Anthony De Rosa

Reddit users have taken it upon themselves to draft legislation in place of SOPA and PIPA, unsatisfied with Washington politicians, who seem to have shown a willful ignorance of how the Internet actually works. Using a Google Doc open for anyone to help write and edit, they’ve come up with a draft version of “The Freedom of Internet Act”

The act addresses some basic tenets they’ve set forth. Note that these proclamations are subject to change as this is a living document and only reflect the content at the time of this publication:

• Censorship – No government of any form presiding over any land, people, or assets in any form within the United States of America shall pass any law, nor ratify any treaty, which imposes or administers any kind of censorship on the Internet, except content found to be illegal content in accordance with this act.
• Culpability – Only the creator or uploader of data is responsible for whether that data is legal to upload, possess or make available to other users or information services.
• Restrictions on the Internet - No federal union or sovereign state may pass unilateral restrictions on the Internet.
• Content removal - Notice must be given to an administrator of the information system and to the uploader of the content within at least 30 days in advance of any deletion of data from any information system or service, or within 24 hours of the transfer of the data in question from publicly accessible storage to privately accessible storage.
• Judicial proceedings - Anyone undergoing judicial proceedings based on this document must be judged in the courts of the nation where the alleged offence was committed.
• Appropriate punishment - TBD
• Rights of the user – Addresses right to anonymity, privacy, use of proxies, encryption without fear of discrimination or suspicion.
• Liability and Settlement of Copyright Infringement Claim - All calculations related to this are to be carried out in a consumer, retail, individual level pricing upon which the production cost, marketing cost will not influence, capped at 200% of calculated damage.

The sub-Reddit page for FIA is located here, where it was created by a user named “RoyalwithCheese22”

The act aims to protect transformative works derived from copyrighted materials, such as mash-ups, memes and many other types of content shared on sites like Reddit, YouTube, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter. It also seeks to try to address issues at an international level not just domestically in the United States.

1) If an individual resided in more than one country when committing violation(s) of this document, they shall be judged based on their physical location at the time of the offence.

2) The individual in question may demand extradition to their country of residence or citizenship, where they must then be tried for the listed offences. The court proceeding shall judge the crime as if the offence had been committed in his country of residence or citizenship during the event of the crime.

3) No person is to be extradited, deported or forced to leave, nor forcibly taken from a country for the need of legal proceedings. Any legal proceeding must be conducted in the country of which the crime was committed.

For more on the act and an interview with the original creator of the document, read this post by Dean Praetorious at the Huffington Post.

In an attempt to shoehorn the social media genie back into the bottle, Sky News has told its reporters they cannot retweet non-Sky sources and must not stray from the topic area or beat that they cover when posting tweets on their Twitter accounts. Not only does this make for a staid and boring feed, but it also puts Sky News reporters at a significant competitive disadvantage to places like Reuters, where we have reporters verifying and tweeting out sources of news from all over the web and from many different news outlets.

Their own boss @RupertMudoch doesn’t even follow these new rules, he frequently references news organizations outside of his own, as @RossNeumann points out. The idea here at Reuters when it comes to social media is to be the beacon for all news, which makes us the go-to source, no matter what the source may be, after being put through our own filters of verification. I’ve written before about how important it is for my own company, Reuters, to be careful if they try to tread in these same waters.

There are occasions where we may share a bit of news or simply cite what other folks on Twitter are saying as a retweet, which in Twitter parlance is an act of quoting someone. It doesn’t imply an endorsement or even an acknowledgement that it is a statement of fact. It is an act of stating, “look here at what this person is saying.”

Sky should take care and make sure that their journalists are not spreading lies and misinformation. This is the first rule of journalism — but that is not what these policies are about and don’t help to enforce. Sky News Digital News Editor Neal Mann, who goes by @fieldproducer on Twitter, is someone I consider a far-off friend, someone I was lucky enough to meet recently and have known over Twitter for some time. We also share many other friends who met Neal through Twitter because he’s become such a trusted and reliable source of news in many different areas and topics. So many people appreciate Neal that they’ve even created a hashtag to protest the new rules that Sky has put into place: #savefieldproducer.

These new rules will hamstring Neal and make it difficult, if not impossible, for him to continue to do what he did to garner so much appreciation from people like me. I suspect Sky will come to their senses and realize the error of their ways. If not, they’re going to lose one of their best ambassadors in Neal, and I would suspect many people working at Sky may wonder if they’re working for an organization that is writing policies that will drive them into obsolescence.

For another good take on this, check out Mathew Ingram’s post for Gigaom, and Cory Bergman for BreakingNews.com

Elana Zak did a nice job putting together a Storify of the reaction to this news on social media.

Update 2/8: BBC tells their journalists not to break news on Twitter, but now claims, that’s not entirely accurate. I Storify’d what BBC had to say about their new policy here.

There’s a bit of a debate going about whether Twitter’s new censorship policy is reasonable or not. My colleague Paul Smalera wrote one of the better posts leaning toward Twitter’s policy having some merits, in the way it makes it easier for those outside censoring countries to see what’s being censored. But I also see some flaws with this, which Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin helped me realize. She calls it “a polite step down a slippery slope”

First, the very act of tweets being censored in those countries, even if those outside the country can read them, removes an early warning system for the folks in country to know of incoming danger. Let’s say, for example, there is a riot on the march toward the village they live in, or there is police activity by an oppressive regime under which they’re force to live headed their way. Twitter’s supposedly enlightened method of censorship isn’t going to protect them.

You also can’t assume everyone is a geek. Some activists use Twitter simply because it’s a broadcast medium and have no idea how to hack their way around censorship. They may have no knowledge, for example, about Tor, an application that can help sidestep the type of blocks that countries try to use to stop citizens from reaching certain bits of information or, in some cases, the entire Internet.

According to Xeni, the real reason Twitter would want to implement this policy is because they want to have a physical presence in these countries. And they can’t have boots on the ground without giving in to some of the demands of the governments in places like China, India, and in the UK, where there are more nuanced defamation laws.

It’s easy to accept censorship in other countries when you’re privileged enough to know what’s being censored. I would like to assume that the ability to see what is being censored will lead to something being done by outside parties, but that requires political courage, and possibly even military action, that many countries ravaged by global recession neither have the resources nor the stomach for.

View the full discussion that came up in response to my support for Paul’s column — “Is Twitter’s censorship policy a good one?” — on Storify.

Word came down yesterday that Twitter will begin giving the governments of some countries the ability to request to have messages censored over their service. This is a big change from Twitter General Counsel Alex Macgillivray’s previous statement from last year that the company was “from the free speech wing of the free speech party.”

Twitter claims they have not yet censored anyone under this new policy and will tell the public when they do, possibly with greater cooperation with the website Chilling Effects.

One has to wonder if the Arab Spring could have happened the way it did under this new policy. Since censored tweets will still be available for people outside of the country doing the censoring, does that simply make those banned tweets more powerful? If everyone else in the world can see what is being blocked, will it have the opposite of the intended effect and bring greater worldwide attention to possible injustices?

For a reasonable, smart analysis of the new Twitter policy, check out this great post by Paul Smalera.

Imagine you’re a reporter and you suddenly witness a major news event occurring right before your eyes. Do you snap it to the wire, file a story to your website, or tweet it out to your followers? If you’re at the AP, you damn well better not choose the latter.

In a perfect world, you’d want to do all the above, though your employer is going to likely want you to do the first two before you tweet. Today, Reuters is a lot more than just a wire service. We’ve built — and are continuing to build — what we think is the world’s greatest news website, in the form of Reuters.com, and part of that is providing our readers with reliable and timely news, information, opinion and analysis.

An extension of that website is the information we post on our social media accounts, at Google+, Twitter and on Facebook. We’re not just reporting our own news there, but have become a beacon for all news, being as comprehensive as possible so readers come to us first for all they need to know. We’ve got things like Counterparties, created by Ryan McCarthy and Felix Salmon that does a great job at bringing news from around the web to our readers.

The wire is still a huge part of our business and always will be. However, acting in a way that handcuffs us from doing our best work on Reuters.com and on social networks, which help drive traffic and extend our brand, is writing a death sentence for us as a future media company. To bury our head in the sand and act like Twitter (and who knows what else comes into existence next month or five years from now?) isn’t increasingly becoming the source of what informs people in real-time is ridiculous.

In order to compete with these new and existing technologies, our wire will need to increasingly become better and faster, not only for our subscribers but for the reporters using it to file reports. The fact that it is easier to fire off a Tweet than it is to snap a wire report is unacceptable. Having a policy where you’re asked never to post something on Twitter before it goes out over the wire will put us at a competitive disadvantage, as other news organizations develop a reputation for being the first to report accurately all the news that matters. As my esteemed colleague Robert MacMillan points out: “in some cases, the tweet before the scoop might be the only way to beat your competitor if your competitor has no restrictions on tweeting,” and “when a news outlet tells a reporter, “don’t tweet first,” in some cases that means that news outlet has lost the edge.”

The institutional brand building you create by having your journalists be great on social platforms cannot be underestimated. Part of having your journalists on these platforms is giving them the freedom to be a normal human being, not a robot, a PR machine or a slave to the wire. Do we want to serve the wire above all, since our paying customers deserve to get that information first? Yes, we do. But we can do that without sacrificing the incredible value we create by making ourselves a must-follow on all social networks because of the information we provide and two way conversations we can have with our readers. We can only do that if we’re not tied down by rules that ignore the reality of the present and the future of media.

Our direct competitors and two guys in a basement somewhere are already developing tools to be the next generation newsroom. If we’re not busy doing the same thing, we’re dead.

The very platform this post is appearing on is undergoing a bit of a revolution. The rise of blogs over the past decade has begun to give way to microblogging platforms, such as Twitter and Tumblr. The difference between the two is that microblogs tend to rely heavily on short bursts of information: links, photos, videos and brief messages. Blogger fatigue gave way to sharing smaller, less labor intensive bits of content.

The short timely updates have not gone unnoticed. Twitter has become something of a wire that provides up to the second reports about breaking news from around the world, used by both large traditional news outlets and freelance reporters. Tumblr is used by ABC journalist Matthew Keys for, among other topics, coverage of the Japan earthquake, which was recognized with a nomination by the Online News Association for the best breaking news by a small site. Until recently, Keys was a freelancer, but his online reporting on microblogging platforms drew attention and led to his recent hire by ABC.

While Twitter’s membership rate grew 26% over the past year, according to Search Engine Journal, Tumblr’s rate has been equally, if not more impressive. According to ComScore, Tumblr attracted 13.4 million visitors in July 2011, up 218% from a year ago (4.2 million in July 2010) along with a staggering 2.5 billion page views per month. 12.5 billion page views per month (according to Quantcast) With tremendous growth comes growing pains, as Twitter once experienced with their own pre-2008 downtime issues.

Now, Tumblr is starting to recover. So I sat down with Tumblr’s founder David Karp, pictured above, last week to discuss how the company has improved. It was readily apparent that the number of hires they’ve made since the last time I visited the office had increased significantly. Karp told me they added 20 engineers in the past year: “Infrastructure is much further along now. We’ve paid down many technical debts to allow ourselves to scale. We’ve created a more distributed, resilient infrastructure.”

As a long-time Tumblr member, I experienced the infrastructure buckling under the demand firsthand. Out of frustration, I vowed to scale back my use of the service until it became more stable. Stability has been one issue with Tumblr, but other issues have crept up as well. Several brands have publicly aired their displeasure with how the company has handled partnership opportunities. One reason that may be the case is because there is no formal process yet for partnerships. Says Karp:

We have no special products available for brands today, though we have several experiments running. Rich [Tong, Tumblr's Fashion Director] and our Outreach team have made it a point to continuously overhaul and reimagine these efforts in the interest of building the best products we can for our community and partners. That includes constantly working with different mixes of partners.

They’ve had some successes, though, with media brands such as Newsweek, NBC News, and ProPublica. Fashion brands, on the other hand, have had mixed reviews. Karp said the following about their efforts thus far:

Although we’re incredibly excited about the early success we’ve had with our partners so far, they’ve overwhelmingly appreciated that these are alpha products with only a basic underlying support infrastructure. That is, of course, the price of the bleeding edge, and we’ve been ecstatic to find so many extraordinary companies as excited about these new experiments as we are.

Krista Freibaum at a PR agency responsible for the Tumblr efforts of AOL StyleList and Edun (part of LVHM), said that Tumblr was extremely helpful to brands from 2007 to 2010, but things changed around the time Tong was hired to manage the relationships Tumblr had with fashion brands. Freibaum recalls that time:

It was at this time when all the cool stuff brands had been working on with Tumblr was essentially lost. Relationships were forgotten. People were left in the dark. Literally, emails stopped being returned. Specifically, when we saw that brands and editorial outlets had been brought in to participate in the last NYFW we were shocked that nobody had even reached out to us or our clients.

In place of AOL StyleList, other brands were included instead, such as Elle.com, Glamour, and The Cut. Freibaum reached out to Tong about the snub to which she said he responded, “‘Thanks, but no thanks. You can do business the way you see fit, and we’ll do the same.’”

In addition to dealing with disgruntled brands, Tumblr has felt some backlash from how they’ve dealt with a browser extension created by developer Jeremey Cutler, called “missing-e” which layers in functions not available within the normal Tumblr experience. Some of these features includes ways to customize the visual display of the “Dashboard” which is the interface where Tumblr users post and “reblog” content from the people they’re following. Tumblr has obviously been paying attention to the “missing-e” since they’ve integrated some of the features offered by the extension since its release, such as carrying over tags from posts that were reblogged.

But Tumblr has not made any public statements regarding their apprehension about browser extensions such as the “missing-e”. Instead their displeasure with the extension has come through Cutler’s own dispatches of interactions with the company on his Tumblr.

In his last interaction with the company, despite removing any API requests with the service and simply providing an extension that interacts with Tumblr after pages are already rendered in the browser, they were unsatisfied. Cutler writes, “They informed me that they consulted their legal counsel, who feels comfortable interpreting the license agreement in the way that they have stated. I have requested information on those grounds, but do not believe much will come of it. I believe that Tumblr has no desire to clarify their position. That’s their prerogative, I’m sure.”

Cutler goes on to state that if he doesn’t comply with their requests, Tumblr would see it fit to stop allowing him to use their service altogether. “Whether or not I have grounds to justly disagree with them on this, the fact remains that under the Tumblr Terms of Service, they are well within their rights to delete my Tumblr blogs as a punitive action should I continue to distribute the extension. They have informed me that this is the course of action they will take should I not acquiesce to their demands.”

When I asked Karp about this and told him that I find “missing-e” to be a useful product that enhances my experience with Tumblr, he told me that people using the extension assume that the issues that creep up are not from the extension but are caused by Tumblr, adding unnecessary burden to their support staff. According to Karp, the “missing-e” is one of many extensions, and not even the most popular one, that Tumblr is forced to support.

I asked why the company has not been more forthcoming with their position, and Karp said that they’re focused on the wider base of users, and responding to an issue that is known to only a subset of their community would only cause confusion.

I told Karp I still think the company could be more transparent and forthcoming about the decisions they make and that he underestimates how that could change the perception some detractors may have. Karp conceded that he wasn’t entirely sure they’ve always taken the right approach when it comes to communication and that they’re working on ways to educate and inform users on a more regular basis:

I’m generally really proud of how we communicate as a company. It’s not particularly easy when there are so many subsets of the community with dramatically different interests and questions. But we respond to more than 11,000 emails each week, go into great technical detail on our Engineering blog, tweet within minutes of any service interruptions, spend lots of one-on-one time with our community (through our Outreach team), and feature our users’ amazing work across Radar, Spotlight, and Tumblr Tuesday. I also love that everyone on our team contributes to our Staff blog — a blog we’re not afraid to curse on — and that we’re quite disciplined in staying out of the fray when incendiary people lie about us.

Karp believes that the company is best served by focusing on execution:

Although we’ve had the occasional communication breakdown that we work hard not to repeat, I think we’ve done a good job of being honest, accessible, and thoughtful over the last 4 years. What I’m eager to improve, like most of what I’m focused on these days, is centered around scale and efficiency. How does our editorial team grow to curate and feature content in more languages? How do we scale our outreach team (currently four people) to cover all of the interests and communities on Tumblr? What’s the most efficient path to get the clearest status message from our ops team, to our support team, to Twitter –– at 4am? Etc.

Tumblr is entirely within their rights to choose who they do business with, whom they focus their attention on when it comes to partnerships, and how they deal with developers such as Cutler. I walked away from my conversation with Karp feeling like they want to operate similar to the way Apple does, protecting their vision for how their product looks and choosing who gets to appear “in their store”. Apple has managed to make that aspect part of what makes their products great; it remains to be seen if this approach will work for Tumblr as well.

The biggest takeaway from today’s Apple announcements at their annual worldwide developers conference was how many companies they’ve just disrupted.

Hey Blackberry, you know that your BBM that many find to be the sole reason they stick by your side instead of bolting for a shiny new iPhone. Say hello to iMessage. Start a conversation on your iPhone and continue it on your iPad. If you still want to talk to your friends tied to their Blackberries, there’s always What’s App.

So Dropbox, you’ve been one of the most useful apps I’ve come across in quite some time. My files auto-synced in the cloud, I barely have to think about it. I move effortlessly from one machine to another and my stuff is right there, a click away. Welp, I’ve got some bad news for you. iCloud. 5 gigs of storage and get this, it’s free. Well, unless you’ve got some non-iTunes music you wanna sync. That’s gonna set you back $25 a year. Cmon, that’s a fraction of the money you’ve stolen from artists and those poor multi-millionaire music executives (if any of them still exist anymore.)

What else? Instapaper, a brilliant app by former lead developer for Tumblr, Marco Arment was just replaced by a feature in Apple’s Safari browser, called “Reading List” which stores what you’re browsing for offline reading later, and syncs it across both your iOS devices and your Mac. Poor guy. His reaction on Twitter was priceless.

If Larry David is a social assassin, what does this make Steve Jobs?

Some companies were disrupted in a positive way. Today was Twitter’s lucky day. Apple just built in Twitter integration at the base level of iOS5. Enter your Twitter credentials in your iOS device settings and you’re set. No need to log into Twitter again for most of the apps you regularly use.  Shoot something with your iPhone or iPad camera? Bam, send it to Twitter. Tired of having to keep logging into Twitter on  Safari? No longer. Same goes for YouTube,  Maps, and your contacts.

Remember all those times you had to fumble with the lock on your iPhone to shoot a photo? No more, you’ll be able to have a one click shortcut on the lock screen to get right to shooting. If you hate using the on screen button to shoot images as much as I do, you’re in luck. You can make the volume button a camera shutter.

The news and magazine business even got a little disrupted, with a new feature called Newsstand, which will be a place for all your newspapers and magazines. Don’t really see the value-add here, since you already download them in the app store. Better organization and background downloading seem to be the benefit.

You know how Android phones have these really cool notification pages that tell you all sorts of things like how your stocks are doing, what the weather this weekend will be, who just emailed you, and what your significant other just posted to their Facebook wall? It’s finally come to your iPhone and iPad. Customize it for what you want to see. Much more useful and informative than that boring screen-saver you’ve been staring at.

That covers your iOS devices, but what did Apple present for the Mac? Lion is the new OS, and it’s only going to be available as an Apple App Store download for $30. A lot of what is coming here morphs it closer to an iPad experience. Full screen apps, all sorts of gesture based features like swipe to change apps or go back and forth between webpages. Mission control lets you manage your documents like you’re grabbing them and moving them around physically.

The most blatantly iPad-esque feature is Launchpad which literally looks like the way your apps are presented in grid format on your iPad, but on a Mac. Apple’s newest mouse supports gestures but you’re going to get a lot more out of this if you’re using a trackpad or laptop. Even the mouse is getting disrupted. No-one is safe.

Perhaps the most life-altering feature here is Resume, which has two parts: auto-save and versions. This is something that is long overdue for the entire software industry. The OS will automatically save where you are in any app in short increments, so if you happen to lose power or just boneheadedly close your app while working on it, you’ll get back the documents and everything else exactly how you left it. If you want to go back to where you were at some point in time, Versions has you covered.

So in summation: Blackberry, Dropbox, Instapaper, GroupMe, and heck even AT&T and Verizon took a bit of a beating today from Apple. Twitter comes out on top. Unfortunately for Anthony Weiner, there was no “one more thing” in the form of a Time Machine.

The first time I used Skype I was in awe. The video quality, the effortlessness it allowed me to see and hear my family far away over my laptop computer screen was magic. It was even more magical when I tried it on my iPhone — a Dick Tracy moment. And it was more impressive than FaceTime because it allowed me to talk to anyone with Skype, not just with those who had an iPhone.

Today, Skype will likely begin to be lost in the maw that is Microsoft. Sure, Microsoft still remains one of the most valuable companies this country has ever produced but aside from the XBox, it hasn’t been on the leading edge of innovation in many years. Apple, Google and companies like Facebook and Twitter are seen at the forefront of the digital age. Microsoft, in comparison, seems like the once great star athlete, a Michael Jordan attempting to regain some glory by playing minor league baseball.

The best case scenario here is that Microsoft rolls Skype into a product like Kinect, which hasn’t quite taken the world by storm, and becomes a simple, easy to use videoconferencing device for the living room, that takes us beyond just hunching over our computers to interact with our friends who are far away.

The reasoning, however, provided in a rather unimpressive press conference by the awkward and uninspiring Steve Ballmer, was to bring new customers to Windows and Office. I can tell you with some degree of experience, business users want screen sharing but they don’t have a great need for videoconferencing. It isn’t a tremendous business advantage or productivity tool.

If, instead, Microsoft predictably turns Skype into Windows Messenger Live Video Vista Professional Edition, then we will have watched one of the most exciting products developed in the last century killed off in the interest of its shareholders.

Is Facebook just an elaborate direct marketer’s masterwork? Should I think twice before using my existing Twitter account to log into various services all around the web? Should I be worried about handing my credit card over to Sony? These and other perfectly valid and  simultaneously conspiracy theoretical ideas tend to float in and around my head from time to time. The big scare du-jour, is if Apple’s iPhone and Google’s mobile OS, Android, are tracking and archiving our every movement.

A journalistic tennis match on this topic took place over the course of the last few days. First, this is old news. Apple responded to congress regarding this almost a year ago. Digital forensics specialists have known you could track locations on iOS devices for some time, and have used the data to assist law enforcement. Alex Levinson, an RIT student, even published a research paper and subsequent book last December detailing data acquisition techniques for iOS products, like the iPhone and iPad. He says that Apple is not collecting the data.

The Wall Street Journal added Google to the mix, citing that Apple is not alone in the practice of collecting user information. Julia Angwin at the Journal claims that not only are Apple and Google collecting the data and storing it locally on the phone, but they actually regularly transmit their locations back to Apple and Google. The endgame? Angwin believes they’re racing to build a massive database of location information in order to tap the $2.9 billion market for location-based services. Today, Apple seemed to indicate that was part of their plan, as they revealed they’re building a crowd-sourced traffic service.

Apple outright denies they’re collecting user locations.

“Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone,” the company said in a statement on Wednesday. “Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.”

In response to the outcry, Apple will release an update to store less information about location and discontinue backing it up entirely. Apple claims that the information they were receiving was anonymous and only stored the wifi hotspots and cell towers around the phone, which could be up to 100 miles away.

I’m as digitally paranoid as the next guy, but this seems like an odd case and strange timing. Why did something that was discovered months ago only recently receive greater attention? Will we see the same thing happen with the earlier reports about apps collecting and sharing demographic information?

Much like Facebook boycotts, we seem to get up in arms about our data being compromised, captured, leveraged, bought and sold, only to lose interest and go on about our lives. Most of us don’t really have the time to care or feel the convenience and novelty of these devices and websites outweigh the potential of being taken advantage of. That’s exactly what many companies in the business of buying and selling data and demographics are banking on.

• Twitter in negotiations to bring back Jack Dorsey as chief product officer – Business Insider
• CNN moves past MSNBC in primetime viewers for the first time in over a year – Forbes
• Magazines can now count iPad and other digital edition sales toward paid-circulation – Ad Age
• Up-to-the-minute updates on aircraft maintaining the no-fly zone over Libya – Guardian
• Chris Tenant out at Vanity Fair after 5 weeks on the job (2nd item down) – NY Daily News
• Flipboard raising capital at a $200 million valuation – BoomTown
• Google exec : We are not at war with Apple – Telegraph