Governments are pretty touchy about their logos. Last year, the FBI threw a hissy fit when it discovered that Wikipedia accurately displayed its logo on a page about (you guessed it) the FBI. Similarly, the White House got upset with a blogger who used the White House logo in a post about a meeting of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. And, while there is a federal law against misuse of logos, that's for people using the logos to misrepresent themselves. Going after Wikipedia or journalists for using logos in a descriptive manner is silly.

However, Fluvanna County, Virginia, decided that it had nothing better to do than to pass an ordinance similarly banning the use of its logo, in an effort that appeared to have been directed at a blogger who used the logo... on stories about the county. Thankfully, a court has struck down the law as being a First Amendment violation:

This sweeping prohibition encompasses a substantial number of uses of the seal that would not suggest government endorsement, such as the display on a website of an exact copy of an official County news release that contains the image of the seal next to the text, or the publication in a newspaper of a photograph of a County official delivering a speech from a podium upon which the County seal is attached and visible.

The court does compare it to the similar federal law, but notes that at least the federal law makes it clear that it's only intended for use where there may be confusion over a potential endorsement. And, with that, here's the damn logo that the county can't sue us over.

Yesterday morning, I was on a panel discussion at an event, where at one point I was asked about how I choose what to write about. I explained a little bit about the kinds of topics we cover, and then finally said, as I've said for years: "In the end, it comes down to whether or not I find something interesting and if I have something to say about it." I then said: "If there's a story everyone is covering, but I don't have anything to say about it, I don't feel the need to cover it." Hopefully this isn't surprising. We're not a "news" site, but an opinion site. But there's really more to it than that. There's something a little strange in seeing a ton of publications all rushing to cover the same news. There is this focus, these days, on the so-called "SEOing" of the news, where various sites act as "content farms," focusing on writing about whatever's "hot" to try to get the pageviews. As an example of this, earlier this week, right after the East Coast earthquake, I saw someone Twitter joke about an infamous tech news site (who shall remain nameless), saying that its staff were probably rushing out dozens of stories about how the earthquake news spread on Twitter. Anything to get the "pageviews" on searches about the earthquake.

But, as I've said over the years, this strategy makes no sense to me. Why would you ever focus on a strategy of trying to downgrade your content to commodity level, rather than working on content that is unique and actually stands out? Writing the same story that everyone else writes about, without adding anything of value to it just seems like a fool's game. I can recognize that "news" sites feel the need to cover such stories on a completist level, but does the online news reader really need so many stories about a single event? Isn't part of the point of the internet that we can link without having to recreate the wheel thousands of times every time some big news breaks?

Which brings us to the title of this post. When the news broke that a certain famous and visionary tech CEO was retiring, I honestly couldn't think of anything to say about it that wasn't being said everywhere else. But, of course, everyone else felt the need to write something. Just a quick look at Google News on the topic shows nearly 5,000 stories on just that: And that doesn't count the sections below that main one, where tons of folks tried to come up with other takes on the story. There are, as I write this, 157 stories on how various stock markets reacted to the news. There are another 50 or so stories on his health history. Obviously, this is big news and it's important, but should everyone cover it?

I asked, via various social networking platforms, if anyone minded if we just didn't cover the story at all. And I was a bit surprised at how the near unanimous reaction was to thank us for deciding not to cover the news. There were a few people who disagreed. Only one person seemed really surprised that we wouldn't, saying, "he is significant, why wouldn't you" cover the story. One person offered to give us money if we could go three weeks without covering the story (I'm guessing this post may disqualify us). A few people did say they would like our take on "the impact" of the story. In this case, the answer is I have no idea.

So this post isn't about his resignation. It's about this question of how people cover the news online today, and the desire for everyone to "have the story" just because everyone else does. I'm wondering if that really makes sense. I am, of course, quite comfortable with not covering the story at all. There are lots of stories we don't cover. But I'm wondering about the value of so many publications all writing the same basic story. Yes, some (perhaps many) do add value or different perspectives. But the basic facts are pretty much the same.

So, if we don't cover a story, it's not because we didn't see it or don't know about it. Sometimes, it's just because we think it's pretty well covered by everyone else already -- perhaps too well covered -- and our time may be better spent doing something else where we can actually add some value.

Last week we wrote about Janko Roettger's GigaOm post concerning the fact that file sharing continues to grow. We focused on how the MPAA and the RIAA might be declaring "victory" too soon. Amusingly, the MPAA's Alex Swartsel took offense to Janko's article and posted one of the organization's typically laughable responses, in which they attempt to scold Janko for his "intellectually dishonest" claim that file sharing is "socially acceptable." Let's just say that between the Swartsel and Janko, one of the two is in denial, and it's not Janko.

The part that the MPAA takes issue with is the following part from Janko's post:

The U.S. credit ratings downgrade, tumbling stocks and international instability have made not just financial analysts nervous this week. Consumers are also starting to wonder whether we’re about to enter another recession. Whenever that happens, people start to tighten their belts and cut unnecessary expenses -- like paying for movies and TV shows.... With memories of the housing slump still fresh, many people could simply return to BitTorrent and download movies for free instead of going to the movies or paying for VOD.

It's pretty clear that there is no statement of support or cheering on or anything here. Janko is simply reporting a simple fact. Some group of people will continue to find unauthorized means of accessing content a better deal than authorized offerings. I don't see how that's objectionable at all. It's a pretty easy prediction to make because who honestly doesn't think it's true?

But, to the MPAA, this is "intellectually dishonest" and the equivalent of Janko supporting "shoplifting clothing." Wow. You know what would be intellectually dishonest? Pretending that lots of people don't use file sharing would be intellectually dishonest. Pretending that a bad economy combined with dumb moves by movie studios might drive fewer people to unauthorized file sharing would be intellectually dishonest. Repeating blatant falsehoods from the MPAA would be intellectually dishonest. Comparing stealing of physical goods to someone making a copy of a digital file would be intellectually dishonest. Calling out a reporter for accurately making a point would be intellectually dishonest.

What's not intellectually dishonest is accurately reporting what's happening.

But the MPAA and Swartsel are so in denial that apparently they've decided to "shoot the messenger." This is all too typical of the MPAA. Rather than adapt and deal with reality, the folks there like to pretend the world is a very different place and will attack any messenger who shows otherwise. Honestly, Swartsel's post reads the same way an MPAA blog post would have read a decade ago if it had a blog back then. It's full of misleading or downright incorrect claims:

T-shirts and jeans aren’t made out of zeroes and ones, at least not yet. But just because movies and TV shows and songs can now be packaged and distributed as data, not just as film reels or vinyl records or DVDs, and can be acquired or distributed with a few clicks of a mouse, doesn’t mean that the labor and time and money that went into making them is any less meaningful.

No one -- especially not Janko -- has claimed that "the labor and time and money that went into making" movies is "less meaningful." Swartsel is simply changing the topic because she can't actually argue against what Janko has said -- because it's accurate. So she's pretending he said something entirely different. The fact that labor and time and money goes into something doesn't make a difference. I put "labor and time and money" into Techdirt, and then it's my job to figure out how to make a living out of it. It does me no good to sit around and say "but I worked hard -- now pay me."

No one cares how hard you worked or how much money you spent. People buy things based on the market. They buy things based on the intersection of supply and demand -- and this is an economics lesson that the MPAA and Swartsel apparently remain ignorant of.

We doubt many people will subscribe to the kind of intellectual dishonesty that suggests that it’s fine – or really, that it’s inevitable – to steal as a way of saving. But it’s troubling that by suggesting that stolen content available on rogue sites and elsewhere is just another substitute good, Roettgers is tacitly arguing that content theft is legitimate and socially acceptable.

He made no such argument, tacitly or not. I will, however, make the argument that for a very large segment of the population, it absolutely is socially acceptable. It is not socially acceptable to me. I don't engage in it myself and never have. But it's intellectually dishonest to pretend that many, many people don't find it socially acceptable. If the MPAA were really concerned about adapting to the changing market, the first step would be actually recognizing that. But that's not how the MPAA works. It works by denying reality, and then running to Congress to get them to change the laws because its member studios don't want to have to change. Tellingly, it appears that Swartsel's last job was... working for Congress.

It would be nice, just once, if the MPAA (and the RIAA) could actually be intellectually honest. If the folks there could admit some basic facts: the market has changed and many, many people find unauthorized file sharing socially acceptable. If you start at that point, and then say, "now what do we do about it?" you can come up with all sorts of productive answers. But that's not what they do at all. They just keep trying to demonize it, and don't seem to realize that every time they insist reality isn't real, people trust them even less.

Three years ago, the Boston Subway system (MBTA) got plenty of attention for getting a judge to block some MIT students from presenting a paper at DEFCON that showed how the MBTA's magnetic strip cards were vulnerable to hacking. Of course, all that really did was provide that much more attention for the weaknesses in the MBTA system. It seems we may be in for a repeat performance, of sorts, of this kind of "blame the messenger" approach from a public transporation group -- and this time it's by the very journalist who stepped in and did a presentation to replace the MIT kids who could not.... DEFCON regular, Dutch journalist Brenno de Winter won't be attending DEFCON this year because the Dutch transporation companies are taking legal action against him for daring to do his job as a reporter and highlight security problems with the Dutch transit system's "OV transit chip card." De Winter, quite reasonably, points out that both European and Dutch courts have supported journalists for reporting on security weaknesses -- and yet he still faces a legal fight that could net him six years in prison. Even worse, it appears that even the threat of such things now has de Winter self-censoring:

"They are effectively banning me from doing my job because if I write about this card, I have to think about the consequences," said 39-year-old de Winter, of Ede, The Netherlands. "I'm writing a book and I have to leave whole chapters out."

This is no way at all to thank someone who finds a flaw for you to fix, but the Dutch transportation conglomerate appears hellbent on making life difficult for those who point out technical problems, rather than just fixing the problems.

It really is quite amazing how so many authority types these days can't seem to comprehend the idea that people can and will take phones and record public events. Sinan Unur alerts us to the news of how two reporters were arrested in Washington DC while attending a public meeting of the DC Taxi Commission, which was meeting over a planned medallion system for taxis (used in many other cities, but somewhat controversial due to the ability to artificially restrict the market). Apparently, a reporter by the name of Pete Tucker was arrested for taking a photograph, and then Reason's Jim Epstein filmed the arrest and subsequent outrage by pretty much everyone in attendance. He then tried to leave, and the police tried to get his camera and then arrested him as well. You don't see him arrested in the video, but the woman at the end who declares that he has no right to film her (false, since this is a public place) apparently is told by a police officer that Epstein's phone would be turned over to her, which raises questions as to why police would be handing a phone over to someone else.

"Hot news" was pretty much dead a few years ago. The court-created doctrine, which resulted in a weird quasi-intellectual property on factual information about a century ago, hadn't been used for years and many people had assumed that it was pretty much gone. However, old legal doctrines die hard and, a few years back, some Wall Street firms sought to revive it, claiming that the website theFlyOnTheWall.com violated their "hot news" rights by accurately reporting on how those Wall Street firms were rating stocks. That's factual information and not protected by copyright, but the firms claimed it undermined their business models via hot news... and the lower court agreed, issuing an injunction.

Thankfully, an appeals court has dumped all of that, claiming that hot news is preempted by federal copyright law and that there's nothing wrong with reporting on factual information. The court mainly relies on the famous NBA v. Motorola case, which found that basketball scores and stats were facts and not protected by copyright or hot news. Using the same rules, the court finds that copyright wipes out any "hot news" in this case as well.

We conclude that applying NBA and copyright preemption principles to the facts of this case, the Firms' claim for "hot news" misappropriation fails because it is preempted by the Copyright Act. First, the Firms' reports culminating with the Recommendations satisfy the "subject matter" requirement because they are all works "of a type covered by section 102," i.e., "original works of authorship fixed in a... tangible medium of expression." 17 U.S.C. § 102. As discussed above, it is not determinative for the Copyright Act preemption analysis that the facts of the Recommendations themselves are not copyrightable. See NBA, 105 F.3d at 850. Second, the reports together with the Recommendations fulfill the "general scope" requirement because the rights "may be abridged by an act which, in and of itself, would infringe one of the exclusive rights' provided by federal copyright law," Altai, Inc., 982 F.2d at 716 (citing Harper & Row, 723 F.2d at 200), i.e., "acts of reproduction, performance, distribution or display," id. (internal quotation marks omitted).

Third and finally, the Firms' claim is not a so-called INS-type non-preempted claim because Fly is not, under NBA's analysis, "free-riding." It is collecting, collating and disseminating factual information -- the facts that Firms and others in the securities business have made recommendations with respect to the value of and the wisdom of purchasing or selling securities -- and attributing the information to its source. The Firms are making the news; Fly, despite the Firms' understandable desire to protect their business model, is breaking it. As the INS Court explained, long before it would have occurred to the Court to cite the First Amendment for the proposition:

[T]he news element -- the information respecting current events contained in the literary production -- is not the creation of the writer, but is a report of matters that ordinarily are publici juris; it is the history of the day. It is not to be supposed that the framers of the Constitution, when they empowered Congress "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" (Const., Art I, § 8, par. 8), intended to confer upon one who might happen to be the first to report a historic event the exclusive right for any period to spread the knowledge of it.

The court also distinguishes the classic "hot news" case (INS) by noting that in that case, the competing firm was taking AP news, rewriting it, and pretending it was its own. That's not what's going on here, where ratings are simply being aggregated.

This is an excellent ruling, though I doubt we've seen the end of "hot news" yet. There may still be appeals, and there are a few other such hot news cases out there. But it's nice to see the judges toss this one out.

A few weeks back, there was a fun story about how the website GWsports.com, which (as you might imagine) covers sports at George Washington University, became something of the laughing stock of the press world by publishing a game recap on a game between GW and the University of Virginia. The game recap reads pretty straightforward, opening with the fact that the GW team lost, and then spending a few paragraphs covering the various efforts by different GW players. It's only in the seventh paragraph, out of a grand total of eight, that it finally gets around to mentioning that the opposing pitcher, Will Roberts, threw a perfect game. If you're not a baseball fan, a "perfect game" is extremely rare. As the article does (finally) note, this is only the eighth such perfect game in NCAA Division 1 history (since 1957) and the first since 2002. Normally, you would think that any press coverage would start with the perfect game bit.

The national press, including the Washington Post, picked up on this and GW folks tried to defend the writing by noting that they're only in the business of promoting their own teams, not others:

“This is the George Washington website,” GWU sports information director Dave Lubeski tells Romenesko. “We’re in the business to promote our athletes and our team. We’re not claiming to be journalists.” What some call “the buried lead” was discussed after the story was posted, says Lubeski, and it was mentioned that the perfect game could have been noted in the sub-hed. But “we’re not in the newspaper business,” notes the SID.

I had sent that story around to a few people, because I thought it was pretty funny, but didn't have any obvious reason to post it here... until now. Apparently, in covering the story, Deadspin wondered if perhaps the original article hadn't actually been written by a newfangled automated software program that's been touted as being good enough to write sports stories.

Well, it turns out that the people who wrote that software, Narrative Science, were offended that their program might be thought of as having written an article so badly written, and fed their program the data from the game, and it popped out much better versions. They actually did two versions, a "neutral" point-of-view one, and one designed for GW fans. The "neutral" one brings up the perfect game in the first paragraph. The GW POV one does wait until the third paragraph, but still seems much better than the original...

So, perhaps the author of the original has passed the reverse Turing test, when you can't tell if a human is actually a human or a robot...

Slashdot points us to an article at the "International Business Times," that reports on a study from the AIM Group which claims that Craigslist is 'a cesspool of crime.' Interesting claim. What seems to be totally missing from the IBTimes report is the fact that AIM Group works for Craigslist competitors and, in this case, the "research" was funded by Craigslist wannabe-Oodle. That's not mentioned in the IBTimes report at all. In fact, the only mention of Oodle in the article is a quote by the CEO of Oodle mocking Craigslis and playing up Oodle... but never mentioning that he paid for the research in question.

As for the actual "research," it seems laughable, at best, and should immediately raise questions about any AIM Group research. The "research" basically scoured news reports and found a grand total of 330 "crimes" in the past year that have some sort of loose connection to Craigslist. I have a hard time seeing how that makes it a "cesspool" of crime. That's a very small number, especially considering the hundreds of millions of posts and transactions that take place via Craigslist. This seems like a massive cheap shot by both Oodle and AIM Group, and it's sad that a reporter would repeat the claims without noting the obvious problems with it. That's not journalism. That's being a PR service.

Meanwhile, looking at the "details" from AIM Group make the results even less compelling. They play up that 12 murders had a loose connection to Craigslist, but a bunch of those appear to be from one deranged individual. It seems pretty ridiculous to blame Craigslist for that.

I've always felt that the maxim "history repeats" is a little oversimplified. There are countless patterns and cycles in history, but they are simply elements of a whole that is always changing. When history repeats, it's rarely identical.

That might be what makes the techno-panic mentality so astonishing: it's one of the few examples where nothing seems to change. Today's anti-videogame rhetoric is no different from the objections raised to telephones, movie theatres and chess. A 1972 documentary on Future Shock is almost indistinguishable from Sherry Turke's latest book.

Now, people can believe what they want about technology, misguided as their views might be. But in one group, it is unforgivable: the news media. It's tough to find any large news organizations that don't turn technology into the star villain of every story in which it is even tangentially related--and they aren't afraid to misrepresent the facts to do so. This highlights several broad cultural problems that plague modern journalism: lazy reporting, pandering to viewers instead of educating them, and an internal techno-panic attitude among journalists and publishers who are failing to adapt to a changing marketplace.

All that brings me around to one of my favorite websites, Cracked.com. I wrote about them not long ago, but boy have they been hitting the nail on the head a lot recently. They just took on some examples of the media exaggerating or flat-out inventing techno-panic stories, and their ruthless analysis is both spot-on and hilarious (and a tad profane). Some highlights:

On some trash-texting between rival football players that made the news rounds in Austin:

In real life, if some high school dudes yell, "I'm gonna tear you limb from fucking limb" across a football field, the ref probably wouldn't throw a flag. Hell, the ref probably wouldn't hear it over all the grown-ups in the stands yelling equally violent threats at the opposing players. That kind of thing is said verbally, from one high school male to another, while in striking distance, on a weekly basis. But take those exact same words and transmit them electronically via a new technology, and it's a goddamned crisis.

We could also write that one off as a slow news day, but two months later, they ran a fucking follow-up report. Why? Because "cyberbullying" is everywhere! "Hide your children, lest the demonic spirit of cyberbullying ingest their innocent, untarnished souls! What is it about these new devil devices that makes our teenage boys act... exactly the way they did before?"

On a Telegraph article titled War Games Fanatic Matthew Pyke Killed by Gamer from Germany:

If you Google his name, you'll find dozens upon dozens of news websites proclaiming that this was a gamer feud gone wrong. A violent game, to boot! He was a "war games" fanatic! Something must be done!

Oh, hey, look at this. It turned out that the killer was obsessed with Pyke's girlfriend. But because the three met on Pyke's gaming forum, every goddamn headline about the case was, "GAMING GAMER KILLS GAMER FROM GAMING GAMELAND GAME GAME!"

On a dispute that ended in murder and, according to the headlines, started on Twitter (but in fact started in person):

Twitter is not simply a means by which people communicate, the same as they would at a bar or by postcards. No, it's new and scary and must have some alien ability to influence men's minds to make them do what they otherwise would not. Right?

Do I even need to point out that if I call your house and tell you you're a worthless cocksucker and threaten your life, that I'm the asshole here? Not my fucking phone?

There have been a bunch of big stories lately -- with Homeland Security's domain name seizures and the whole Wikileaks situation -- so I hadn't been paying much attention to an ongoing story down in Australia, concerning a threat by the Editor-in-Chief of The Australian Newspaper, Chris Mitchell, to sue a journalism professor, Julie Posetti, over a series of tweets she wrote at a conference trying to paraphrase what former Australian reporter Asa Wahlquist was saying on a panel.

The details are somewhat convoluted, but the link above lays them out quite carefully. Basically, there was a journalism conference, and one of the panels was discussing how the media was covering "climate change" as a story. Apparently, the general sense among everyone involved was "that climate change is real, and crucially important, and inadequately reported." Wahlquist, on the panel, noted that one of the reasons why she had resigned was that she felt pressure in what she was writing on such topics. Posetti summarized that in a series of quick tweets. As is quite typical for those live tweeting an event, she paraphrased what was being said. I do this too. It's about the only practical way to post in real time and stick with the 140 character limit. It does appear that she may have, just slightly, misheard one thing that was said by Wahlquist, and implied that Mitchell had directly influenced what Wahlquist wrote about. From a recording that later came out, it appears that Wahlquist was a little less specific, stating: "The other thing that was happening at The Australian before I left was the editor-in-chief and the editors (were?) becoming much more prescriptive and you saw that in the lead-up to the election, where you were actually being told what to write."

Posetti simplified this to state:

"Wahlquist: 'In the lead up to the election the Ed in Chief was increasingly telling me what to write.' It was prescriptive."

That's a pretty close paraphrase, but Mitchell took great exception to this (and two other tweets that really were more expressing opinions), and said that he never put pressure on Wahlquist. And here's where The Streisand Effect enters. Not too many people had seen Posetti's tweets -- or really paid too much attention to them. Until Mitchell went into the pages of his own newspaper and threatened to sue Posetti for defamation -- which was indeed followed up by a legal threat letter (pdf).

Suddenly, this off-handed paraphrase of a tweet got a lot more attention (reasonably so), especially when the editor of a major newspaper threatens to sue someone for defamation over a tweet paraphrasing what someone else said. Mitchell later claimed that Wahlquist claimed she had not said what Posetti had tweeted, but once the audio became clear, it seemed pretty clear that Posetti's tweets were pretty damn close -- and if there was that one tiny slip up, it's hardly worth a defamation lawsuit. And, really, if Mitchell has anyone to complain about, it's Wahlquist -- though, again, only if what she said was really inaccurate. Jonathan Holmes, of Austalia's ABC, summarizes the whole mess and suggests that Mitchell needs to calm down and realize that if Wahlquist said what she said, he should at least be realizing that some of his reporters felt that way, and strive to fix it, rather than threaten the messenger.

Looking back, it's really amazing how many mistakes were made here. There was overreacting to a tweet. Blaming the messenger. Calling way more attention to it than necessary. Actually carrying through with legal threats and then denying that any of the original statements of opinion could be valid. Oh, and we left out the bit where Mitchell's own paper has railed against Australian defamation law, saying that they "act to suppress free speech and enrich lawyers..." Oh, really now?