To read the full Supreme Court decision in the foreign-copyright case (Golan v. Holder), go here.
Be sure to read the dissent by Justice Breyer, which kicks in after page 41. He alone on the court seems to get that the Constitution recognized copyright as a mechanism to provide for the general benefit of society and not to create a property right for certain individuals.
May some future court come around to that understanding.
Filed under Uncategorized
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 6,800 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.
Filed under Uncategorized
By Chris Daly
Today’s Times carries in the print edition an incremental piece about the cranial dangers of heading the ball in soccer.
The upshot:
The researchers found, according to data they presented at aRadiological Society of North America meeting last month, that the players who had headed the ball more than about 1,100 times in the previous 12 months showed significant loss of white matter in parts of their brains involved with memory, attention and the processing of visual information, compared with players who had headed the ball fewer times. (White matter is the brain’s communication wiring, the axons and other structures that relay messages between neurons.)
“No one is suggesting that heading should be outlawed,” she concludes. But science and common sense both indicate that “it’s almost certainly not a good idea to practice heading over and over and over.”
Filed under Uncategorized
By Chris Daly
At a glance, can you tell Doha, Qatar, from Kendall Square?
You make the call!
Hint: The top photo is from today’s NYTimes, the bottom photo is from today’s Globe.
Filed under Uncategorized
By Chris Daly
More slimy details emerge from the Murdoch scandals.
Today’s Times spotlights the unrepentant former deputy features editor at Murdoch’s News of the World.
Meanwhile, the Guardian focuses on the former spokesman for the British government, Alastair Campbell.
Filed under Uncategorized
for journalists, about polling. As we enter a busy election season, all these issues will come up again and again.
Thanks to Tom Patterson at the Kennedy School and his colleagues.
Filed under Uncategorized
Or clever but mean?
You be the judge of this satirical screenplay in today’s NYTimes magazine that imagines the Murdochs going to visit a family therapist.
It’s by Etan Cohen, (not Ethan Coen — one of “the Coen brothers”). ETAN is a screenwriterwho got where he is by the traditional route — go to Harvard, join the Lampoon, sit around and think up funny premises. Someone’s got to do it.
Filed under Journalism, Uncategorized
If you like spreadsheets (and who doesn’t?), then you will want to watch this video, which co-stars my next-door neighbor and tech guru Dan Bricklin.
Congrats, Dan.
Filed under computers, Uncategorized
By Chris Daly
Just to be clear: It is never OK to arrest a journalist (except in rare cases where the journalist is actively engaged in some activity that is a crime, like committing arson on a day off). When a journalist is working, the police have a positive duty not to interfere. The arrests of the journalists covering the Occupy movement are violations of their Constitutional rights. More importantly, those arrests violate the absolute right of the people to be informed about what John Adams called “the character and conduct of their rulers.”
To repeat, the First Amendment says:
Shame on those cops. Shame on their chiefs. Shame on those mayors.
Discipline the cops. Fire the chiefs. Recall the mayors.
Those things won’t happen, of course, so it’s up to the journalists on scene. Report, report, report. Take names and badge numbers. Call your lawyers. File suit.
Shoot video. Take pictures. Get audio.
[Yes, of course, I realize that there is another side to this argument: It is ludicrous to say that all journalists have an unlimited right to descend en masse on every crime scene, disaster site, drug bust, surveillance stake-out, courtroom, grand jury room, and so on. But that’s not what’s at stake in the Occupy arrests. These are not secret, investigative police actions. These are important public-policy matters, playing out in public (Yes, Zuccotti Park is private, but that seems like a technicality at this point, since the occupation is infused with such a public interest in its outcome). It is also disingenuous for police, when they start making arrests, to declare the area a “crime scene” just because they are making arrests and order all journalists to leave. If the police are allowed to do that, then journalists will never be able to watch the police at work and report about it. That would be a great day for the police but a bad day for everybody else. Even Justice Byron White, no friend of the news media, saw the threat. As he wrote in the majority opinion in the 1972 Branzburg ruling, “Nor is it suggested that news gathering does not qualify for First Amendment protection; without some protection for seeking out the news, freedom of the press could be eviscerated.”]
Filed under First Amendment, Journalism, Uncategorized
By Chris Daly
In his column today, the New York Times media columnist does a brutal take-down of Craig Dubow, the value-destroying former head of the Gannett newspaper chain. (It gives me great pleasure to describe Gannett as a “chain,” because for all the years that I worked at the AP, we were forbidden to refer to any of the big newspaper chains as chains, because they carried such clout on the AP Board that they has succeed in banning the term chain in connection with their own businesses.)
Long story short: Dubow eviscerated the company, then walked off with a $37 million “bonus” package. What a racket.
BTW. . . Here is the company’s updated logo. (To my mind, it carries a kind of creepy aftertaste: What exactly is within reach? Whose reach? Sheesh.)
Filed under Journalism, journalism history, New York Times, publishing, Tribune Co., Uncategorized
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