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"The only reason that DRM is so rampant is because society has proven that they can't be trusted"

No the reason piracy is so rampant is because copyright law is corrupt and people know when the world is unjust even if they can't articulate it, the corporations stole the public domain first. Even if most of the public is ignorant of copyright law they can still smell the evil of corporations and their bought and paid for laws.

This is not new in history:

"Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrims Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich, for the advantage of the greatgrandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom make nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the words of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living. If I saw, Sir any probability that this bill could be so amended in the Committee that my objections might be removed I would not divide the House in this stage. But I am so fully convinced that no alteration which would not seem insupportable to my honorable and learned friend, could render his measure supportable to me, that I must move, though with regret, that this bill be read a second time this day six months."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/media/File:Copyright_term.svg

The piracy debate is always one sided and privileges business instead of talking about the criminal corporations/businessmen who's been taking your rights to own shit away and trying to pass piracy off a bad thing when games never reach the public domain because it was stolen by people like yourself and valve. Game licensing is a scam, games never go into libraries and are held in "intellectual property" limbo. The whole concept of IP and licensing when applied to games is a legal con and the fact that ignorant people like you eat it up and want to be corporate slaves is sickening.

http://www.onthemedia.org/story/265083-barely-any-us-culture-will-enter-public-domain-year/

http://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131231/23434825735/grinch-who-stole-public-domain.shtml

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131231/23434825735/grinch-who-stole-public-domain.shtml

Piracy is the only way things like video-games for instance will be preserved given that the source-code is confiscated/locked down and not going into libraries. Corporations stole our culture an illiterate like yourself is chastising the "thieves" when corporations are the biggest thieves of all time.

It reminds me of Librarians vs Patriot Act

you think people take the white house petitions seriously???? thats adorable

This story's a couple of years old, but here's one petition that was taken seriously:

http://www.onthemedia.org/stor...

I just thought of a few more. The one for student loan relief (capped after 20 yrs) and the one about Westboro Baptist being required to stand 300 ft from funerals.

What news agency is willing to be the first to fork over the money just to have the means to recoup the funds pulled out from under them? I think this idea is brilliant if you want to curb the FOIA requests you receive.

The real danger to news agencies is that The Daily Show, National Public Radio's On the Media program and other media critics will be able to see all the documents that the reporters were given, but did not report on.... so, IMHO, this new FOIA policy will really help to expose the biases of many mainstream news agencies.

A call to arms for the anhedonists of the World!!!!

... oh, why bother?

I'm not having a serious problem with this.

Did you know that Politics and Prose is the best independent bookstore in Washington and, IMHO, one of the best bookstores in the country? The Politics and Prose wikipedia page says it original co-owners "became known as literary tastemakers."

Consider that as you re-read the example I choose for the summary:

At Politics and Prose, the traditional [AMAZON BUY IT NOW] version — featuring the iconic eyes floating on a blue background — sold better than the DiCaprio [AMAZON BUY IT NOW] cover.

Do you see the problem now?

I'll end with a shout-out to the NPR program On The Media - I look forward to hearing OTM cover this issue!

(This post not edited by Brooke.)

The deal came in the wake of a consumer rebellion over the policy of locking cellphones to a carrier. A petition that garnered more than 114,000 signatures landed at the White House, and the Obama administration sided with the petitioners.

On The Media just put out some audio on this topic. They came to the conclusion that politicians on both sides (Democrat and Republican) are using some really questionable numbers. Harry Reid (Democrat) claimed 10 million, while John Boehner (Republican) was claiming that there was a *decline* in the number of people with health insurance over the past three months. http://www.onthemedia.org/stor... (7 minutes)

Olsson is pretty relaxed when the weirdness of Glass comes up — it's obviously the most common question she has to face when talking about the product. "It's interesting to see the parallels with headphones," she says. "The fact that people walk around with these huge headphones is kind of crazy, in a way. But now you don't think about it as technology, you think about it as something that delivers music to you."

This comparison felt fishy to me. Were people really that skeptical of Walkmen? After all, headphones were around for a long time before Walkmen were invented. A century had passed where people had gotten used to headphones, worn them at home. All Walkmen did was to take a familiar invention and make it portable.

But then I checked, and it turns out Olsson is right. Here’s the proof: a NPR story originally broadcast in 1981, when Walkmen were still pretty new. It’s mostly a series of man-on-the-street interviews, and people express a disgust for the newfangled invention that's very, very familiar:

You're all the old man yelling at the kid to "get offa my yard"

No wonder we plunged to 46th place on press freedoms...

Listen to this On The Media story or this article for details, but basically Reporters Without Borders changes its methodology every year, and the rankings are largely based on the perceptions of reporters within the respective countries, which is far from an objective measure. So as WP article states,

Most of the coverage is based on the premise that 2013 saw a sudden, alarming and perhaps unprecedented decline in media press freedom because the ranking dropped from the previous year. This is just bad data journalism for big two reasons. First, it confuses relative rankings with absolute scores – more on this later. Second, it ignores the fact that Reporters Without Borders has been raising and dropping the U.S. ranking for years.

I actually largely agree with your more abstract points, but it's worth pointing out that the entire press freedom ranking you cite is at best fairly misleading, and arguably entirely worthless. As the author of the article points out when interviewed on On The Media, Reporters Without Borders does some excellent work compiling statistics and incidents of press freedoms being impinged upon around the world. But their ranking system is best ignored.

Think for yourself, but have a look here.

Their statistics suck, even if their principles are sound.

Let us look at the last few years worth of rankings
2002 17th
2003 31st
2004 22nd
2005 44th
2006 53rd
2007 48th
2008 36th
2009 20th
2010 20th
2011-12 47th
2013 32nd
2014 46th

Seems like a yo-yo, maybe this index is more about creating headlines than true measure. Please do reference the On The Media story linked above.

Think for yourself, but have a look here.

Their statistics suck, even if their principles are sound.

It's too bad that the /. editor that posted this didn't dig into this shoddy piece of journalism before posting. You can read more about how arbitrary this "ranking" is at On The Media and then move along, there's nothing to see here.

That has not always been the case though. There was a time (fairly recent actually) when even the NRA and Reagan himself were in favour of gun control laws:

http://www.onthemedia.org/story/258691-untold-story-guns

At the end of the day, it all depends of who is caring the weapon and whether you consider that person a threat to you or not.

I am also NAL, but ownership of pictures is a little more involved than that, I'm pretty sure. Mugshots are already public, hence the mugshot photo sites remaining up. Ownership of pictures depends on the history of the picture. If you take, say, a dick shot of yourself, and send it to your girlfriend, she now legally owns the picture. At least in many states. Which is why the revenge porn laws, aimed at the people posting the photos, were passed, because otherwise posting pictures of your ex that you have legal ownership of is not against the law.

If, for instance, you take a topless photo of yourself, store it on your own computer, which is then hacked into, that's already illegal because of the hacking.

And apparently a lot of the pictures on these sites have been obtained through email hacking, and are therefore not revenge porn as such.

(On the Media covered this all in last week's show, and has an update on their site: http://www.onthemedia.org/

Oh, and as a side issue, on the media has decided to become a civil liberties clearing house, and currently has a little war on with DHS. Worth following.)

"Clearance" has always been a major part of making movies and TV shows. (You know why the little kid in E.T. ate Reese's Pieces? They couldn't get permission to use Skittles.)

Actually, it was M&M's, not Skittles. It is true that, now, the process of clearing rights to use materials or products that may be copyrighted or trademarked is a big part of making movies and TV shows. (Whether this has "always" been true, I don't know.) One problem is that most producers have given up on the concept of fair use: rather than risking complaints from copyright or trademark holders, the producers arrange clearance or make product-placement deals. This dilutes the concept of "fair use", because no one ever claims fair use any more.

Example: a documentary which included a cell phone ring-tone using the theme from the movie "Rocky". The film-maker ended up paying 2500 US dollars to include the "Rocky" ring-tone in the movie, even though from a legal perspective it was clearly fair use, because paying the money was less of a hassle than fighting. (From the radio program "On the Media".)

And this is one way rights get lost. Lawrence Lessig has written extensively on this topic.

The Kitty Genovese case was the announcement to the world of that sort of community involvement had ended. It had been coming for a while, but that was really the big thing that people could point to. You might not remember this, but it was where a young woman was screaming she was being stabbed for something like a half an hour before finally succumbing to her wounds. Nobody came to help or even called the police.

But the other side of the Kitty Genovese case is that the media constructed a narrative -- "38 people watched and did nothing" -- that demonstrably wasn't based in fact. There were maybe 2-3 people who (probably) knowingly ignored it, and at least one who tried to help. Most of them had no idea of what was going on.

It's worth thinking about why the story became what it did. From the media's point of view, mayhem sells -- "if it bleeds, it leads" -- and a ghastly, horrifying story is made all the more attractive when you add the "38 witnesses" angle. From a political point of view, there are certain...advantages...to making people feel fearful, cynical, and isolated. When you combine that with the right mix of anger and indignation, it can be very useful indeed.

Maybe if you believe no one cares, it's partly because the people who control the narrative want you to believe that no one cares.

Jokes are fairly difficult to copyright. According to the linked piece you can copyright the "delivery", but not the joke itself. You could technically go out, repeat Louis CK's act verbatim, and suffer no legal consequences**. In the comedy world, most of the consequences are social -- you hurt your reputation and damage your chances of booking well-paying gigs.

Magic is a different medium, but it appears that Teller is using the same idea of protecting "delivery," rather than the premise of the illusion itself.

**Ok, in real life, if you recreate an entire 90 minute act, chances are there will be something in there somewhere that could be found to be infringing on delivery.

A related story on NPR today points out that as a patient you don't have access to the data collected in and about your own body. The story focuses on one man's attempt to see his own data. He's looking for someone with technical skills to help him get at the data. Seems to me that somebody on /. should be able to help. http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/jan/20/who-owns-data-inside-your-body/

You need to take a look at the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). A violation of this act is a criminal matter. There have been a number of criminal cases brought by the government for TOS violations. Take a look at this article. http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/6189-can-terms-of-service-turn-you-into-a-criminal. How about this article http://www.onthemedia.org/blogs/on-the-media/2011/sep/28/senate-advocates-terms-of-use-reform-computer-fraud/. Note this quote
"Late last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved an amendment to the law that specifically decriminalizes terms of service violations." How do you "decriminalize" something that in not currently criminal? Here is the EFF article about the amendment. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/09/senate-committee-agrees-violating-terms-service-shouldnt. Here is the amendment. http://judiciary.senate.gov/legislation/upload/JEN11A19-Grassley-Franken.pdf

Your second point is moot because the ruling clearly states that the tabular data was not copyrightable and focused on the descriptions and pictures which are.

You are confusing the two aspects of the case; breach of contract and copyright infringement. The scraping was a breach of contract as it contravened the web site TOS which the court ruled is a binding contract. The display of copyrightable descriptions and pictures was ruled copyright infringement. These are separate issues in the case.

Actually, the legal consensus is that publishing the wiki leaks does NOT break any USA law. The person that gave the cables to wiki-leaks likely broke the law, but any subsequent publishing is legal. That is why there have been no charges, and why some USA politicians want to pass new laws to make this sort of thing illegal, but such a law most likely would be unconstitutional in the USA.

1. Clippy: Misunderstood animated pedagogical agent or spawn of Satan? - Invokes Sun Tzu

2. Why People Hate the Paperclip: Labels, Appearance, Behavior, and Social Responses to User Interface Agents. Impressive 65 Page PDF available from this abstract page.

3. People Who Hate Clippy, the Stupid Paper Clip from Microsoft Word (Wartburg Chapter). Emergency outreach

4. Meme:Clippy. Fanpic uploads @ end.

5. On Youtube.

6. How I Made Clippy Lovable. Stanford again. What is it with these guys? You know their mascot is a tree?

7. DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS. I think my nose just started bleeding.

8. Et tu DARPA?.

9. Senor Pedaso Molesto de Matal NPR transcript.

10. Back At'chya. Remember before they became inertia?

11. Hark the Herald.. Wait, DIE DIE DIE. Just sayin'.

12. Reflection.

Happy Clippymas! Hope the leaks result in a zillion times the cogitation invested in Clippy..

So far they haven't broken the treaty. Have they broken their word? Yes, by building the Qom facility when they told the IAEA they would announce any new developments.

By building a nuclear facility in secret they have broken the treaty. That's what the sanctions are about.

Iran is not stupid and not that crazy; they are rational and pragmatic.

The regime appears to be locked in a power struggle between the 'regular government' (for lack of a better term) and the Revolutionary Guard. Last week's on the media has a good analysis on how Iran has now become a dangerous place even for those who vocally support its policies because of this. Regimes that feel threatened in their existence are generally not known for the rationality of their actions.

Christian Zionists they do not believe they can "speed the coming of the apocalypse" by their actions

I'm not quite sure what you mean, but at best it smells of moral relativism stemming from a laziness to think or to get informed (I'm sure there's a term for that).

NPR On the Media covered this last week with a pretty good story: http://onthemedia.org/transcripts/2010/09/10/05

The other guilty party here is us, and by us, you do mean us, among everybody else [LAUGHS] in the media. We aired an interview with Heap back in May, and we were quite impressed with his story. You say that Heap has proved to be catnip for the media. Why do you think his narrative is so appealing?

That's an admission you don't hear too often in the press, oblique though it was.

-S

There was a media spoogefest over this software a while ago. It turns out that there are only 100 users and apparently it sucks in the first place.

We are in a world without precedent. While I share girlintrainings's skepticism and understand the point, I don't write off the capability of citizens to make the world and the government a better place.

THE WEB IS 17 YEARS OLD. Give it time.

Her point exactly. Would you say that world governments as a whole are heading towards less or more restriction of the internet? Yeah, I thought so.

And much of the censorship apparatus is being manufactured by...yep, you guessed it...Americans.

On the Media (a fantastic program if you haven't heard of it yet) covered this last month. Interview and transcript are here: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2010/02/26/03

WNYC's On The Media recently focused on books for their weekly show. One of the segments (you can listen or read transcript here: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/11/27/04) discussed a New York City University deans experiment with reading Dickens Little Dorrit four ways, the original (book), Kindle, iPhone and Audio. The result was a favorable report for all four with a "win" for the iPhone. It had a brighter screen, flipped pages faster and (to quote Woody Allen) 70% of success in life is showing up... The iPhone tended to be with her where other devices required pre-planning.

Personally I don't have a Kindle (they only very recently became available here in the frozen north) but I've been reading Project Gutenburg books on my iPhone since about the day after I got my iPhone. Love it.

NPR came-down on the "government funding is a good idea" viewpoint.

Gee what a surprise. A partially government-funded organization that thinks more government funding is great! They have inadvertently demonstrated how Uncle Sam dollars can skew viewpoints - naturally NPR is in favor of *more* Uncle Sam programs, because "he" is their sugar daddy. ;-) Honestly I've never heard either NPR or PBS espouse smaller government, or even interview a libertarian (like Congressman Paul). They are pro-statists.

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/10/30/03
Take For Granted
October 30, 2009

NPR just recently covered this issue. NPR came-down on the "government funding is a good idea" viewpoint. Gee what a surprise. A partially government-funded organization that thinks more government funding is great! They have inadvertently demonstrated how Uncle Sam dollars can skew viewpoints - naturally NPR is in favor of *more* Uncle Sam programs, because "he" is their sugar daddy. ;-)

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/10/30/03
Take For Granted
October 30, 2009

Specificaly, this segment.

On The Media has pretty good coverage in their October 30'th episode, which you can download as an .mp3.

NPR: equally hated by conservatives and liberals

See here for a relevant story by the folks at On the Media. http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/08/14/01

Transcript and audio are both available.

They point out some of the defects of the Communications Decency Act with some similar case histories.

What happens and what is your recourse when you are libeled anonymously online?

What do you do when the owner of a website refuses to divulge who created the posting, refuses to remove it, has no liability for it and the search engines refuse to eliminate it from their results.

They publish fake magazines, with fake studies in them, especially targeted to make doctors think they are real and therefore describe pills that kill their patients, or at least make them suffer while going broke, just so the pharma industry can make money.

Citation needed. The version I heard was that the studies we're all legit, but cherry-picked to help sell products. And note the past tense: they got caught, and stopped doing it.

Dishonest? Certainly. But not the evil murderous thugs in your version. Which, frankly, sounds like the usual fourth-hand blog bullshit. Use your brain before repeating such crap.

If the music clip is being used commercially it's not fair use -

Dude, don't repeat internet folklore as if it were a serious legal authority. This bit of folklore is popular amongst people who like to believe that re-using content is OK as long as they don't make money off it. Has no basis in fact.

I have never nor would ever make that claim. Making money off something doesn't make it commercial use, for example denying the owner of a work their commercial exploitation by giving away said work. You may have a insightful comment but slurring me by claiming I'd endorse that sort of weak trashy argument is not necessary. I think perhaps you're making the fallacy of the excluded middle here?

If I affect your commercial exploitation of your work by it's use, except in the limited fair use exceptions (in the US) criticism/news reporting/parody then that is not a fair use.

Here's an interview with two lawyers (one of them extremely pro-industry) who both endorse the idea that documentary use is fair use. The even cite that ring tone as a classic example:

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2006/05/19/07

OK, Boyle is a professor of law, but I think he's wrong in this instance. If the music were a simple clip that was captured and incidental to the scene then it would not matter what music it was. The director shot herself in the foot - she says it's an essential element, the specific theme, to that scene. Without that particular music the scene would not have worked. That's not incidental. Nor is it an insubstantial part - again if it were it wouldn't set the mood the director is trying to create.

If the director had said "it didn't matter what ring tone it was" then she could have claimed it as an incidental capture.

Incidentally I don't think this is just only that it is the reading that I would expect a court to give based on US law.

MHB apparently has made $8million+. If they didn't want to pay EMI then they can simply not use that music.

That is not even an argument. When you take away something that belongs to somebody else, there are many factors that decide whether or not it's legal. But the wealth of the takee is just not one of them. If you don't believe me, go steal Bill Gates's watch and see what happens.

And even if your argument were logical, it wouldn't apply. Because when the producer of MHB approached EMI, she didn't have an $8 million movie. She had a lot of uncut footage and a dwindling bank account that couldn't begin to cover all the coverage fees people were trying to extort from her. In order to get the movie made, she had to bargain, dub over, and even cut scenes because they showed kids dancing to music she couldn't get rights to, and it wasn't possible to dub over it.

One of the missing scenes featured Ray Charles's all time classic, "Hit the Road Jack." If that had been in the movie, I might have gone to see it just to watch kids dancing to it. But it had to be cut. And the issue wasn't even money! You can't get clearance for this song at any price, because the people who own its publishing rights consider it overexposed and are holding it off the market.

If the music clip is being used commercially it's not fair use -

Dude, don't repeat internet folklore as if it were a serious legal authority. This bit of folklore is popular amongst people who like to believe that re-using content is OK as long as they don't make money off it. Has no basis in fact.

Here's an interview with two lawyers (one of them extremely pro-industry) who both endorse the idea that documentary use is fair use. The even cite that ring tone as a classic example:

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2006/05/19/07

On the Media, a weekly NPR show, had an interview with Robert Darnton last week.

Some people are clearly worried that Google is getting so big. I doubt we'll see too many companies even attempt to do the massive book scan that Google is. If/when Google tries to abuse its digital monopoly power over these books, antitrust regulators will almost certainly step in and force Google to license the data to competitors. Worrying about their potential monopoly power is hardly good reason to try to stop them at this point; some access through Google is certainly better than none.

On the Media, a weekly NPR show, had an interview with Robert Darnton last week.

Some people are clearly worried that Google is getting so big. I doubt we'll see too many companies even attempt to do the massive book scan that Google is. If/when Google tries to abuse its digital monopoly power over these books, antitrust regulators will almost certainly step in and force Google to license the data to competitors. Worrying about their potential monopoly power is hardly good reason to try to stop them at this point; some access through Google is certainly better than none.

There was a story on NPR last week about a CalTech professor writing an economics text book and releasing it under CC license: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/09/05/05

NPR's On The Media ran a great story about the media in China a few months ago. Well worth a listen. One of the interesting things they noted was that while reporting on national issues is often self-censored due to fear of reprisal, on the provincial and local level it is possible to do hard-hitting investigative reporting on neighboring areas.

Not much of this stuff ever hits the Western mainstream media, but it is there, and it's made an impact. Censorship on a national level is still a huge problem in China, but there are reporters out there doing good work, and getting that work published.

Here is a link to a partial transcript of the show.

I don't have the energy to go through this all over again, so I'll punt to the experts:

http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-6700447/Scrubbing-dirty-bombs-explosive-hype.html

Steven Musolino of Brookhaven National Laboratory, who worked on the dirty bomb experiments with Harper, summed it up this way: "Pretty much everything bad happens within 500 meters, and to a large extent [the bad effects] don't happen." That conclusion jibes with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's fact sheet on dirty bombs, which says the long-term health risk of limited exposure to radioactive particles is probably "extremely small." The commission categorizes the dirty bomb not as a weapon of mass destruction, but as a weapon of mass disruption.

http://www.news.uiuc.edu/gentips/02/07dirtybomb.html

Even if terrorists got access to radioactive isotopes and wrapped them around a conventional explosive device - an unlikely scenario, according to Palmore - the real danger would come from the explosion, not the spread of radioactive material. "If you're thinking in terms of pellets of radioactive material that might be spread through an explosion," he said, the danger is minimal because "it doesn't disperse in the air; you would just go through the area with a Geiger counter and clean it up."

http://www.notposta.com/?p=19

Dirty bombs are overrated. No one receives a lethal radiation dose from a dirty bomb, besides the bomber.

http://www.onthemedia.org/yore/transcripts/transcripts_072503_fear.html

To many experts, the dirty bomb is the most over-rated weapon in the terrorist arsenal. That's because the actual loss of life and property from such an attack probably would be relatively limited.

Long story short: Dirty bombs don't work. It's not nearly as easy to distribute radioactive materials as the media would have you believe.

On the Media had an interview (transcript and mp3 download available) last week with Internet Archive co-founder Brewster Kahle. about his personal experience with the national security letter. Interesting stuff, but perhaps not much new if you've been keeping up with this.

On the Media had an interview (transcript and mp3 download available) last week with Internet Archive co-founder Brewster Kahle. about his personal experience with the national security letter. Interesting stuff, but perhaps not much new if you've been keeping up with this.

There is no fair use exemption for redistributing content. There is nothing that allows you to "build" on another's property to make your own in this context.

For example, no matter how cute I think it might be to overlay Neil Diamond's "Heartlight" with the word "head" everywhere Neil is singing "heart", all I can legally do is play the result for myself. Should I take this "derivative work" and publish it in any form - including just making it available for download on the Internet - I will (rightfully) get sued. I don't get any points for it being a parody, for some kind of fair use, for it being some kind of "sampling" or anything else.

Are EULAs legal? Absolutely. Every time one has come up in court it has been ruled enforceable. At no time has a EULA ever been struck down. Good thing that the EULA known as GPL v2 is built on solid ground, isn't it?

As for your idea that somehow including a public performance of a ringtone is "fair use", I'm afraid you are very, very wrong. There is no such thing as fair use when it comes to redistribution in any form - and including casually recorded sounds is certainly redistribution.

This brings to mind a story I recently heard on NPR's On The Media. It was about how public webpostings made at age 19 can linger and retain the power to embarass years later. (Transcript of story http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/05/25/0 4here). In her heady youth, Ms. Rafsanjani (now a producer for OTM) wrote a letter to an Iranian newspaper defending America and attacking Iranian policies, and in the typical style of a teenager, her letter was idealistic, impassioned and over-the-top. It mortifies her to this day.

What was interesting to me about this piece was how, despite wishing she could supress the letter, Ms. Rafsanjani eventually became resigned to having this information out there, and although it embarassed her, she welcomed the opportunity to discuss it further on NPR, because it gave her a way to control the story. She wanted people who found that previous piece to know that her thinking had evolved, and that she no longer feels that way. I think that something similar is happening in the article you linked. Although she was unable to get her name off of that one blog, by participating in an article about using "reputation defenders," the first woman in the article is able to get the message out that SHE has changed, that she regrets the incident from her past, and that she wants people to know she is not bigoted. Whatever one thinks of the content of her claims (I don't know enough to say), I think that brings up an important point. The best way to handle certain potentially damaging bits of information in one's past, especially online, is not always to supress it. Sometimes the ideal situation is to go out there and use one's own name to defend oneself, to clarify one's point of view, and give one's own side of the story.

NYPD Blue went on the air in the 1990s, and it did more than just about any prime-time show before or since to make a case for the legitimacy of (partial) nudity and profanity on the airwaves. The crackdown didn't come until the Bush Administration decided to make some hay out of "indecency" on television.

There was an NPR interview with Stephen Bochco in 2006 where he said the following about NYPD Blue:

"You know, we made twelve years of that show, and it really was only in the last two years, I would say, that we began to feel the sort of restrictive vise of these new broadcast standards .... What you had to realize is that the FCC essentially serves at the pleasure of the administration, and as the administration in power turns more conservative, the FCC is going to be completely reflective of the philosophies of the administration. I think that's what we're dealing with now."

Transcript here.

I mean, you can choose to take Bochco at his word or not. But the fact remains that NYPD Blue, a broadcast network television program, was using words like "bullshit" and "dickhead" in prime time until fairly recently. Bochco blames the Bush Administration for the current crackdown on that kind of language. Is he really making that much of a stretch to say so?

Here's how the mis-addressed email thing works. Politicos in the White House or elsewhere, have mistakenly typed .org instead of .gov when addressing their emails. The www.whitehouse.org owners are none to happy with Bush's politics, and so routinely forward their emails to Greg Palast, whose reputation is well known. Mystery solved. Palast says this much in most of his books. While American networks avoid Palast like the plague, largely because he is at odds with the media-moguls, he has had his own show on the BBC for years and is considered a good source for what is really happening in the US by the Europeans. He has also appeared on the NPR show On the Media and on Democracy Now from Pacifica Radio.

A gift, not a bribe? You should go into politics.

It's worth noting that a lot of bloggers have no notion of journalistic ethics. Here's a particularly nasty story about bloggers who can't even be bothered to get their quotes straight.