Sarkozy Seeks To Criminalize 'Habitually Visiting' Websites About Violence

from the thought-police dept

Wizz points us to a speech that French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently gave in response to the death of the suspect in the Toulouse murders after the police shot him as he tried to escape, when they raided his apartment after a 32-hour standoff. As part of the speech, Sarkozy decided to use it as an opportunity to push for more anti-internet legislation, including a plan to criminalize visiting certain websites too often. Here's the video in French, with his comments coming around 2:20. Translating the key line, he says:

Anyone who habitually visits Internet sites that advocate terrorism or carrying calls for hate or violence will be punished under criminal law.

It appears that there is already a law in France that similarly makes it a criminal offense to "habitually" visit child porn sites, and this is a push to expand that same law to terrorism, hate and violence sites (original French). Of course, there are all sorts of problems with this. Obviously, accessing child porn is a strict liability kind of thing, where it's clearly illegal. Merely reading about terrorism, hate or violence is not.

Also, there's a question of how do you know if someone "habitually" visits such sites, raising fears that Sarkozy wants to implement a pretty broad deep packet inspection spying system to make this work. This has, quite reasonably, raised significant concerns among human rights/free speech activists (original French) about just what Sarkozy is actually planning. Others point out that such a law almost certainly wouldn't pass French constitutional scrutiny.

Either way, just the idea is quite a dangerous leap. Criminalizing the visiting of websites because they contain information? If the content itself is illegal, go after those who create the website. Going after people for reading it reaches towards the level of establishing thought police. It also seems to greatly overestimate (as many politicians do) the power of a simple website to convince people of certain things. We see the same thing in the US with Senator Lieberman's grandstanding against terrorist content, which he wants banned and blocked in the US as well. It seems to assume that people are all complete suckers who, as soon as they read a terrorist pitch, automatically become terrorists. In reality, all they're really doing is legitimizing much of this ridiculous content, by suggesting that it really is "dangerous" and somehow must be criminalized.

Filed Under: censorship, dpi, france, hate speech, nicolas sarkozy, surveillance, terrorism, violence, visits, web sites

NBA Deletes Evidence Of Players From All Team Websites Due To Intellectual Property

from the wow dept

As you may have heard, the NBA and the NBA Players Association did not hit their deadline last night to reach a new collective bargaining agreement, and thus began a lockout/work stoppage. Of course, we're not a sports blog, so what's interesting about that for us? Well.... apparently over the last few days, the webmasters for all of the NBA team websites have been scrambling like mad, because they believe that when the players are locked out, there can be no mention or image of any player on any NBA webpage:

That's because the moment the clock strikes midnight on the current CBA, all those images and videos of NBA players have to disappear off NBA-owned digital properties. Depending on how you interpret "fair use," the prohibition could include the mere mention of a player's name on an NBA-owned site, though different teams have different interpretations of this particular stipulation.

That's from ESPN... who doesn't give any more detail as to what it is they actually think would be infringing here. It's certainly not copyright, even though that's implied. There's no copyright in names. And the copyright on the images would be held by whoever took the images, not the players. I'm assuming this is more of a publicity rights issue, which we've been discussing a lot lately. But those are generally based on a patchwork of state laws. And, even so, I can't quite see how that would prevent teams from accurately listing players who were on the team. That's factual information. But not according to the teams:

There are additional gray areas that are still up for discussion: What about a photo of a Lakers fan wearing a No. 24 Kobe Bryant jersey? What about a retrospective feature on the John Stockton-Karl Malone Jazz teams? Do tweets from the team's official Twitter feed that mention a player and/or link to an image need to be deleted? How about Facebook posts?

Nobody seems to know for certain the definitive answers to these questions and the criteria seem to be arbitrary. According to more than one team website staffer, the cutoff for images of retired players right now stands at 1992-93 -- Shaquille O'Neal's first season in the league. And social media is an area they're still grappling with as the deadline approaches.

However strict the boundaries, overhauling the architecture of these sites is a painstaking process that has a lot of talented web people around the league very stressed out. The NBA has built and furnished each team with a website "wire frame" that will take the place of the existing, much more sophisticated site. The wire frame is a rudimentary version of the site, without a lot of the snazzy technology we've grown accustomed to seeing. As a result, each of the 30 team sites will look virtually identical.

It looks like those "new" sites are in place. I've looked around at a few team sites, and while they may have old players (from decades ago), most traces of modern players have disappeared. They do list the names of players on the team under the "team" tab, but otherwise, the players seem almost entirely absent. And for what reason? Intellectual property shouldn't be part of a labor fight. It's got nothing to do with that. The whole thing just seems silly.

Filed Under: basketball, copyright, fair use, lockout, publicity rights, web sites
Companies: nba

Out Of The Ashes Of Newspapers...

from the looking-forward dept

Lots of folks have been writing in asking about the news that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has finally admitted what many people knew was going to happen for a while: the newspaper is shutting down, while the website will live on with a much smaller staff. Of course, rather than focusing on the "death" of the paper, it's a lot more interesting to look at the opportunities the new site will embrace. The kickoff discussion seems to be full of excitement about a chance to do something different than to simply mimic what everyone has been saying a newspaper needs to be:

We're going to break a lot of rules that newspaper Web sites stick to, and we are looking everywhere for efficiencies.... We don't have reporters, editors or producers--everyone will do and be everything. Everyone will write, edit, take photos and shoot video, produce multimedia and curate the home page.

We definitely need more experiments and flexibility, so it will be worth watching what happens here. I'm not sure it's the best idea to make everyone do everything (splitting jobs up so that there's more streamlined efficiency does have value), but it's great to see that the new folks are at least open to experimenting -- with a focus on delivering more value (finally!) to the reader:

We're going to focus on what readers are telling us they want and on what makes SeattlePI.com essential and unique--within the context of our local news mission, of course. We know what we do best, and we are going to build on the things that we know our readers love, and look to find new ways to inform and entertain them.

Meanwhile, with the Rocky Mountain News shutting down a few weeks back, some of the reporters there have gathered together to try to startup a brand new online-only publication called In Denver Times. They're making an interesting play, however: saying they'll only start it if they get 50,000 people to agree to pay $5/month by April 23rd. That seems like a tall order, given that people aren't really being told what they're getting. The reporters say that plenty of the news will be available for free on their site, but subscribers will get access to bonus materials, such as opinion pieces and special chat rooms. But, for that to work, there needs to be a clear benefit to those, and since they don't yet exist, there may be something of an "empty room" problem.

Either way, it'll be worth watching both experiments play out. They may not be successful (and, if I had to bet, I'd probably bet against both), but it's great to see new experiments and ideas being tested directly out of the ashes of these two newspapers. It makes it pretty clear that the death of a newspaper certainly doesn't mean the death of journalism.

Filed Under: failure, new businesses, newspapers, web sites
Companies: in denver times, rocky mountain news, seattle post-intelligencer