Category Archives: Media Law

New York Times: Bits Blog: A Tool to Harvest Location Data

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Developers in The New York Times Company Research and Development Lab released a Web-based tool on Thursday that they hope will corral the location data Apple had been collecting and make it available to customers and researchers. ... People who participate in the project are asked to upload location information from their phone, which is then made anonymous and added to a database with the data from every other upload. "

Monday Note: Flipboard: Threat and Opportunity

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Frédéric Filloux: "Every media company should be afraid of Flipboard. The Palo Alto startup epitomizes the best and the worst of the internet. The best is for the user. The worst is for the content providers that feed its stunning expansion without getting a dime in return. ... For the reader, Flipboard provides the ultimate comfort: no ads. ... No media outlet should be allowed to complain about Flipboard. First, there is a now well-established pattern in the increasing fight between old-fashioned publishers and 'inexperienced' Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs. The latter always invent things that the former should have been first to come up with."

O’Reilly Radar: Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is recording your moves

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"Today at Where 2.0 Pete Warden and I will announce the discovery that your iPhone, and your 3G iPad, is regularly recording the position of your device into a hidden file. ... All iPhones appear to log your location to a file called "consolidated.db." This contains latitude-longitude coordinates along with a timestamp. ... All iPhones appear to log your location to a file called "consolidated.db." This contains latitude-longitude coordinates along with a timestamp."

New York Times: Cellphones Track Your Every Move, and You May Not Even Know

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Story on the Zeit Online data retention interactive: “This is really the most compelling visualization in a public forum I have ever seen,” said [Matthew Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania], adding that it “shows how strong a picture even a fairly low-resolution location can give.”

Online Journalism Blog: Guest post: visualising mobile phone data – the data retention app

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"It’s not very often that one can follow the direct impact of an article, let alone a piece of data journalism. But the visualization of the cellphone data of Malte Spitz from the Green party in Germany led to visible repercussions in the US. Following a piece in the New York Times about Spitz and the data app, some days ago two senators wrote a letter to the 4 main US-carriers for information about their data retention policy."

WSJ.com: Apple Antitrust Issues Raised by Subscription-Service Terms

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"Apple Inc.'s new subscription service could draw antitrust scrutiny, according to law professors. ... Publishers, for example, might claim that Apple dominates the market for consumer tablet computers and that it has allegedly used that commanding position to restrict competition. Apple, in turn, might define the market to include all digital and print media, and counter that any publisher not happy with Apple's terms is free to still reach its customers through many other print and digital outlets."

BBC Open Secrets: Balen Report: The case continues

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"Today was to have seen a Supreme Court hearing - and thus possibly the final stage - in the most long-running legal dispute involving freedom of information since the law came into force. However that case will not be happening this Wednesday, following the death last month of the man who initiated it and has been fighting it for several years, a London solicitor named Steven Sugar."

Waxy.org: The Daily: Indexed

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"Anybody else think it's weird that The Daily, News Corp's new iPad-only magazine, posts almost every article to their official website... but with no index of the articles to be found? They spent $30M on it, but apparently forgot a homepage! So I went ahead and made one for them! Introducing, The Daily: Indexed... Frankly, I'm also very curious about the legal implications. My understanding is that linking to public news articles is unquestionably legal, and I believe that right should never be discouraged. It's also worth noting that Google's slowly indexing all the articles too, and search engines aren't blocked in their robots.txt file."