalition of privacy, civil liberties and internet activist groups successfully banded together to bury CISPA in the Senate even though some helpful amendments (including one by Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan limiting the sharing of library and certain other records) had been adopted before the House passed the bill in April of 2012.

Zombies, of course (even legislative ones) don’t stay buried for long and CISPA was no exception. It clawed its way back to legislative daylight in the current Congress as H.R. 624, which passed the House yet again in April of 2013 … minus the helpful, limiting amendments adopted by a vote of 415-0 in the prior Congress. Once again, ALA teamed up with the likes of the ACLU, Center for Democracy and Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and many others to put CISPA back in its box in the Senate where key Members pronounced it dead … again … and promised to draft their own bills to address cyber threat sharing and related liability issues. [Cue scary music . . . . . .]

Well, as of June 17, it’s baaaaaaa-ack! Now called the “Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act,” or CISA, a draft bill circulated by Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Vice Chair Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) suffers from essentially the same enormous flaws as the original version of CISPA that first broke ground in the House three years ago. Wasting no time, SSCI held a closed door hearing on the bill last Thursday, just two days after it was made available to privacy advocates and the public, and was slated to meet in secret again to “mark up” and vote on the bill today. Perhaps in the face of deep and widespread opposition, however, the Committee just announced that it won’t consider CIPA until sometime after Congress’ upcoming July 4 recess.

As before, privacy, civil liberties, libertarian and many other organizations have furnished detailed joint critiques of the new bill to the Senate Intelligence Committee and its professional staff. In two separate but coordinated letters this week (see links below), ALA and many others have urged the Committee to make comprehensive changes to CISA in order to prevent it from effectively nullifying existing federal privacy protection laws and allowing scores of agencies at all levels of government from receiving US citizens’ private electronic communications and other personal records.

With enormous grassroots input from librarians and other concerned citizens, CISPA was killed twice. CISA may require a similar fight before we can safely say “R.I.P” to this latest assault on privacy in the name of national security.

Will you be ready to fight this legi-zombie again when the time comes? Here’s how to help…
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