The Righthaven saga continues. The Las Vegas Sun (who seems to be having fun reporting daily on this operation set up by its competitor), is noting that in the first court hearing on a Righthaven lawsuit, the judge appeared to want to figure out the absolute smallest sum that he could set for an unemployed, non-commercial cat blogger (written from the perspective of a cat) who was sued by Righthaven for posting an article, with a link and credit, about a fire that killed some birds. The magistrate judge clearly wanted the two sides to settle quickly, and kept pushing Righthaven boss Steven Gibson on how much it actually cost to file one of these lawsuits, and even challenged his initial claim of $1,800, and got him to push the number lower. The judge also brought up the potential of awarding $200 in damages -- which is the amount allowed for cases of innocent infringement. It seems pretty clear that the magistrate judge is not impressed with at least this lawsuit.

Separately, the article notes that the WEHCO Media newspaper chain -- apparently totally and completely oblivious to the massive negative publicity Righthaven has generated for the Las Vegas Review-Journal -- has become the second media company to sign up for Righthaven's brand of "copyright enforcement." Paul Smith, the President of WEHCO apparently said:

"It's a pretty serious matter when someone takes your copy, information you've spent a lot of money to produce."

To which we wonder if he even realizes what Righthaven does. First of all, having a random blog or forum repost your content with a link back to you isn't "a pretty serious matter." It's someone giving you some attention. It's certainly not taking anything away from you. Anyway, if you want a list of newspapers not to link to, WEHCO publishes the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (and the NW Arkansas Democrat-Gazette), the Benton County Daily Record, the California Democrat, the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the Fulton Sun, the News Tribune, the NW Arkansas Times, the Rogers Morning News, the Springdale Morning News, the Banner News, Camden News, El Dorado News-Times, the Texarkana Gazette and The Sentinel-Record. Apparently none of those papers want you alerting anyone to the news they publish.

A few years back, we had noted that Mexican gangs were actually some of the earlier adopters of YouTube, using it as a communications platform, posting videos of the different crimes they had committed and communicating with and taunting other gangs. So, perhaps it's no surprise that a recently launched blog, run by an anonymous blogger has now become the go-to source for people on all sides of Mexico's raging drug war. Apparently both gangs and law enforcement are regularly sending the blog exclusive information, photos and videos, hoping to get them more widespread attention among others in the drug war. The anonymous site owner is careful to stay "neutral" in posting all of this stuff, though that has some attacking him for not abiding by his journalistic "social responsibility." While I recognize where that worry comes from, I actually think that's what makes this story so interesting. By creating a sort of neutral "middle ground" platform, a lot more information is making it out to everyone involved. If anything, it sounds like this "professional journalist" is just jealous:

"Media outlets have social responsibilities and have to serve the public," said Carlos Lauria, of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. "This is being produced by someone who is not doing it from a journalistic perspective. He is doing it without any ethical considerations."

Ethical considerations like repeating bogus statements from officials rather than getting to the actual meat of a story? Ethical considerations like reprinting press releases without fact checking? What "journalistic perspective" does Lauria think is being ignored here, and why is there some mythical standard that this blogger needs to live up to?

I'm very happy that the US has very broad safe harbors for liability in the form of Section 230, though I still don't think such a law should be necessary. It should be common sense that you don't blame a third party for actions of someone else. And yet, even with Section 230 safe harbors, third parties get sued all the time in the US. And, it's even worse in other countries where there are no such protections, and some judges will put liability on a third party, creating horrible chilling effects. Over in Singapore, there's a lawsuit that could be worth following when it comes to the proper application of liability on blog comments. Reader Veri alerts us to the news that a school based in Singapore (though it runs schools around the globe) the Global Indian Foundation (GIF), sued a parent who keeps a blog about the school, not for anything that parent wrote, but what some others wrote in the comments, claiming that the comments are defamatory.

The guy who's being sued, Ajith K Narayanan, points out that he didn't write the words in question, that the terms of service on his blog make it clear that commenters are responsible for their own language and, finally, that there wasn't any defamation anyway because the comments are true. The latter two arguments are interesting, but it's the first one that's the important one. If Singapore properly applies liability to those actually responsible, the case should just get tossed out on that first issue, and the other two issues shouldn't matter at all. If the school really wants to go after the commenters for defamation, it should be required to show that there's a strong likelihood that the material was defamatory, and then request a subpoena for the commenters' information (at which point the blogger can decide whether or not to fight it). But simply suing the blogger and claiming he's liable for the possible defamation takes third party liability way too far, and hopefully the court in Singapore recognizes this.

It should be noted that there are some other oddities involved in this lawsuit as well, many of which are summarized at this Techgoss post. It appears that the school initially filed criminal charges, but those were quoshed by a judge earlier this year. Then there's the really bizarre back and forth from April, that began with a report in an Indian newspaper that police had arrested a former GIF employee, claiming that he had started the blog and that it was a "fake" blog to discredit GIF. That report claimed that Narayanan had revealed this ex-employee to be his co-blogger in an affidavit. Yet, in a post on the site, denies pretty much all of that. This seems like a bit of a sideshow, but it does make the whole case a bit more confusing...

Last week, we were confused as to why 73,000 blogs from Blogetery were taken offline due to some unnamed government agency, and now details are starting to come out. Greg Sandoval at News.com, has the latest, noting that the FBI told Blogetery's ISP, Burst.net, that there were bomb making tips found on the site, and rather than just getting rid of that one blog, Burst.net (not the FBI) decided to take down the entire Blogetery account. Either way, as we noted originally, taking down all 73,000 blogs seems like a total overreaction -- it's just that the overreaction was by Burst.net, rather than the FBI (who didn't even tell Burst.net to take down that one page -- but just requested info on who had created the page).

TorrentFreak is reporting that a company, Blogetery, that hosted about 73,000 blogs, has been shut down by US authorities. Details are, admittedly, sketchy at this point, but the entire site has been taken down, and the company's ISP claims that they had to terminate the account immediately due to the "request of law enforcement officials, due to material hosted on the server." The ISP also claimed:

"this was not a typical case, in which suspension and notification would be the norm. This was a critical matter brought to our attention by law enforcement officials. We had to immediately remove the server."

That seems odd. If there was problematic content from some users, why not just take down that content or suspend those users. Taking down all 73,000 blogs seems... excessive. TorrentFreak speculates that this may be a part of the recent Homeland Security efforts to shut down file sharing site, and points to some evidence that there were at least a few Blogetery blogs that shared copyrighted works. However, no one's talking, and the ISP seems spooked, saying that it's "serious":

"Simply put: We cannot give him his data nor can we provide any other details. By stating this, most would recognize that something serious is afoot."

I'm still wondering what could be so serious that the specific problems couldn't be pinpointed? Taking down 73,000 blogs with no notice seems like overkill, no matter what the actual issue turns out to be.

In talking about the recent decision by Rupert Murdoch to lock up the entire website of The Times behind a paywall, we noted that one of its editors, Danny Finkelstein, claimed he was still going to post links to stories at The Times on his Twitter account, even though people wouldn't be able to read them without paying. We pointed out that, in our experience, even linking to registration required sites annoyed the hell out of people, and Finkelstein might want to think twice about engaging in social media by sending people to a paywall. Finkestein responded with a bit of snark:

First, I won't be tweeting stories that followers can't read. I will be tweeting stories that followers have to pay for if they wish to read. That is an entirely different thing.

It's not that different. Most people won't pay, so the vast majority of people who follow your links are going to get frustrated. It's not a good consumer experience at all -- especially when you're talking about using Twitter or other social media platforms where sharing and link passing are encouraged.

Apparently, folks over in the UK aren't quite getting that message. Felix Salmon notes that the Financial Times, who has one of the more annoying paywalls out there is now putting its blogs behind a paywall too. Salmon rightly questions this idea:

The move makes sense in a kind of tyranny-of-consistency way: the FT.com site believes that paywalls are the way to go, Money Supply is on the FT.com site, therefore Money Supply must be behind the paywall. But beyond that, it's silly.

For one thing, the best reason for newspapers to put a paywall around their website is to support the circulation of the print product, where readers are much more lucrative in terms of both subscription and advertising revenue. Newspapers with free websites fear that their print readers will desert the newspaper for the online product, and they put up paywalls to make that decision less attractive.

Blogs are a great way for a newspaper to add online value for their print subscribers: they can put nichey content like wonky posts on central banking online, without using up precious newsprint. But the FT doesn’t give online access to its print subscribers: that's a key difference between the FT paywall and the one being proposed by the NYT. And print subscribers understandably don’t particularly want to pay twice for the same content. So their relationship with the FT will necessarily weaken when they lose access to the blog content.

But that's the thing about both the Times and the FT's view of things. It's never been about "adding online value" at all. It's been about stamping your feet and declaring "we are valuable, now pay us." Unfortunately for them, that's not how the world works.

Salmon goes on to explain how this will totally take certain FT blogs out of the conversation. It's a key point. What makes blogs work so well is that they usually are not the same as a traditional journalistic reporting platform. They're not designed to just report the news and move on. The blogging ecosystem tends to be about discussion and conversation, with blogs linking to each other, building off what each other said and continuing the conversation and the debate. But walling it off takes away from all that. That's why we've already seen at least one blogger from The Times bail out from the paper and move his blog elsewhere. I wouldn't be surprised to see FT bloggers do the same. Putting a paywall on blogs is the equivalent of putting a paywall on a conversation... And, speaking of that, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention our conversational paywall t-shirt, which is getting mighty close to selling out:

We expressed some serious concerns with the somewhat ambiguous FTC disclosure rules directed at blogs and new media that went into effect last year, and we've been waiting to see how the FTC enforces those rules. We found it odd that the FTC apparently felt that celebrities could be held to different standards. There have been some questions about different activities -- for example, Viacom's actions in trying to make authorized uploads look as if they were bootlegs certainly appears to run afoul of the rules. And, more recently, there were some concerns over the NY Times' lack of disclosure concerning its relationship with Apple when reporting on the iPad.

However, back in February, some were wondering if retailer Ann Taylor's offer of gift cards to bloggers who covered their new line of clothing violated the rules. Apparently, the FTC did take notice, and Michael Scott points us to the news that last month, the FTC decided to give Ann Taylor a one-time pass, though it did express some concerns about the program: What strikes me as interesting here is that the FTC investigation focuses on the advertiser's actions, rather than the bloggers'. That is, most of the concerns about the program were about whether the FTC would take action against bloggers. But, here, it was focused on the advertiser and its actions. That does make more sense, but does leave open a questionable loophole: if an advertiser tells a blogger to disclose some information and then the blogger does not do so... is the advertiser still liable? In this case, the FTC even mentions that one of the reasons it's not taking action is because many (though not all) of the bloggers, who wrote about the event, disclosed the gift cards. But if they had not -- even though Ann Taylor had told them to -- then is Ann Taylor to blame?

Cram was the first amongst many to submit the story that online publications won Pulitzer Prizes for the first time ever. Sherri Fink of ProPublica, a non-profit online journalism service, won the investigative reporting prize for her piece about overworked doctors in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which was co-published in the New York Times Magazine. Mark Fiore won for his editorial cartoons on SFGate.com, which marks the first time that an online-only entity has won a Pulitzer. To us, this is only an affirmation of a trend that we've been watching here for years. Nothing about a physical newspaper inherently makes it better suited for doing great reporting. Print and online are just a mediums, and as consumption patterns shift towards online, we should see more of this in the future. As we've seen recently with the breaking of the huge Collateral Murder story by Wikileaks, there's an opportunity to do great hard-hitting investigative reporting not only outside of the print medium, but also outside of the traditional journalistic institutions themselves. The question is, will Pulitzer recognize such efforts? From the Pulitzer eligibility rules:

Entries for journalism awards must be based on material coming from a text-based United States newspaper or news site that publishes at least weekly during the calendar year and that adheres to the highest journalistic principles.

So, it's unclear whether or not blogs would be eligible for a Pulitzer. Plenty of blogs would meet the weekly publishing requirement, but from the rest of the definition it would appear that any site not affiliated with an "official" news site would not be eligible. As for the "highest journalistic principles," The National Enquirer was accepted as a nominee this year, so surely there's a blog or two out there that can bring their quality of reporting up to that level.

That said, the Pulitzer does not have to change their rules to include blogs, after all, by definition, it is a prize for the newspaper industry. Magazines and broadcast news are also not eligible. But, these prohibitions seem artificial since many of the prizes focus on reporting, and plenty of quality reporting happens outside of the newspapers. Times change, and if the Pulitzer wants to continue to be relevant in the public eye, it needs to evolve or it risks becoming a big award in a small pond.

Remember the debate about whether or not anonymous commenters were good or evil? Well, let's take it up a notch. The Cleveland Plain Dealer -- who amusingly just recently told its reporters they needed to engage more in the comments on their stories -- had a persistent commenter, who was a bit vocal, and at times mean. After she posted a comment questioning the mental state of a relative of a reporter, the newspaper decided to look into who was behind the comments, and realized that it is a high profile local judge, who has actually been in the news a lot lately. The judge's daughter tried to claim credit for the posts, but apparently there's some evidence that suggests the judge made many, if not all, of the comments (it was her email address, and apparently it's clear that many of the comments came from her work computer). Some of the comments even came on cases she was involved in. Of course, it's also worth noting that she had threatened a reporter from the Plain Dealer with jailtime if he didn't reveal his source for a story (and, yes, this is why we need a strong journalism shield law), so the Plain Dealer may be seen as having an axe to grind.

Still this raises a bunch of questions that lots of sites struggle with. We've often wondered about it ourselves, as there are times when it's obvious who a commenter is -- and even here on Techdirt we've had high level execs pseudononymously comment (while doing little to hide their real identity) -- even at times about issues they were involved in. And, to some extent, those situations seem newsworthy -- though not everyone would agree. Along those lines, we've sometimes pointed out that two commenters may be the same person, though never revealing who they actually are in real life. But, again, does that reach an ethical standard? Of course, a few months ago, there were similar concerns when the online editor at StlToday.com called the boss of a commenter, leading the commenter to resign. But that was purely vindictive, and of no journalistic significance.

It's easy to just say that no publication should ever reveal such info -- but if it has journalistic value, and the commenter has done little to hide their actual identity, it certainly reaches a gray area. I can see the arguments on both sides of this issue. In the end, I don't think it's a good idea to "out" commenters' true identities, but if there is journalistic value in the information, rather than just doing it out of spite or anger, I don't think it's as clear cut as some are making it out to be.

While Cablevision may be fairly innovative in delivering broadband services, its foray into the content business has been a bit of a disaster. As you may recall, Cablevision bought the local newspaper, Newsday, two years ago. Going in to the deal, the company admitted that it didn't know much about the business, but planned to talk to newspaper experts. As we noted at the time, that seemed like a bad idea, because it was "newspaper experts" who were driving newspapers into the ground. True to form, Cablevision decided the best thing to do with Newsday was to spend $4 million redesigning and putting up a paywall that drove away some writers and convinced 35 people to sign up in its first three months. Yes, 35. Of course, Cablevision insisted that the goal was really about reducing churn by offering the newspaper website to Cablevision cable TV and broadband subscribers, but it still seems like a pretty big failure all around.

So it's a bit surprising to hear that Cablevision is apparently trying to expand in the content business by buying the blog network Gothamist, which has a series of city-focused local blogs. The deal is relatively cheap, but it makes you wonder what Cablevision is planning to do with that content. First of all, most of the blogs in the network cover cities where Cablevision has no presence at all. The only exception is Gothamist itself, which focuses on New York City -- even as Cablevision is more focused on neighboring Long Island. Is Cablevision now going to put up a paywall around the blogs to?

On the whole, it looks like Cablevision is just confused about the online content business, and buying some blogs doesn't seem likely to clear that up any time soon.