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
Wednesday, June 25
My Wordle
by
Jason
on Wed 25 Jun 2008 11:24 PM CST
Sunday, June 15
Pledge For Firefox 3.0 Download Day - June 17, 2008
by
Jason
on Sun 15 Jun 2008 09:48 PM CST
Firefox 3.0, the latest version of the popular open source web browser, is attempting to set a world record for software downloads in a single day.
On Tuesday June 17, over 1.3 million people (as of this writing) have pledged to download the new version of the software. I've been using a beta release of the software for a month or so and have to say it's a massive improvement over the current release. More info (including a very cool map showing how many people have pledged per country) is available here: Spread Firefox | Download Day 2008 Saturday, June 14
Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic
by
Jason
on Sat 14 Jun 2008 11:53 PM CST
This is how I sometimes feel...
My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. Check out this great article from The Atlantic Online which talks about how people read, how they do research and how that's changing in the age of the Internet among many other related topics that are covered. The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level. Where does Google fit in all of this? The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction. Lots to think about! (via MetaFilter) Friday, June 6
Friday Fun Link - Read at Work (and an unrelated story of why Shea is a computer genius) (June 6, 2008)
by
Jason
on Fri 06 Jun 2008 10:10 PM CST
Read at Work
is a site from the New Zealand Book Council that allows you to read classic books, poetry, samples from selected New Zealand authors and more, online and formatted to look like either the Windows XP interface and Powerpoint presentations. Very fun and cool (though I do not, of course, advocate performing non-work activities such as this while at work! Of course, if you work in libraries, this *is* work related...sort of.)
(via Reddit though I don't have the original link handy - you can search if you really need it) As for Shea being a computer genius, I'm sitting in a hotel room in Swift Current right now. We made sure the room had an Internet connection as I've brought my laptop with me. I plugged it in when we got here, checked e-mail then trundled off to the pool with Pace and Shea. When we got back, Shea went to the computer and asked, "How come it won't turn on?" I pushed the power button, sure I'd left it running when we left. Nothing. Again, holding it a few seconds. Nothing. "Oh fuck" is the non-paraphrased thought that came to mind. I ran through the checklist...did the screen give out? The motherboard? The hard drive? Hopefully the motherboard - that's the least bothersome major error. The hard drive has a full back-up but would be PAINFUL to redo everything. We're in a poolside room...maybe the humidity just temporarily short-circuited it or something? Wishful thinking but maybe it'll work tomorrow if I crank the air and say a prayer to the techno-gods before I fall asleep. So I'm laying in bed with Shea and Pace and Shea goes, "How long were we at the pool? Do you know if the plug in you used was working? Maybe it wasn't and the battery died?" My battery life is down quite a bit from when it was new (now I get maybe an hour whereas back then, I got 3-4 hours) but w weren't at the pool that long...were we? I plug the laptop into a different outlet and...voila...it boots no problem. So I must say my wife is a brilliant computer-engineer level of intelligence that I am daily in awe of. (Also, I was up and out of the house by 5am today to go do weeding in a distant community. So I drove 3 hours round-trip, did six hours of weeding, then drove another three hours to get here. So hopefully that's an excuse for being such a moron at why my computer "died" tonight.) God, I need sleep... (Oh yeah, I didn't plan to get up at 5am but I had a dream about being at the library weeding and the branch librarian had got her whole board of 10+ people there to help - but in exchange, they wanted me to help them move their entire library...which is in reality a big part of the reason why I was going out - to do a major weeding to help them prepare for an impending move. But yeah...I dreamt about weeding. I think I've reached the next level on the Librarian Nerd Scale!  ) |
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