Reversed In Part

Stephanie Tai is still with us, but in a lower res version dictated by her (government) employers. Wish I could say we weren't likely to see more of this sort of thing, which only equates to (1) missed opportunities for the organization/institution, and (2) more anonymous/psuedonymous writers. *Sigh.* Thesis 29: "Elvis said it best: 'We can't go on together with suspicious minds.'" Thesis 87: "We'd like it if you got what's going on here. That'd be real nice. But it would be a big mistake to think we're holding our breath."

No Axis Of Bleevil (—uh, blame Doc)

Jeff Jarvis has an interesting and encouraging report on a session held yesterday to preview AOL's forthcoming blogging tools. Among other things, Jeff details signs of intelligent life and cautions against knee jerk reactions: "If we are eager for Iraqis and Iranians to blog, we certainly should be eager for AOLers to blog." In the comments, Dave Sifry is good to go.

OYEAH

Very, very cool—Jerry "OYEZ" Goldman's interview with Laura Lynch of Creative Commons:

This month the OYEZ mission takes a new step forward with the release of hundreds of hours of MP3 versions of their archived audio under a Creative Commons license.

Imagine having all your favorite hits by The Supremes tucked away in your tote for a leisurely beach listen. Ok, so it's not for everyone...but it's still sicknasty. Here's more information, and the initial MP3s available for download. Here also is Glenn Otis Brown's June 25 post about Creative Commons' new strategy for helping people associate license information with MP3s.

OYEZ presents: the Portable Court

[Update] Joe Germuska has more, including links to OYEZ RSS feeds, its iCalendar for the Supreme Court (!!), and this: "I used to work with Jerry at Northwestern University, and he always liked to be on the 'bleeding edge.' So far he's the only person who turns up in my iChat AV buddy list with an AV-enabled icon." (See also the OYEZ Features page.)

D Broadcast, D Broadcast

An executive summary of D: All Things Digital is scheduled to air on CNBC starting today (7:00, 10:00, and 1:00 a.m. Eastern; 4:00, 7:00, and 10:00 p.m. Pacific). Check your local listings and set the TiVo so you can go off and watch the fireworks.

Jack Balkin on Batzel (LazyBlawg)

Jack Balkin has a great summary of the 9th Circuit's recent Batzel decision (PDF) and its implications for bloggers:

This does not mean that bloggers are immune from libels they themselves write. It means that they are immune from (for example) libels published in their comments section (if they have one) because these comments are written by other people and the blogger is merely providing a space for them to be published. Congress wanted to treat operators of chatrooms and other interactive computer services differently from letters to the editor columns in a local newspaper.

So if bloggers defame somebody, they can still be sued for what they say, just not for what someone else who publishes on the blogger's site says. The Ninth Circuit extends this immunity to people who run e-mail lists and republish the e-mails they receive to the list, even if they edit the e-mails a bit or do not republish every e-mail they receive. That is different from the rules that apply to print journalism. A newspaper is responsible for defamation in letters to the editor or op-ed columns that are published in the newspaper.

Jeff Jarvis rightly tells blogging attorneys and law professors, "It would be a tremendous contribution to your community to put up on the web a guide to libel, defamation, copyright, and other legal highlights for bloggers." Too true. I'd be happy to take part in such a project, but fear that in order for it to truly shine we'd need to find a coordinator who works for someone like IBM (see Tim Bray's discussion of Sam Ruby's work on Echo). In the meantime, at least it now can be said there are hundreds of blawgers out there, with a broad range of legal expertise, who help shed light on these sorts of issues post by post. That wasn't the case just a couple of years ago.