Playing Devil's advocate, I reckon they would say that they all want the best for the artist, but they differ about how to deliver it. Each collection agency will argue that their way of distributing revenues gets more to artists, or to the widest number of artists, or the most 'deserving' artists, than another agency's method. On that basis, it's only right that they, and their method, should be the one that is used.
Sadly, because of the way things work in Europe (and the UK is a particularly bad example), a lot of newspapers and politicians will happily play along with the narrative that the EU is trying to force 'our' artists to accept a rights collection method that is less effective than our national rights agencies offer.
If the state's going to raise revenue by force, aren't systems like this a fairer source of income than taxes on property or income (or on vices that only hurt the person indulging in them). At least here, you're paying a price for doing something that's dangerous and anti-social, rather than for doing something productive.
Shouldn't the answer be to have more speed cameras, so everyone who acts anti-socially pays the same price, rather than having less and only charging some people?
There's a big risk of something akin to "stockholm syndrome" in trade journalism: when a company's taken you somewhere nice, fed and watered you, and you've had a nice time with their employees, it's hard not to think of them as friends, and to want to be nice to them in return.
There are other pressures that stop you from succumbing to that temptation though. For one thing, you need to get readers. If all you ever write is flattery, people won't be interested in reading your articles, and in the end your publication will make less money.
Even the contacts that you criticise will often respect you more if you try to be balanced, than if you just rewrite their press releases or marketing claims all the time. That will mean that you actually get less access if you are seen as a shill than if you are seen as (relatively) independent.
Publishers will generally erect walls between advertising sales and editorial, in order to ensure that their content is interesting to readers. The publishers that do that best tend to be the ones that have magazines that last and make money.
As an individual, you'll eventually want to move to another job. Few editors will be impressed by a portfolio stuffed with puff pieces, so you'll find it harder to get a better job, and you'll make less money.
There's also the issue of job satisfaction. There are many reasons why people choose to become journalists. Purely financial considerations won't be high on the list though (or, at least, you'll soon realise you've made a mistake if you think journalism is a route to riches; that's the point at which many people decide to work in PR instead). For many journalists, the sense that you are in some way performing a socially important task, by exposing wrongdoing or incompetence, is a powerful motivator. If you don't ever criticise the people you write about, the work will be far less satisfying.
Publications could go further to avoid the sort of capture you describe though. They should be frank with their readers about how they are funded, how their visits to contacts are paid for, what the source of information is, and so on. There's no harm, I think, for trade publications to admit that they are as much an ambassador for the sector they cover as a critic. If your readers understand where you're coming from, they can make better judgments about what you write.
You can also encourage your readers to hold you to account. By allowing them to comment on your stories, and to criticise you when you give the impression of having been suckered by a company's marketing team, you can provide a variety of accounts that come closer to the truth.
It's not a perfect system, and there should be as many alternative approaches as possible: like allowing reader comments, having to compete with blogs, subscription magazines, forums and whatever else keeps professional journalists honest, and ensures that there are a variety of approximations of the truth.
As weird harold says though, online journalism by individuals working on their own, may be more susceptible to this sort of 'capture'. A good example of that, I think, is the fanboy culture around companies like Apple. Despite the fact that many people who blog about their favourite tech manufacturer do it for free, or for very little reward, and have less contact with the people they write about, they're often less critical rather than more so.
Art Lebedev Studios, the Optimus keyboard guys, have a pretty cool solution. Their Clone Museum lists all of the people who've used their ideas, with detailed evidence of what has happened. It saves them the cost and expense of taking someone to court (particularly tricky when a lot of the design concepts might not be strictly copyright; some are straight reproductions of images they created though).
It takes the idea that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" and makes it into a marketing tool. How better to make the point that you create striking content than by forcing dozens of big names to effectively give you a testimonial?
The problem with the 'publish and be damned' approach you suggest is that individual authors may want to travel to the UK, and their publishers will likely have an office or subsidiary in the UK.
The way English libel laws are written, virtually everyone from the CEO of the compnay that publishes a book, down to the guy who runs the bookshop it is sold in, can be held liable for any defamation. As an example, look up the Scallywag case.
Scallywag was a satirical magazine, which had published an article someone (I'm a bit blurry on the details, as it was a long time ago) objected to. Rather than going after them, the complainant threatened to sue W H Smith's, who, as well as running their own stores, had a virtual monopoly on magazine distribution. Smith's then refused to distribute Scallywag, which meant it got no newsagent sales and went bankrupt.
The point is, English libel laws set very difficult standards for respondents, allow complainants to select respondents for the maximum chilling effect, and give our courts virtually international reach (particularly with regards to Internet publications). Only concerted international pressure to change them will fix the problem.
What are you waffling on about AC? Anything specifically about the post? Really makes me want to put my red coat on and go burn some villages...
Anyway, on point and as I commented here a couple of days ago, UK libel laws are atrocious. The question is, what can other countries do about them? Certainly laws that allow victims of libel tourism to countersue in local courts are a start.
I wonder if something like the WTO could be used to force Westminster to amend English law. After all, these laws are effectively a barrier to the export of US publications to the UK. Could the US impose some sort of tariff on UK publishers selling books in the UK? Or could US and other politicians do more to use the UN to shame England into amending these laws?
I'd guess most of the people who've commented saying they'd just ignore the risk of libel damages don't write on a regular basis for any sort of audience about anything that matters. Still baffles me how anyone could think it's a good idea to incur hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars of damages; maybe Zero plans to spend his life never earning any money and living in a squat. It would fit his nick.
What the linked advice doesn't mention is the atrocious state of English libel laws, and English courts' willingness to rule on overseas publications that have only reached a handful of English readers (search "Al Qaeda banker libel" for examples). Some US states have passed laws (NY, IIRC) allowing American writers to countersue locally over cases brought in England that ignore US free speech rights.
That, like everything surrounding libel, is still going to be a long and costly process, that will wreck your life for years, even if you win.
If you want to write serious investigative journalism, whatever the venue, you need to bear in mind the risks you face, not just from local courts but from courts around the world.
If you live in an Engish-speaking country, and you want your local journalists to be able to write freely, you should encourage your local politicians to put pressure on England to rewrite its libel laws.
Err, yeah, just noticed I contradicted myself and the source in my first couple of paragraphs (that's quality journalism for you).
Rather than saying:
"Didn't notify them personally, no, but announced it before it was confirmed: hence the analogy with shouting the news in the street."
I should have said:
"Didn't notify them personally, no, but announced it ahead of anyone who knew Russert's family: hence the analogy with shouting the news in the street."
So you're saying that fired employee personally notified the family without confirming the situation? Because if that's what you are saying you're wrong, once again.
Didn't notify them personally, no, but announced it before it was confirmed: hence the analogy with shouting the news in the street.
RTFA
“We were not prepared to say anything until all the family had heard,” said Allison Gollust, an NBC News spokeswoman. “The last thing we wanted to do was to have the family discover this on the air.” She said NBC had asked the other networks to hold back and they readily agreed.
he waited until it was verified prior to posting it on Wikipedia.
Granted. But did he wait until he was sure the family knew? I cover an industry where people are killed, frequently. Generally, I take the stance there's no rush to release names until we know there's been a public announcment. That doesn't mean we hold off reporting the why and how.
We decide on whether to report something by considering news value, public interest, and the feelings of the people involved. Tim Russert isn't Brezhnev: It doesn't matter to anyone but his friends and family whether he's alive or dead, so there's no urgent public interest in announcing his death. If you have a conscience, that's one of the easiest judgements to make.
you're comparing a report of an actual and accurate news event to gossip
Bob Dodd bangs your mum.
That may well be a fact, but it hasn't really embiggenned either of us for me to tell you, or to announce it on a public forum. It's not the factual status of the story that makes it news or gossip, but whether it benefits anyone else to tell or be told it.
And you're ignoring the fact that some news is hurtful and unkind. Should we not report on Islamic terrorism because it offends Muslims?
Not at all. Much news will hurt someone, and that's often one sign of it being good reporting. The question, again, though is if it also benefits anyone.
There's a moral question here first: Some of us might not mind finding out a family member has died through an (essentially anonymous, and possibly false) Wikipedia edit, but I guess a lot of people would think it kind of nice to have the news broken to them by someone they know.
There was no real public interest in breaking the news a few minutes ahead of the official announcement. Perhaps if it was Dick Cheney's corpse, being propped up Brezhnev-style for months on end, there would be news value. There wasn't here.
That seems like one of the flaws of 'citizen journalism'. There's a lot of problems with professional reporting too (and I declare an interest here, as a reporter on a minor magazine), but people who do journalism for a living and have received some training generaly at least consider moral issues like this.
When people are submitting news just for kudos, like this person was, some of them seem to ignore these issues. It's kind of like the idiots who go around posting "First!" in every comment thread they can find: the content and context isn't important, just beating everone else is.
Disregarding ethics and all that though, there's a simple contractual issue. This person was employed to collect news on behalf of NBC, not to give it away it to the company's rivals. If you work for Widget Manglers Inc., and take a bunch of prototype widgets out of the factory to give away, you can expect to be fired. This seems to be an example of pretty much the same betrayal of one's duty to an employer.
Perhaps now they'll have a chance to demonstrate their skills as a 'citizen journalist' by coming up with some stories they haven't just leaked from their employer.
Defamation laws are really designed for a day when there was a restriction on publication. It was to deal with the situation where a powerful publishing entity could write false things
Not really. UK libel laws were designed the for the days when our upper classes tended to respond to slurs on their reputation by fighting duels. Having a legal mechanism to resolve these disputes stopped so many of them killing each other.
I guess on that basis, you could say maintaining laws on defamation would be a way to reduce the fatal(ly boring) effects of online flamewars. Maybe not though.
The pointlessness of trying to stop p2p with criminal sanctions has been made here plenty of times, and if you don't get it by now, you're never going to.
What's not been covered so extensively, here or elsewhere, is the cultural value of sites like Oink as a form of voluntary, open, archive. DJ Rupture (quoted extensively on Stereogum here) makes the point well: "Oink had everything by certain artists. Literally, everything. I searched for ‘DJ Rupture’ and found every release I’d ever done, from an obscure 7″ on a Swedish label to 320kpbs rips of my first 12″, self-released back in 1999. It was shocking. And reassuring."
Where else can you do that? Not bricks and mortar stores, not iTunes, not emusic. On p2p, and BitTorrent in particular, as long as one dedicated fan is willing to share an artist's music, anyone can get a copy. For the fans, getting the music they like enjoyed by others is incentive enough. For business, however big or small, it's not always going to be profitable to make every single cultural artifact available.
Maybe Oink did mean that a few less CDs or DRM'd mp3s were sold. It also meant people had exposure to a far wider range of artists, and perhaps meant that more money was spent on gigs, T-shirts, and added value hard copies, and that a few more smaller acts with niche audiences were able to make a living from their work. I'd reckon that better serves society than a top heavy music industry run by a handful of corporations.
What's more worrying than this innocuous court decision is the rapidity and lack of thought with which it's being presented here as some big issue.
How many of the posters above noticed that both the court report, and the defamatory article, were published by the same company - in the same paper, in fact?
Or that the court only ruled that two out of four statements are defamatory, and that the case is going back to a jury trial to consider the other statements, and arguments for the defence?
There's a copy of the full ruling here. I found that on this forum thread, incidentally the sixth or seventh result on a Google search for 'NSW Court of Appeal restaurant critic', and one of the first ones that isn't clearly published by the defendant.
There's also a good explanation of the Australian approach to defamation in that thread, about eight posts down, that says
I think that it is clear that Mr. Evans's review was defamatory, as are many negative reviews, whether of restaurants, wineries, theatre, film, art shows or novels. If bad reviews rarely result in lawsuits, it is partly because they are sometimes artfully worded, but also because whether a review is defamatory is far from the end of the matter. There are important defences, such as truth and fair comment. As two of the judges put it, at paragraph 13 of the decision:
"It may be difficult for jurors to appreciate that, in defamation practice, a decision that a publication is defamatory is not the end of the debate about liability; that often it is just the beginning. ... there may well be jurors who think that a decision that a publication conveys a defamatory imputation is tantamount to a decision that the defendant has committed an actionable wrong."
The next steps are that the newspaper and the critic will file a statement of defence and a judge will hold a hearing to decide whether the defences are valid. My personal view is that at that stage of the process, the owners of Coco Roco will have to prove that Mr. Evans was either grossly negligent or maliciously out to get the restaurant or the owners. If they can prove that, and there is not at the moment a shred of evidence that would support such assertions, the owners will win, and deservedly so. Short of that, I think that they will lose"
So, we've got a blogpost from a biased source. Neither the orginal poster or any of the commenters here made the single google search necessary to check the source, or find the original ruling, or find any other analysis. When you do, you see the story is pretty misleading.
All the court has said is "Two of the statements would damage the restaurants reputation". The publisher and journalist can stil argue they were fair comment, or make other defences.
Great to see the blogging community living up to its reputation for well-thought out, evidence-backed, debate.
If you wanted to watch, or upload, infringing content - rather than clips for fair use, and maybe the occasional music video - why would you use YouTube? Surely BitTorrent or newsgroups are a much better, and much more established, tool for that sort of use?
The point of the summary is to emphasize that a man was compensated for a: being in a mc accident b: wanting sex from his wife c: playing video games.
The gentleman in question may be severely damaged, but that was not indicated in the summary, nor the article you chose to direct us to.
I think you're confusing 'emphasising' and 'misrepresenting'. Sure, that's what the summary and the first article says, but the article I dug up, the Phineas Cage case study, a bit of basic knowledge of neurology and some basic common sense is going to tell you that a court (OK, an English court, US courts may be a bit different) isn't going to award someone a million quid for the reasons you state.
They might however for the sort of relatively common brain injury that causes you to lose all ability to engage in normal social behaviour.
Even if he is brain-damaged, he must be functioning at a level where he can enter into the work force... Brain injury or not, he can still be a Wal-Mart greeter.
No, not in this sort of case. The sort of injury all of the articles seem to be describing mean that you both lose the ability to control anti-social behaviour (squeezing any pair of breasts that come into your field of vision, for example - not ideal for a WalMart greeter) and the sense of cause and effect that allows the rest of us to see we have to motivate ourselves to go to work.
That's what's being described when the articles talk about his poor hygiene - he has been deprived of the mental faculties needed to understand that he stinks, it will bother people, and that he can fix it by taking a wash.
Whatever happened to the family? Families used to take care of it's members.
Why should the family pay for someone else's action? If I come to your house, nick your stuff and kill your cat, should your parents be responsible for buying you new stuff and a new cat, or should I?
If someone's (negligently) harmed another person, it's their responsibility to fix it, not the victim's family, or society, or the state. That's what makes the civil law great - it ensures the right person pays when something goes wrong.
No, I would not expect a rocket scientist out of him, but he can focus on some other line of work suitable to his capability level.
Well, this is an aside, but compensation here is worked out (in part) on the basis of what you've been deprived of. So, the part that compensates you for lost earnings will differ depending on what your job, and career expectations, were before the injury.
Sure give the guy a bit o'cash, but it shouldn't be enormous.
Well, the respondents (the insurers) seemed to agree that £1.2m was a fare sum. Consider what he's lost, and how you would value that. If I said to you that I'd pay you a million quid, in return for you giving up any ability of ever working, having a normal sexual relationship, any friends, or any of the normal ingredients of a healthy adult life, would you go for it?
You have a bit of your brain, at the base, where your primal urges (eat, shit, fuck the wife) come from.
You have a big bit, at the front, that works out that you don't necessarily want to do those three basic things all the time. It's the bit that means you sometimes come and post drivel here, rather than spending all day on The Hun.
If you put a big lump of metal (or a car bonnet, or a kerb) through the front of your head, you lose the bit that lets you work out when the right time to do these things is, and when it might cause you problems.
If it's someone else's fault that that happens, and you can't get a job or live a normal life because of it, why shouldn't you claim compensation?
dammit, missed the first 'and' in that last sentence, and can't edit.
Anyway, gives me the opportunity to link to a slightly more sensible report on the case. Odd how technology and sex both provoke newspapers into shoddy journalism - I guess having both together is a lazy editor's dream.
It's not really that far off the case of Phineas Cage, the unfortunate first experimental subject of lobotomy. While its easy to snigger, there's a big difference between thinking about something constantly, thinking about it constantly and being deprived of the physical capacity to control how you act upon your urges.
"You just need to follow the money and find out who bought the stock right before the spam and then sold right after."
IANA broker, but I'm guessing you'd use fake identity, anonymous offshore accounts, or whatever to buy the stocks, if you were doing this for a living. Would be silly to spend time (or money) getting a botnet set up and spewing spam, only to incriminate yourself so obviously by using your real identity to buy and sell the stocks.
Playing Devil's advocate, I reckon they would say that they all want the best for the artist, but they differ about how to deliver it. Each collection agency will argue that their way of distributing revenues gets more to artists, or to the widest number of artists, or the most 'deserving' artists, than another agency's method. On that basis, it's only right that they, and their method, should be the one that is used.
Sadly, because of the way things work in Europe (and the UK is a particularly bad example), a lot of newspapers and politicians will happily play along with the narrative that the EU is trying to force 'our' artists to accept a rights collection method that is less effective than our national rights agencies offer.
If the state's going to raise revenue by force, aren't systems like this a fairer source of income than taxes on property or income (or on vices that only hurt the person indulging in them). At least here, you're paying a price for doing something that's dangerous and anti-social, rather than for doing something productive.
Shouldn't the answer be to have more speed cameras, so everyone who acts anti-socially pays the same price, rather than having less and only charging some people?
There's a big risk of something akin to "stockholm syndrome" in trade journalism: when a company's taken you somewhere nice, fed and watered you, and you've had a nice time with their employees, it's hard not to think of them as friends, and to want to be nice to them in return.
There are other pressures that stop you from succumbing to that temptation though. For one thing, you need to get readers. If all you ever write is flattery, people won't be interested in reading your articles, and in the end your publication will make less money.
Even the contacts that you criticise will often respect you more if you try to be balanced, than if you just rewrite their press releases or marketing claims all the time. That will mean that you actually get less access if you are seen as a shill than if you are seen as (relatively) independent.
Publishers will generally erect walls between advertising sales and editorial, in order to ensure that their content is interesting to readers. The publishers that do that best tend to be the ones that have magazines that last and make money.
As an individual, you'll eventually want to move to another job. Few editors will be impressed by a portfolio stuffed with puff pieces, so you'll find it harder to get a better job, and you'll make less money.
There's also the issue of job satisfaction. There are many reasons why people choose to become journalists. Purely financial considerations won't be high on the list though (or, at least, you'll soon realise you've made a mistake if you think journalism is a route to riches; that's the point at which many people decide to work in PR instead). For many journalists, the sense that you are in some way performing a socially important task, by exposing wrongdoing or incompetence, is a powerful motivator. If you don't ever criticise the people you write about, the work will be far less satisfying.
Publications could go further to avoid the sort of capture you describe though. They should be frank with their readers about how they are funded, how their visits to contacts are paid for, what the source of information is, and so on. There's no harm, I think, for trade publications to admit that they are as much an ambassador for the sector they cover as a critic. If your readers understand where you're coming from, they can make better judgments about what you write.
You can also encourage your readers to hold you to account. By allowing them to comment on your stories, and to criticise you when you give the impression of having been suckered by a company's marketing team, you can provide a variety of accounts that come closer to the truth.
It's not a perfect system, and there should be as many alternative approaches as possible: like allowing reader comments, having to compete with blogs, subscription magazines, forums and whatever else keeps professional journalists honest, and ensures that there are a variety of approximations of the truth.
As weird harold says though, online journalism by individuals working on their own, may be more susceptible to this sort of 'capture'. A good example of that, I think, is the fanboy culture around companies like Apple. Despite the fact that many people who blog about their favourite tech manufacturer do it for free, or for very little reward, and have less contact with the people they write about, they're often less critical rather than more so.
Art Lebedev Studios, the Optimus keyboard guys, have a pretty cool solution. Their Clone Museum lists all of the people who've used their ideas, with detailed evidence of what has happened. It saves them the cost and expense of taking someone to court (particularly tricky when a lot of the design concepts might not be strictly copyright; some are straight reproductions of images they created though).
It takes the idea that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" and makes it into a marketing tool. How better to make the point that you create striking content than by forcing dozens of big names to effectively give you a testimonial?
@enrico suarve
The problem with the 'publish and be damned' approach you suggest is that individual authors may want to travel to the UK, and their publishers will likely have an office or subsidiary in the UK.
The way English libel laws are written, virtually everyone from the CEO of the compnay that publishes a book, down to the guy who runs the bookshop it is sold in, can be held liable for any defamation. As an example, look up the Scallywag case.
Scallywag was a satirical magazine, which had published an article someone (I'm a bit blurry on the details, as it was a long time ago) objected to. Rather than going after them, the complainant threatened to sue W H Smith's, who, as well as running their own stores, had a virtual monopoly on magazine distribution. Smith's then refused to distribute Scallywag, which meant it got no newsagent sales and went bankrupt.
The point is, English libel laws set very difficult standards for respondents, allow complainants to select respondents for the maximum chilling effect, and give our courts virtually international reach (particularly with regards to Internet publications). Only concerted international pressure to change them will fix the problem.
What are you waffling on about AC? Anything specifically about the post? Really makes me want to put my red coat on and go burn some villages...
Anyway, on point and as I commented here a couple of days ago, UK libel laws are atrocious. The question is, what can other countries do about them? Certainly laws that allow victims of libel tourism to countersue in local courts are a start.
I wonder if something like the WTO could be used to force Westminster to amend English law. After all, these laws are effectively a barrier to the export of US publications to the UK. Could the US impose some sort of tariff on UK publishers selling books in the UK? Or could US and other politicians do more to use the UN to shame England into amending these laws?
I'd guess most of the people who've commented saying they'd just ignore the risk of libel damages don't write on a regular basis for any sort of audience about anything that matters. Still baffles me how anyone could think it's a good idea to incur hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars of damages; maybe Zero plans to spend his life never earning any money and living in a squat. It would fit his nick.
What the linked advice doesn't mention is the atrocious state of English libel laws, and English courts' willingness to rule on overseas publications that have only reached a handful of English readers (search "Al Qaeda banker libel" for examples). Some US states have passed laws (NY, IIRC) allowing American writers to countersue locally over cases brought in England that ignore US free speech rights.
That, like everything surrounding libel, is still going to be a long and costly process, that will wreck your life for years, even if you win.
If you want to write serious investigative journalism, whatever the venue, you need to bear in mind the risks you face, not just from local courts but from courts around the world.
If you live in an Engish-speaking country, and you want your local journalists to be able to write freely, you should encourage your local politicians to put pressure on England to rewrite its libel laws.
Err, yeah, just noticed I contradicted myself and the source in my first couple of paragraphs (that's quality journalism for you).
Rather than saying:
"Didn't notify them personally, no, but announced it before it was confirmed: hence the analogy with shouting the news in the street."
I should have said:
"Didn't notify them personally, no, but announced it ahead of anyone who knew Russert's family: hence the analogy with shouting the news in the street."
So you're saying that fired employee personally notified the family without confirming the situation? Because if that's what you are saying you're wrong, once again.
Didn't notify them personally, no, but announced it before it was confirmed: hence the analogy with shouting the news in the street.
RTFA
he waited until it was verified prior to posting it on Wikipedia.
Granted. But did he wait until he was sure the family knew? I cover an industry where people are killed, frequently. Generally, I take the stance there's no rush to release names until we know there's been a public announcment. That doesn't mean we hold off reporting the why and how.
We decide on whether to report something by considering news value, public interest, and the feelings of the people involved. Tim Russert isn't Brezhnev: It doesn't matter to anyone but his friends and family whether he's alive or dead, so there's no urgent public interest in announcing his death. If you have a conscience, that's one of the easiest judgements to make.
you're comparing a report of an actual and accurate news event to gossip
Bob Dodd bangs your mum.
That may well be a fact, but it hasn't really embiggenned either of us for me to tell you, or to announce it on a public forum. It's not the factual status of the story that makes it news or gossip, but whether it benefits anyone else to tell or be told it.
And you're ignoring the fact that some news is hurtful and unkind. Should we not report on Islamic terrorism because it offends Muslims?
Not at all. Much news will hurt someone, and that's often one sign of it being good reporting. The question, again, though is if it also benefits anyone.
There's a moral question here first: Some of us might not mind finding out a family member has died through an (essentially anonymous, and possibly false) Wikipedia edit, but I guess a lot of people would think it kind of nice to have the news broken to them by someone they know.
There was no real public interest in breaking the news a few minutes ahead of the official announcement. Perhaps if it was Dick Cheney's corpse, being propped up Brezhnev-style for months on end, there would be news value. There wasn't here.
That seems like one of the flaws of 'citizen journalism'. There's a lot of problems with professional reporting too (and I declare an interest here, as a reporter on a minor magazine), but people who do journalism for a living and have received some training generaly at least consider moral issues like this.
When people are submitting news just for kudos, like this person was, some of them seem to ignore these issues. It's kind of like the idiots who go around posting "First!" in every comment thread they can find: the content and context isn't important, just beating everone else is.
Disregarding ethics and all that though, there's a simple contractual issue. This person was employed to collect news on behalf of NBC, not to give it away it to the company's rivals. If you work for Widget Manglers Inc., and take a bunch of prototype widgets out of the factory to give away, you can expect to be fired. This seems to be an example of pretty much the same betrayal of one's duty to an employer.
Perhaps now they'll have a chance to demonstrate their skills as a 'citizen journalist' by coming up with some stories they haven't just leaked from their employer.
Libel origins
Oops
Just noticed the original source for Rupture's comments, quoted above.
The pointlessness of trying to stop p2p with criminal sanctions has been made here plenty of times, and if you don't get it by now, you're never going to.
What's not been covered so extensively, here or elsewhere, is the cultural value of sites like Oink as a form of voluntary, open, archive. DJ Rupture (quoted extensively on Stereogum here) makes the point well: "Oink had everything by certain artists. Literally, everything. I searched for ‘DJ Rupture’ and found every release I’d ever done, from an obscure 7″ on a Swedish label to 320kpbs rips of my first 12″, self-released back in 1999. It was shocking. And reassuring."
Where else can you do that? Not bricks and mortar stores, not iTunes, not emusic. On p2p, and BitTorrent in particular, as long as one dedicated fan is willing to share an artist's music, anyone can get a copy. For the fans, getting the music they like enjoyed by others is incentive enough. For business, however big or small, it's not always going to be profitable to make every single cultural artifact available.
Maybe Oink did mean that a few less CDs or DRM'd mp3s were sold. It also meant people had exposure to a far wider range of artists, and perhaps meant that more money was spent on gigs, T-shirts, and added value hard copies, and that a few more smaller acts with niche audiences were able to make a living from their work. I'd reckon that better serves society than a top heavy music industry run by a handful of corporations.
What's more worrying than this innocuous court decision is the rapidity and lack of thought with which it's being presented here as some big issue. How many of the posters above noticed that both the court report, and the defamatory article, were published by the same company - in the same paper, in fact? Or that the court only ruled that two out of four statements are defamatory, and that the case is going back to a jury trial to consider the other statements, and arguments for the defence? There's a copy of the full ruling here. I found that on this forum thread, incidentally the sixth or seventh result on a Google search for 'NSW Court of Appeal restaurant critic', and one of the first ones that isn't clearly published by the defendant. There's also a good explanation of the Australian approach to defamation in that thread, about eight posts down, that says
So, we've got a blogpost from a biased source. Neither the orginal poster or any of the commenters here made the single google search necessary to check the source, or find the original ruling, or find any other analysis. When you do, you see the story is pretty misleading. All the court has said is "Two of the statements would damage the restaurants reputation". The publisher and journalist can stil argue they were fair comment, or make other defences. Great to see the blogging community living up to its reputation for well-thought out, evidence-backed, debate.Seems intuitive
If you wanted to watch, or upload, infringing content - rather than clips for fair use, and maybe the occasional music video - why would you use YouTube? Surely BitTorrent or newsgroups are a much better, and much more established, tool for that sort of use?
OK, a little "Neurology for webmongs"
You have a bit of your brain, at the base, where your primal urges (eat, shit, fuck the wife) come from.
You have a big bit, at the front, that works out that you don't necessarily want to do those three basic things all the time. It's the bit that means you sometimes come and post drivel here, rather than spending all day on The Hun.
If you put a big lump of metal (or a car bonnet, or a kerb) through the front of your head, you lose the bit that lets you work out when the right time to do these things is, and when it might cause you problems.
If it's someone else's fault that that happens, and you can't get a job or live a normal life because of it, why shouldn't you claim compensation?
dammit, missed the first 'and' in that last sentence, and can't edit. Anyway, gives me the opportunity to link to a slightly more sensible report on the case. Odd how technology and sex both provoke newspapers into shoddy journalism - I guess having both together is a lazy editor's dream.
It's not really that far off the case of Phineas Cage, the unfortunate first experimental subject of lobotomy. While its easy to snigger, there's a big difference between thinking about something constantly, thinking about it constantly and being deprived of the physical capacity to control how you act upon your urges.
"You just need to follow the money and find out who bought the stock right before the spam and then sold right after."
IANA broker, but I'm guessing you'd use fake identity, anonymous offshore accounts, or whatever to buy the stocks, if you were doing this for a living. Would be silly to spend time (or money) getting a botnet set up and spewing spam, only to incriminate yourself so obviously by using your real identity to buy and sell the stocks.