"AT&T Inc. has joined Hollywood studios and recording companies in trying to keep pirated films, music and other content off its network — the first major carrier of Internet traffic to do so," the LA Times reports. So customers will pay in added overhead and false positives, while filesharers adapt to evade the filtering (for both infringing and non-infringing traffic). Who wins? The sellers of filtering snake-oil tech, perhaps.

It's not just the pros who want control. Over the weekend the NCAA ejected a Louisville Courier-Journal reporter from a college baseball championship for live-blogging the game. Brian Bennet reports that he had been posting updates throughout the game on his Courier-Journal blog, until, at the bottom of the fifth inning, "an NCAA representative came to my seat on press row and asked for my credential and asked me to leave. I complied."

Apparently, according to a memo NCAA circulated, the college athletic association believes that live-blogging interferes with its revenue streams from broadcast licenses:

The College World Series Media Coordination staff along with the NCAA Broadcasting group needs to remind all media coordinators that any statistical or other live representation of the Super Regional games falls under the exclusive broadcasting and Internet rights granted to the NCAA's official rights holders and therefore is not allowed by any other entity. Since blogs are considered a live representation of the game, any blog that has action photos or game reports, including play-by-play, scores or any in-game updates, is specifically prohibited. In essence, no blog entries are permitted between the first pitch and the final out of each game.

Now there are legal and policy questions here: First off, this wasn't a copyright or misappropriation claim. If the reporter had watched or listened to a broadcast and blogged details from there, the NCAA would have no claim against him (see NBA v. Motorola, where the basketball association lost just such a claim). It can't claim ownership of the facts, even if it currently makes money from selling privileged access to the facts.

Instead, the NCAA was clamping down on the data through a claimed right to control physical access to the game, at least to the press box. Was the NCAA within its legal rights to revoke a press credential? Probably. The NCAA has no obligation to issue press credentials, and apart from anti-discrimination law, can condition them on whatever arbitrary terms it likes. But David Price points out another twist: The University of Louisville, where the game was played, is a public institution, subject to First Amendment limitations on the speech-limiting rules it can impose. Can it ban speech or allow others to do so on its space based on claimed disruption to a business deal? Does it depend whether a baseball stadium is a "public forum"? (Under current law, it's probably not.)

Finally, there's the policy. Even if banning bloggers is legally permissible, it;s silly. Silly of the NCAA to think it can keep up this kind of control, silly of licensees to see blogs as a substitute to what they're licensing, and silly of schools to endorse and accept such policies for their student athletes' games. Exclusivity of facts is unlikely to last long in practice, as the Courier-Journal reports: "The Oregonian newspaper in Portland decided to work around the rules by blogging Oregon State's game against Michigan on Sunday off a radio broadcast in its newsroom, said its executive editor, Peter Bhatia. He said the newspaper heard no objections from the NCAA and planned to do the same yesterday."

My OII colleague Tobias Escher reports on a German decision on website operator liability for user-posted content. A professor unhappy with his reviews on Meinprof.de, such as comments calling him a "psychopath," sued. The site had removed the comments on his complaint, but he nonetheless demanded that the site pay a fine and be enjoined from allowing similar comments to be re-posted. The appeals court sensibly rejected that injunction. According to Tobias:

The court has decided that a general “cease and desist” for unacceptable comments is against the law. As a professor one has to face public criticism that cannot be prohibited ex ante.
...
In general this is a positive outcome for web sites that leverage the wisdom of the crowds as it offers some protection for the often not-for-profit operators of these sites. However, this does not justify defamatory comments on those sites and the court has emphasized the operators’ duty to remove those entries as soon as they are recognized. Last but not least, the subject under public scrutiny does matters as professors might well be made to face personal criticism in their role as public figures while teachers and nurses might have to be treated differently.

German law lacks a CDA Section 230, which immunizes U.S. service providers from defamation liability for user-contributed comments. So RateMyTeachers.com can ignore claims of defamation, leaving U.S. teachers to fight back with words, leaving their own comments or questioning the reliability of the site.

German sites, by contrast, can be held liable for their users' false assertions. If such liability were automatic, triggered immediately upon the posting of a defamatory comment, sites that permitted users to post content might as well paint lawsuit targets on their homepages: anyone could claim to have been defamed there; anyone unhappy with postings could get a heckler's veto against not just individual posts but the site itself. Sensibly, then, the MeinProf.de court limits the potentially unbounded liability in a manner similar to the U.S. caution against prior restraints of speech. The site can't be held liable until it has been given an opportunity to defend or remove the post; those who want to make libel claims against hosts should start by giving the host notice.

My U.S.-centric view is still that posters and their subjects should battle over online defamation between themselves, leaving their online hosts out of the picture. As we all depend on intermediaries to speak online, our speech gets less free with each new burden and risk-sensitivity we put on the intermediaries. Those who feel victimized have access to the same speech technologies to respond -- putting them on a more level playing field than arises when one calls in the law and an intermediary is chilled. In the German context and legal tradition, however, this decision seems to get close.

I hope there's political reward for refusing to prey on misguided fears, because Michael Bloomberg certainly seems more sensible than his predecessor in that regard. He's earned points with me, at least, with this response to alleged JFK terror threats.

"There are a lot of threats to you in the world," Mr. Bloomberg said, listing a few, like heart attacks and lightning strikes. "You can’t sit there and worry about everything. Get a life."

Via NYT

You don't have to work at Google to ride a wifi bus. The Oxford Tube, the confusingly-named coach between London and Oxford) offers power outlets and free wifi. Seems a nice incentive to choose the slower, cheaper bus over the train. Heading back to Osford on a Sunday evening, I don't see anyone else with a laptop open, though.

"It's too early for us to be realistic," David Weinberger says in closing is2k7. Where reality is binary, forcing us to categorize each piece of information, digital networked storage lets us add metadata along multiple axes. We shouldn't rush to cram it all back into real boxes. Instead, we can build new structures, sometimes adding metadata to digital contents, sometimes using the "contents" as metadata with regard to another question we're asking.

That lack of hierarchy sounds threatening to some, perhaps including universities, who are accustomed to being the authorities. Online, we find new sources of authority, though we also have to learn and re-learn when not to trust both online and offline sources. The university's challenge, and all of ours, is to engage with these new sources of information and meta-information. The answer to "too much information" is likely not to shut off the spigot but to hand out better filters and filter-building toolkits (aggregators, search engines, databases, social network tools, and mashups).

I'm headed to Everything Is Miscellaneous for more.

After the widely-heralded circulation and revocation of one AACS key, Ed Felten ran a satirical integer sale on his Freedom-to-Tinker blog. Now it seems one of the commenters decided to hide another processor key there, BoingBoing reports.

Of course, the odds are basically zero if the number was chosen at random. You have a better chance of winning the Powerball jackpot four days in a row. So, for more than a week, everyone who read the comment assumed that it was just another joke. But one thing about it was different: the cryptic hint to arnezami, a "uv" number, a pointer to a specific key within the AACS keyspace.

You can probably guess the rest of the story. Eventually someone tipped off arnezami about the strange comment, and he tried using the 45 5F … number to decrypt the new discs. It worked! It really is the new processing key. As a result, all HD-DVDs are open to the public again, at least until new titles can be updated once more.

Should blog-owners start to worry that their comment forums will earn them takedowns? I don't think so, but the law is remarkably unclear, as I wrote in a piece, Anticircumvention Takedowns, LinuxWorld just published, describing the last round of AACS-key purges:

Note that this claimed contribution to circumvention is a degree further removed from underlying copyright harm than a contributory infringement. The claim is not that hosts assisted in unlawful copying, but that they assisted in distribution of a component of a tool with which others might circumvent technological measures and thereby access copyrighted works or infringe copyright. That's a lot of layers of indirection, and courts have never yet adopted a “contributory circumvention” claim.