When Jessamyn West was here for SLA, this topic came up at the after-event gathering. I meant to post something about it at that time when the story was still somewhat fresh but never got to it, being as busy as I was with much more important matters like cute baby pictures and Flash-based Friday Fun Links.
A recent invite to the annual Sask Blogs summer picnic reminded me of the fact that the Sask Blogs Aggregator, a site which creates a rolling summary of posts from various Saskatchewan-based and Saskatchewan-themed blogs, is still down.
But I'm getting ahead of myself...
In mid-April, a right-wing, Sask-based blog named "Small Dead Animals" posted a link to another conservative site named FreeDominion that had posted a story about Canadian civil rights lawyer, Richard Warman. As with most blogs, FreeDominion accepts comments. Warman saw these and made the claim that the comments were defamatory. He sued but in a unique twist, he didn't just name FreeDominion (which allowed the comments) but also sites that linked to the FreeDominion story such as Small Dead Animals (and therefore, were re-publishing these comments indirectly in his view.)
Although the case was still in the works and linking to a third-party site that may contain libelous or defamatory material hadn't yet been defined as legal or illegal by a court, the Sask Blogs aggregator shut down their service completely out of concern that a similar charge could be leveled against them - either for linking to Small Dead Animals or to any of the other dozens of blogs that who were part of their feed and which may contain similar borderline comments which could be actionable.
Here's a summary from the Regina Leader-Post of the whole situation.
I gotta say, I'm with the right winger on this and think that the civil rights lawyer is stretching too way far. If FreeDominion libeled you or allowed you to be libel, that's one thing. But suing every single site that links to the story (or links to a site that links to the story - hey, I just realised, because of all the links I've thrown out to the various sites involved in this case, I'm implicated now too! In fact, because of the interconnected nature of the Internet, every possible site that includes links to other sites is guility as well! Oh-oh - do you know what that means? That's it - shut down the Internet - it's over. Links are no longer allowed!)
Okay, kidding aside, does anyone see the irony in a civil rights lawyer being responsible for an action that's stifled freedom of speech and sharing of information, not only in the original offending site but for numerous harmless bystanders? To me, this is sort of like the copyright issue where someone is trying to apply old-world views of how things work now to a new world. In the old days, yeah, if someone else repeated a libelous statement, they were responsible. But in the Internet age, where a link is a click away, a statement can go out to a million people as easily as to a dozen, the old paradigms simply don't work anymore. "The genie is out of the bottle" is a phrase I think of all the time in situations like this. Warman is trying to corral the spread of whatever libelous statements were made but somewhere, someone is going to be able to access them. That's the new world and we all have to accept that.
At any rate, the Sask Blogs aggregator was a great, volunteer service that I miss a lot. I tend to read blogs that are in my narrow areas of interest or written by people I know so Sask Blogs was a simple way for me to get an overview of what people were writing about across the province - from all viewpoints, all writing styles, all geographic locations, all manner of topics from personal to political and everything in between.
Hopefully this case will be resolved and Sask Blogs will be back soon.
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Monday, June 30
Link to Another Blog That Allows Its Users To Post Libelous Comments - Get Sued Yourself!
by
Jason
on Mon 30 Jun 2008 11:42 PM CST
Sunday, March 9
CLA's 2nd Annual Survey of Challenged Materials in Canadian Libraries
by
Jason
on Sun 09 Mar 2008 07:08 PM CST
Continuing yesterday's trend of posting items long after their "best before" date, here's a press release from the Canadian Library Association
summarizing their second annual survey of challenges to materials in Canadian libraries.
Oliver Twist, The Golden Compass and Rolling Stone magazine were among the library materials challenged by Canadian library users in 2007, according to a new survey released today. The Canadian Library Association’s 2nd annual Survey of Challenged Materials in Canadian Libraries identified 42 items challenged by patrons. Children’s books, mainstream films, graphic novels and popular magazines were all challenged, and a policy on Internet access was also disputed. The survey was released in advance of Freedom to Read Week, February 24 to March 1. Saturday, March 1
FTRW - "The Charms of Wikipedia" (with discussion of the policy of deleting of "non-notable" articles)
by
Jason
on Sat 01 Mar 2008 11:25 PM CST
Author Nicholson Baker takes a look at Wikipedia and includes a critique of the number of articles being deleted for less-than-solid reasons. [Edit to add a link to the article which is a pretty important detail to leave out!]
In the fall of 2006, groups of editors went around getting rid of articles on webcomic artists—some of the most original and articulate people on the Net. They would tag an article as nonnotable and then crowd in to vote it down. One openly called it the "web-comic articles purge of 2006." ... Rob Balder, author of a webcomic called PartiallyClips, likened the organized deleters to book burners, and he said: "Your words are polite, yeah, but your actions are obscene. Every word in every valid article you've destroyed should be converted to profanity and screamed in your face." Friday, February 29
FTRW - Tories Plan To Withhold Funding for "Offensive" Productions
by
Jason
on Fri 29 Feb 2008 06:54 AM CST
Tories plan to withhold funding for 'offensive' productions
"Would this committee put money into Juno? It might not want to encourage teen pregnancy. Would the government put money into a film with a dirty title, like Young People Fucking? Would they invest in something like Brokeback Mountain? They might not want to encourage gay cowboys to have sex together in Alberta." (via Cenobyte - whose FTRW credentials are strong. Last year, she let me say "scrotum" AND "nut sack" on her radio show during a discussion about Freedom to Read Week.) Thursday, February 28
FTRW - Rotten.com
by
Jason
on Thu 28 Feb 2008 09:07 AM CST
One of the semi-frequent questions/complaints I get from our branch librarians is how to deal with patrons who are looking at pornography. But during my training, one branch librarian mentioned that she'd had an incident with a patron looking at something much much worse: rotten.com
(I don't usually do warnings on my blog but I'm doing one here. Although there's nothing disturbing on the Rotten.com front page that I linked to above, remember that you can't "unsee" anything you see once you start clicking on the links on that page!  ) Rotten.com bills itself this way: The soft white underbelly of the net, eviscerated for all to see: Rotten dot com collects images and information from many sources to present the viewer with a truly unpleasant experience. while Wikipedia sums it up like this: [Rotten.com] is devoted to morbid curiosities, primarily pictures of gruesome fatalities, deformities, autopsy or forensic photographs, depictions of perverse sex acts, and historical curios that are disturbing or misanthropic in nature. (There's also a summary on Wikipedia of a few of the site's legal challenges.) I've got mixed feelings about the site myself. Does seeing a picture of a decapitated person (to take but one example of what you might see if you click through the links on the site) harm you in some way? Is it illegal? Is it immoral? (And is that simply a cultural construct or a personal bias? Or is this an absolute value?) On the other hand, is the site just a way to satisfy natural human curiosity? Is it better to be able to see this type of material rather than having it hidden? (The US policy of not allowing photos of caskets returning from Iraq is on the very opposite end of the spectrum.) Is it any different than the six o'clock news where you can regularly see video of people being killed, dying, being tortured, being assassinated, and god knows what else. It's explicit but on some level, is it any different than a site like MyFreeImplants.com (again, as just one example among hundreds that could be cited.) Salon.com has an article exploring some of these questions called "The Internet's Public Enema #1: Will Rotten.com ever be kicked offline?" But Rotten.com isn't just a database of the disgusting; it's also a venue for making a point about censorship, at least according to "Soylent," the pseudonymous proprietor of Rotten.com, whose highly graphic content has earned him enemies around the world. The site is currently being investigated by Scotland Yard and the FBI for cannibalism. The German Family Ministry has threatened Soylent with legal action if he doesn't find a way to shield minors from his site. And then there's the endless cease-and-desist letters that flood in from a long list of major corporations that object to the site. "Rotten dot-com serves as a beacon to demonstrate that censorship of the Internet is impractical, unethical and wrong," Soylent writes in his manifesto, adding that nothing he posts there can't be found elsewhere. "To censor this site, it is necessary to censor medical texts, history texts, evidence rooms, courtrooms, art museums, libraries, and other sources of information vital to functioning of free society." Tuesday, February 26
FTRW - German Authorities Slam "The God Delusion For Kids"
by
Jason
on Tue 26 Feb 2008 04:53 PM CST
I was a bit disappointed to click through and realise this book wasn't actually a version of Richard Dawkins' book for young people (which would be awesome!).
But the sentiment of this controversial German kid's book certainly fits with Dawkins anti-religion polemic. The German Family Ministry is pushing for the children's book "How Do I Get to God, Asked the Small Piglet," written by Michael Schmidt-Salomon and illustrated by Helge Nyncke, to be included on a list of literature considered dangerous for young people. The authors and publishers have released the book online in English so that interested parties can read it themselves. Monday, February 25
Happy Freedom To Read Week (Feb 24 - March 1)
by
Jason
on Mon 25 Feb 2008 09:40 PM CST
Didn't get a chance to post yesterday so missed kicking off FTRW on its official start date. But never one to be a day late and a dollar short, here's a link to the main web site for Freedom to Read to kick off the week. Explore, read, look for events in a community near you!
Saturday, January 12
Tracking Challenges in Canadian Libraries: 2nd Annual Survey
by
Jason
on Sat 12 Jan 2008 01:32 PM CST
Please find below direct access to a one page web survey produced by the Advisory Committee on Intellectual Freedom. This second annual survey is intended to help the Committee develop documentation about challenged resources and policies in Canadian libraries in the 21st Sunday, November 11
John Wellington "Wally" Peet (1919-2007)
by
Jason
on Sun 11 Nov 2007 01:59 AM CST
 Five Things Grandpa Peet and I Talked About During Pretty Much Every Conversation We Ever Had 1. The Stock Market 2. The Price of Oil 3. The Blue Jays 4. The Weather 5. The Stock Market I was honoured to give the eulogy at Grandpa Peet's funeral this year, him having passed away only a week after Pace was born. Needless to say, that was a time of the highest of highs and lowest of lows of my entire life, all within a period of a few days. The funeral was a decent affair as far as these things go - fairly light on the overwrought rhetoric and sombre tone that marks so many funerals but with a couple unique moments I'll never forget. One was right at the end when three couples that Grandpa and Grandma used to dance with regularly, waltzed right out of the chapel where the funeral was held to Anne Murray's song, "Could I Have This Dance?".  I knew in advance that this would happen and thought it would be the part of the funeral where I'd be most likely to get emotional. But it was such an uplifting, happy way to end that instead, any tears I had were (strangely at the funeral of your last living grandparent) tears of joy - a fitting final tribute to a long, well-lived, successful life. The other moment that I didn't expect to affect me much ended up hitting me much harder than I ever thought it would. It was when some members of the local Royal Canadian Legion stood to perform a tribute to my grandfather - something that apparently happens at the service of any deceased member of the armed forces. One member read "The Ode of Remembrance"... They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old; Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them. ...and then, as "The Last Post" bugle call played over the speakers, one by one, six different Legionnaires marched to the front of the chapel, saluted, marched to a wreath that the first person had placed and pinned a poppy to it, returned to their spot, saluted again, then returned to their seat. I'm not a complete pacifist but if you know me, you know that I lean pretty strongly that way. So as I said, it was a bit of a shock at how much this brief ceremony affected me. It made me realise that my grandfather had done things in his life that I likely would never have to (partly because he did them when he did). It reminded me how different our lives had been, not just that he had been to war and I hadn't but just how different our entire experiences of being alive were even though we were born only fifty-odd years apart. It affected me because I knew the reason I was able to get the job that I did right out of library school was because a young man with a value set very similar to my grandfather's had chosen to go to Afghanistan out of a sense of duty to his country with all the risk that entailed rather than contentedly sitting at a desk in Weyburn Saskatchewan, buying books and supervising a network of rural library branches. And it hit me because, as each of those octogenarians marched, slowly but with purpose, to the front of the room, I thought what it must be like to do this ceremony for yet another one of their deceased comrades, knowing how close to the end of their lives they were as well and what it would mean to our society to lose this generation. A bit more about one of these points which I also touched on in the eulogy I read that day - what a stunning relevation it was to realise that my grandfather and I had both been in England as young men in our 20's - him as a soldier risking his life as a tank driver in the Netherlands, me as a student who, because of what he and so many others did during the war, was able to visit the Netherlands during my time in Europe as a carefree tourist with not a care nor concern in the world. This is an extremely hard thing to admit on a public blog but I don't wear a poppy in November. This is partly because I feel that if you show support for one cause, you should show support for all of them that you believe in, partly because of my feeling towards wars (even just ones) in general (I think of the hypocrisy of people saying "I'm against the war but I support the troops") and partly because of my inherent resistance to anything which 99.9% of the population partakes in as the ultimate form of peer pressure and conformity. Are those good reasons? I don't know. Have I ever worn a poppy? Yes. Could I wear one next year? Maybe. Would I feel like a hypocrite if I did? Ask me when I do. Do I slip money into the bins where they sell them? Sometimes. Do I think about what Remembrance Day means each and every year? Probably more than many people who slip that poppy on like a politician's smile. In fact, I usually shed a tear or two on Remembrance Day in my own private way. It's just that today, those tears will be more directly meaningful than they ever have been before. I'll end the way I started... Five Things My Grandpa Peet and I Rarely Talked About 1. His experiences as a tank driver in Europe during WWII 2. What It Was Like For Him Growing Up On the Prairies in the First Half of This Century 3. How He Met and Fell In Love With My Grandma 4. Politics, Religion and Philosophy 5. His Dreams, His Hopes, His Fears Throughout His Life But we did talk about each of these things at least a bit during his life and for that, I am grateful. And more than anything, those are the things I will remember today. Friday, October 12
Friday Fun Link - What The F***? Why We Curse (Oct 12, 2007)
by
Jason
on Fri 12 Oct 2007 10:51 PM CST
I’ve done a pretty fucking exhaustive swearing-related FFL before but this fucking article is a nice fucking addition to that list. Fuck yeah!
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