News Lawyer

New York Times article detailing Facebook’s response to privacy criticisms concerning Facebook’s practice of broadcasting Facebook users’ purchasers to other Facebook members.  As the article details, Facebook is trying to cash in on the popularity of Facebook without damaging the popularity.

The article points out a paradox of younger internet users – many broadcast details of their own lives in an almost exhibitionist manner, but want to maintain control over what is made public, even over purchasing decisions.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s website SF Gate is using a sneaky new technique that threatens to change online political discourse.

Syria cracks down on social networking site Facebook. (Hat tip: Drudge).

Fascinating article about virtual mobs and internet vigilante justice.

Lori Drew, a mother, goes online and creates a fake MySpace account, pretending to be a teenage boy. She does this specifically to befriend Megan Meier (her daughter’s friend and daughter of a neighbor) in order to get information about her own daughter. Somewhere along the line, Drew turns on young Ms. Meier and berates her. Ms. Meier – tragically fragile – then commits suicide. The dead girl’s father finds out about his bullying neighbor’s apparent role in his daughter’s death, and in a spasm of righteous rage, destroys the Drew’s foosball table. The Drews then press police charges against the grief-stricken father. Internet vigilante Sarah Wells finds out, does some research, and organizes a virtual mob whose fury has real world consequences – enough so that police have increased their patrols around the Drews’ residence.

The facts here seem pretty egregious, but the key word is “seem.” Mobs are not particularly known to be careful fact-finders nor dispassionate dispensers of justice. Are we entering an age of virtual witch trials and online cultural justice when the real world fails to mete out subjectively appropriate punishment? And with the anonymity of the internet, do mobs have even less of a sense of fair play?

Aside from the obvious internet cultural issues stand some fascinating legal issues. There is a tort law concept known as the “eggshell skull,” where those committing torts are responsible for all consequences flowing from the injurious acts, even if the victim suffers from unusually high damages from the acts. Did Drew have reason to know how emotionally fragile Ms. Meier was? Was the bullying pervasive and outrageous? It would seem that Papa Meier could have a cause of action against Drew, but what about free speech?

And check out the end of the article – in an ironic twist, Sarah Wells is tabbed a “vigilante” by a counter-vigilante, who posts personal information of Wells on the internet. Great read.

Great article by Holman Jenkins in today’s Wall Street Journal regarding the emerging contours of battle between Google and Ma Bell’s progeny, whose strategy of upgrading the broadband pipes leading into homes might pay immense dividends in a streaming content world of movies-on-demand.

With Thanksgiving approaching and some students already heading out of town, Columbia Journalism School paraded a series of professors in front of an auditorium of students this afternoon to entice and inform students regarding their upcoming choices for spring semester. Each professor got a few minutes to detail their classes and make a personal pitch for the assembled students to select their courses.

Most Columbia Journalism students are fulltimers in for one year only, so institutional memory of the possibilities can be found in one of only a few places – class evaluations whose written contents are specifically withheld by the administration, the hard-to-pin part-timers, and the occasional unguarded faculty member, whose motivations can range from angelic to Machiavellian. And with only this semester to choose before graduation, a group of us poured over tonight’s handouts in the dark corners of a local beer & burger joint to weigh our options. Some thoughts:

1. In addition to completing a Master’s Project, each student is required to take one six credit seminar, one six credit workshop, and one three credit elective. Tough choices all around. My New Media Master’s Project seems to lock me into a New Media Workshop – not a bad thing, but the overcrowding and on-the-fly feel to the New Media courseload has left feelings of unease among some of the concentrators, particularly with so many tried-and-true Workshop offerings for the taking.

2. Courses are selected on a balloting system – select your top three choices for each category and you will assuredly get one of your three. But with some courses historically tougher to get into than others, gamesmanship opportunities abound! For example, let’s say I want to take “Sports Journalism” with Sandy Padwe as my elective. If my heart is set here, I can select two popular courses that don’t interest me, propelling me into the course I want. Perhaps students have already been subconsciously doing this for years – there might be professors who owe their popularity to game theory! And of course, I could get stuck with my third choice.

3. I really wanted to take “Covering Religion”, but my New Media Master’s Project got in the way. The class takes a fully funded trip overseas each spring, one which overlaps with the Master’s Project deadline. Last year the class visited India, while this year they plan to go to Ireland. Pretty sweet deal, but I probably would have taken the class without the trip, alas.

4. With MIT already offering online courses, when is Columbia Journalism School going to put its money where its mouth is and offer students (and maybe more importantly, alum) the opportunity to take courses online?  Several visiting graduates expressed no small amounts of envy when shown the current New Media curricula, and past students would certainly benefit from Flash training or other New Media skills easily taught online.

It had to happen sooner or later, but the ease of content distribution has impacted the pornography industry.

Pornographic movies are presumably easy to produce and write, so the porno industry is now being hit from both ends – battling a growing army of free content providers while simultaneously fending off the standard piracy threat so pervasive with other forms of online content.  Presumably, consumers of smut will want to pay for “quality” branding as a means of wading through unappealing amateur content.  If porn actors are like rock stars, the branding could include live appearances or, more likely, increased emphasis on endorsements for the stars.  In this case (as is the case in music labels and newspapers), it is the middle-man in the content production chain who faces the most pressure from internet market forces.

(Hat Tip: Drudge)