Category: Political

ITP End of Year Events – Thesis Presentations and End of Semester Show

ITP Spring Show 2006
A two day exhibition of interactive sight, sound and physical objects from the student artists of ITP.

This event is free and open to the public. No need to RSVP.

ITP Thesis Presentations 2006
ITP’s graduating students will be presenting a wide variety of highly creative and interactive projects that they have constructed over the course of their final project seminars.

Students have been encouraged to undertake projects that bring together the conceptual and design issues that they have engaged in during their two years of study at ITP.

Projects will include installation based work, digital video and audio pieces, interactive 3D, games and educational applications, to name only a few.

ITP will be providing a live webcast of all the thesis presentations.

Beyond Broadcast: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture

Beyond Broadcast, May 12-13 2006 — Beyond Broadcast 2006: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture Archive
Beyond Broadcast, a conference being put on at the Berkman Center is coming up in a bit more than a month. The conference second day will be a second convening of the Open Media Developers Summit and is shaping up nicely.

Please feel free to visit the blog and wiki, attend and participate.

From the blog:
You are invited to an open convening at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. We will explore the thesis that traditional public media — public broadcasting, cable access television, etc — face a unique opportunity to embrace new participatory web-based media models — podcasting, video blogs, social software, etc — and create a stronger and more vital public service.

New Senate Broadcast Flag Bill Would Freeze Fair Use

EFF: DeepLinks
From the article:
Draft legislation making the rounds in the U.S. Senate gives us a preview of the MPAA and RIAA’s next target: your television and radio. (Please write your Senator about this!)

You say you want the power to time-shift and space-shift TV and radio? You say you want tomorrow’s innovators to invent new TV and radio gizmos you haven’t thought of yet, the same way the pioneers behind the VCR, TiVo, and the iPod did?

Well, that’s not what the entertainment industry has in mind. According to them, here’s all tomorrow’s innovators should be allowed to offer you:

“customary historic use of broadcast content by consumers to the extent such use is consistent with applicable law.”

Had that been the law in 1970, there would never have been a VCR. Had it been the law in 1990, no TiVo. In 2000, no iPod.

Network Neutrality

Free Press : Press Release
From the report:
“Congress should enact tough new laws prohibiting cable and telephone companies from blocking consumer access to content and services on the Internet, bilking both consumers and Internet-based companies,” said Jeannine Kenney, senior policy analyst at Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine. “If they don’t, these big companies will use their market power to line their pockets by discriminating against competitors in favor of their own content and service offerings.”

I completely agree.

Hopefully, if Congress doesn’t do something, the marketplace will.

Here is an idea: http://www.freepress.net/news/13403

Free Chris

evilutionary virtual log >> Blog Archive >> Free Chris
Webmaster of NTFU thrown in jail on obscenity charges after opening his adult site up to soldiers in Iraq to post pictures.

From the post:
Chris Wilson, of Lakeland Florida, is the webmaster of NTFU, a user forum created in June of 2004 where people could post pictures of their wives or girlfriends nude. It recieved some national attention for the “G.I. Jane” controversy, but most recently for images of corpses in Iraq.
Chris granted interviews to dozens of news agencies and websites about this issue. He expressed his opinion on the morality of posting these images, and pornography in general. This sparked some major controversy with islamic groups, and anti pornography groups.
On October 7th, 2005, Polk County Sheriff officers raided his home and seized computer equipment and other files, including 20 films and 80 photos, and arrested him on 300 counts of obscenity charges. He is currently being held on $101,000 bail.