David Akin’s On The Hill

In all the resignations, accusations, protests and so on surrounding the BBC and its reporting of the pre-war intelligence that Lord Hutton now says was
not “sexed up”, I always wondered why Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter, or the organization itself wasn't risking some legal sanction if it was, in
fact, so wrong.
Conor Gearty asks — and answers — that very question in the current issue of the London Review of Books.:

A Misreading of the Law

Why didn't Campbell sue?
“If Gilligan's broadcast was so terrible, if the Blairs were having
sleepless nights as a result of being accused of deceit, if the prime
minister was shunned at home and abroad as a liar, the law has a simple
remedy, the one adopted by Albert Reynolds in the case that Hutton makes so
much of: sue for libel.”

For good or bad, I'm usually computing on three or four different machines. On each machine I'm receiving e-mail and surfing the Web. Generally, when I find something interesting, I plop the URL or the document into electronic Inbaskets I have on each machine with the intention of going through that inbasket and taking a closer look at what I've hauled in. This weekend was the one for going through the Inbasket on the G4 Cube I have in the home office. There's a pile of stuff in there, some of it really cool, some of it dated and trashed.
One of the coolest things in that inbasket, though, may be old news to many readers of this blog — this made its first round on the Internet several months ago — but if you haven't seen it yet check out this Honda commercial. (This is a 3.2 MB QuickTime file). So far as I know it aired only in the UK. It's a marvel of engineering (and some pretty decent cinematography, too: It's just one very long shot or take.)

Now this is rich: Janet Jackson's Super Bowl boob stunt has now been
condemned by the Free Speech Coalition, the U.S. trade association of the
adult entertainment industry.
In a press release the group put out yesterday, executive director Kat
Sunlove said “the entire half-time performance had distinctly sexual
overtones and was therefore inappropriate for a family show such as
Superbowl. We see it as a matter of giving parents adequate and timely
warning that such adult-oriented material is coming up. For example, people
and parents
know what children will see if they let them watch “Sex in the City”, or
programs
labeled as adult themed. That is obviously not the case with the Superbowl,
which is
expected to be family fare, a G rating, not PG-13. The adult entertainment
industry would never have
offered such titillating fare for a family show. There is a time and a place
for adult
entertainment and the Superbowl is neither.”

My friend Tyler Hamilton reports in today's Toronto Star that Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. is about to become the first Canadian municipality to roll out residential high-speed Internet service which uses power lines to carry data traffic. The Soo's local public utilities commission (PUC) will use Wi-Fi transmitters on hydro poles as its last-mile solution but power lines will be used as the transmission layer back to the PUC's central office where fibre will continue to be the main backbone to the wider Internet. 

I got some e-mail the other day from Andy Kaplan-Myrth, a law student at
the University of Ottawa. Andy wrote to
tell me that The Information Technology Law
Society at his university and the University of Windsor's IP/IT society “have launched a
project that aims to bring together from across Canada law students and
practitioners interested in helping people who are targeted” by the record
industry.

Just as the Recording Industry
Association of America has sued individuals in the U.S. it believes are
illegally trading music files, the Canadian
Recording Industry Association has threatened to sue file traders
in Canada. CRIA, if you ask its representatives, is a bit evasive on
details. U.S. law, for example, is significantly different than Canadian
law. There is no Canadian version of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
Moreover, the Copyright Board of Canada has ruled that it is perfectly legal
to make a single copy for personal use of a recording you own. In the U.S.,
any and all copying is illegal. So: We don't know what statutes CRIA will
cite if and when it sues Canadian file traders.

CRIA is also very quiet
when it comes to deciding when to file these lawsuits.
But whenever it happens, some Canadian law students plan to stand up for the
defendants through the the Canadian
File-sharing Legal Information Network
“CanFLI is meant to be a public advocacy project,” Kaplan-Myrth says,
“,collecting and making available information that can help ordinary people
who are sued by CRIA. At this point, CanFLI is agnostic on questions of
digital copyright reform and the likes. Rather, we want to make sure
Canadians get due process, can find lawyers who want to take on these cases,
and are informed about Canadian copyright law and Canadian procedure.”
An admirable mission that we hope makes it a little bit more of a fair fight when one of those most poweful industries in the world goes after its customers.

Folks who read this blog are (I hope) already up to speed on the wonders of wi-fi. But not everyone is so hip as you and I, dear reader. So we must spread the news, evangelize for all things high-speed and wireless. Happily, I have a great big soapbox for just this use called CTV National News, watched, I'm told, by as many as a million Canadians each evening. So, before Christmas, I whipped up an item for the newscast that could tell all those who had not yet heard that Wi-Fi was sure to be the Next Big Thing. Mind you, in one minutes and 50 seconds, there's not much more you could do other than sketch out some broad strokes and, with any luck, get viewers interested in this thing called Wi-Fi. The piece finally aired on Sunday night last. The link to watch the piece is under the Related Video section right here. It features Mark Wolinsky, co-CEO of hotspot provider Spotnik Mobile and Kirk Moir, CEO, of InMotion Technology, a provider of in-vehicle Wi-Fi access.

I tend to agree with Mr Honderich here. Whether on the Web or on dead trees,
a top newspaper brand is a reference point or a hub for other media,
electronic media, broadcast media, new media, and alternative media. In
other words, newspapers still have a powerful agenda-setting role that all
the indie media outlets, blogs and alternative journals in the world don't
seem to be able to change.
What all those alternatives do that is new, though, is challenge the agenda
of those media hubs, those top newspaper brands.

Newspapers Thriving in Electronic Era
Newspapers are becoming the sole mass medium, particularly for advertising, as television becomes more and more fragmented, claims Toronto Star publisher John Honderich.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an article trying to explain why those aged 18 to 30 are tuning out the mainstream media. “Kids don't “even vaguely connect to guys like Peter Jennings and Dan Rather,” says the producer of Dennis Miller's CNBC show. “If you're 18, who are you going to trust? Dan Rather or Jon Stewart?” I'd like to see someone explain the connection between this disconnected, newsless group and their pathetic voting records. Prior to the vote in Iowa, Howard Dean was seen as someone who was energizing the party and attracting a whole new group of young voters, people who had never even voted in an election before, let alone participated in a political movement. And yet, when it came down to it, the traditional political machinery (particularly unions who could deliver voters by the busload) was able to get voters out, to the benefit of the more traditional candidates, Kerry and Edwards. So why don't young people, who are crying for change in so many alternative media vote? Has no one explained to them that bad governments are elected by good citizens who don't vote?

Canada, the United States and South Korea have the highest proportions of Internet users among  13 countries surveyed by pollster Ipsos-Reid.  Canada led the way with 71 per cent of adults surveyed reporting they had gone online at least once in the 30 days prior to the survey.  Canada's estimated Internet population is 16 million people. South Korea was second with 70 per cent of its adult population online. The U.S. was third with 68 per cent of adults online.

A lot of those “Smart People” listed over there on the right have talked a lot on their blogs about Howard Dean, the U.S. Democratic primaries, and blogs. We're just starting to do the same thing here in Canada as the race to lead the new Conservative Party of Canada heats up. My Globe and Mail article this morning is a first stab at that. In it, I asked some Web design and communications experts to take a look at the site for, in alphabetical order, Tony Clement, Stephen Harper, and the latest entrant  in the race Belinda Stronach. They are each very different sites and Belinda's is the only one with a blog.