Available Online for Free. More work by this artist here. Link courtesy of Wooster Collective.

I want to highlight a couple helpful resources on fair use law, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s fair use guide and the Stanford University Copyright and Fair Use Center. The most frustrating thing about fair use is that the burden of proof is on the user. There is no clear criteria for what qualifies as fair use. This allows large conglomerates to easily push around individual artists and critics who do not have the money to fight clostly legal battles even if the individual is clearly using copyrighted material in good faith. As the EFF’s FAQ points out, it is also unclear if fair use is a right or just an acceptable defense against copyright infringement.

What is clear is that the law is not adequately protecting the average citizen’s right to expression, as well as stifling the sharing of art and criticism. What is most frustrating about the current situation is that the current legal situation does not appear to be in anyone’s best interests. Artistic derivative works and criticism do not serve as adequate substitutes for original works so they are not actual threats to original rights holders, in fact they often serve to spark interest in the original works. Thusly, going after critics and artists is not in the long term interest of large conglomerate rights holders. However, legal departments feel like they are serving the short term interests of these conglomerates by bullying and possibly winning settlements. Reform of intellectual property law to catch up with modern technology is going to be a long arduous process. I am curious and excited to see what direction the Obama administration takes us in. Sadly I expect we will have to wait a while given the number of higher priority crises in President Obama’s docket.

These days not only does the US have an Obama white house to boast about while liberal Canadians lament a thus far thwarted attempt to oust conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, but recently Canadian policy makers came through with the sort of technologically backwards, consumer-unfriendly decision we typically fear coming from US lawmakers. In a battle over Internet Service Providers’ right to throttle bandwidth, a practice typically used to limit users’ ability to utilize P2P file sharing protocols like bittorrent, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission refused to prohibit the practice. This is a big deal, in essence they are saying that an ISP can dictate how you use the internet connection you pay for.

Recently in the United States Comcast was confronted for throttling bittorrent traffic and the FCC ruled that Comcast was in the wrong and must cease throttling torrent traffic. It’s nice to see our country headed in the right direction but it would be even nicer to see both countries doing so.

I am sorry about the recent dearth of posts. I have been in Washington, DC for the inauguration but this post should mean that the blog is rolling once again. While I initially hoped to blog a bit about my inauguration experience for Yes We Might, thus far it has been a bit of a disaster after being kept out of the swearing in ceremony due to poor crowd management and missing Obama’s appearance at the Youth Ball for the most trifling of reasons that are not worth getting into here. Hopefully my luck will change this evening at the Obama For America staff ball.

We are now talking about a war in which Israel refuses to allow foreign journalists access into Gaza, and both sides are battling for global support and to shape the narrative of the conflict via Web 2.0 strategies. As the Gulf War was the first cable news war, the current Israel-Palestine conflict is the first YouTube war. The obvious question being: is this the future of wartime journalistic propaganda?

It is clear from watching just a few of the videos available on Palutube that there is a different tone here than on the IDF’s YouTube channel. The IDF’s content has focused on justifying their attacks, which have been widely criticized as a disproportionate response to Hamas’ aggression, through videos of Hamas’ rocket attacks and evidence of other Hamas wrongdoing. In contrast the new Hamas site is a mix of videos that either display the large scale suffering that is going on in Gaza or provide evidence that Palestinian morale in Gaza is not dead through songs and videos of demonstrations.

The latter videos are particularly of interest considering the character of the Israeli attacks. It is quite clear that Israel’s attacks are an act of aggression by the side with the upper hand. Hamas rocket fire into Israel, while indefensible from the perspective of someone who would like to see the conflict resolved through diplomacy, is essentially impotent in comparison to the Israeli response. The Israeli message is that Hamas is thoroughly out gunned and by continuing to fire into Israel Hamas is inviting Israel to respond tenfold simply because they can. In a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece Rashid Khalidi presented a particularly insightful quote from former IDF chief of staff Moshe Yaalon: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.” Temporarily setting aside how disturbing that statement is, with Palutube Hamas appears intent on saying it is also not correct.