Link Ch. 3 – 8 Years Later – Supreme Court Declines to Take Up Janet Jackson Wardrobe Malfunction Case

Posted on June 29, 2012 by Ralph Hanson

Eight years ago, singer Janet Jackson exposed her breast for 9/16ths of a second.  As a result, broadcast network CBS was fined more than half a million dollars and a near-decade long battle over what could or could not be broadcast on network television was launched.

Today, The Hill reports that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the lower court ruling that threw out the fine on the basis that the punishment for showing “indecent content” was “arbitrary and capricious.”

This is essentially the same point the court made in the Fox and CBS fleeting indecency cases about a week ago.

According to Chief Justice John Roberts the case does not give a clear path to indecent content on broadcast channels today because broadcasters now know that such content is not allowed.

Unless you are Nancy Grace.

If you are Nancy Grace you can show your nipple to the world for an even longer amount of time than Janet Jackson did and have no one talk about $550,000 fines.

And if you ask me, Nancy Grace exposing herself, however accidentally, is a much more serious offense.

The Janet Jackson Super Bowl “Wardrobe Malfunction”

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McDonald’s Urban Ad – 1976

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Ralph Hanson

An “urban ad” for McDonald’s from 1976.  Somethings are better left forgotten…. (Thanks to BuzzFeed for finding this!)

1976 urban ad for McDonald's

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Link Ch. 13 – Supreme Court rules that FCC fines for language, nudity were given without proper notice

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Ralph Hanson

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that broadcasters did not have to pay fines levied by the FCC for fleeting expletives or brief nudity because the FCC had not provided sufficient warning that there would be penalties. The court had heard arguments on the case back in January of this year.

The cases deal with a few seconds of Charlotte Ross’ nude behind on the CBS show NYPD Blue or by expletives spoken by celebs such as U2’s Bono, Cher, and Paris Hilton during live shows.

Although it was a unanimous 8-0 ruling (Justice Sonia Sotomayor did not vote because she had been involved with the case at a lower level), the judgment tells us very little about the court’s true feelings.

All the court did was rule that the FCC can’t throw big fines at broadcasters without warning them in advance.  The court did not rule based on First Amendment issues, nor did it indicate that it was likely to tell the FCC to lighten up on regulation.  This is the second time the court has heard the case.  The first time the court ruled 5-4 in favor of the FCC on procedural grounds.

The supreme court has yet to hear arguments on the Janet Jackson Super Bowl case from 2004.  And nobody brought a case on the Nancy Grace Dancing with the Stars wardrobe malfunction from this year.

Video from The New Yorker featuring video from C-SPAN and George Carlin.  Lots of bad language and limited nudity. (Yeah, that says C-SPAN to ya, doesn’t it!)

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Ch. 10 Link – Hitler Finds Out About Parody Fair Use

Posted on June 20, 2012 by Ralph Hanson

If you read this blog at all, (or even go on the Internet at all) you have to be familiar with the “Hitler Finds Out About…” meme. People take the excellent German film Downfall in which Hitler gets angry and frustrated, and they add their own creative subtitles to it.

The Real Downfall Clip

Clearly the creators of these sometimes hilarious videos are making use of copyright materials. But are they legally within their rights? (NOTE: As you go through this post, please note that most of the Hitler Finds Out About videos have NSFW language in the subtitles.)

In an interview with New York Magazine, Downfall director Oliver Herschbiegel said that the parodies are a compliment to his work. But the film’s distributor, Constantin Film, issued a takedown order last week for the videos for violating copyright.

According to the Ars Technica blog, Constantin Film did not obtain a takedown order under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; instead, the studio used YouTube’s Content ID filter that lets copyright holders directly blog content using digital audio and video fingerprints. In short, Constantin can automatically block many of the videos without any intervention by the courts or YouTube.

But, you say, aren’t these videos protected as parody? Yes, in fact, they most likely are. And according to the social media blog Mashable, the people who have created the parody videos can click on a check box that says the creator of the parody is disputing the takedown. That forces Constantin to go through the formal process of actually following the procedures outlined in the DMCA.

Perhaps the best explanations of the whole case are outlined in …. what else …. Hitler Finds Out About videos.

 

and

 

To me, the most interesting question is not how Constantin Film has fought this battle, but rather why? As I said before, the director doesn’t object and the publicity of the videos would not seem to be hurting the value of the movie. It appears to me that the biggest issue surrounding the meme is that it trivializes who Hitler was and what the Nazis did. (There is reportedly a version of it subtitled in Hebrew about the lack of parking in Tel Aviv.)

Of course, offensiveness is not a legal reason to ban parody.

In closing, here’s a link to an intensely academic analysis of the case from the Department of Alchemy.

Other Downfall parody links

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Ch. 14 Link – Commentary Through Impersonation

Posted on June 17, 2012 by Ralph Hanson

You can learn more about Ian Murphy’s punking of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and about the Food Lion case here.

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Link Ch. 2 – Godwin’s Law

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Ralph Hanson

You may have noticed that sooner or later, every Internet discussion that turns ugly (and what of them don’t?).  And once they turn ugly, it seems that before long one of the people arguing will compare the other person to the Nazis.

There’s actually a name for this phenomenon: Godwin’s Law.  Attorney Mike Godwin coined the law/meme back in the early 1990s when he noticed the phenomenon.  Here it is:

Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

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Link Ch. 10 – Neda Agha-Soltan as a Symbol of Iranian Protesters

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Ralph Hanson

NOTE: This is a re-post of the 2009 blog entry. All of the videos linked to here contain disturbing, violent imagery.The news out of Iran about the violent suppression of people protesting the results of the recent Iranian election has been chilling.

No where has this been more dramatic than with the news about the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan, a 26-year-old woman who was studying philosophy and vocal music. Though accurate details about Agha-Soltan are scarce, the New York Times reports that was engaged, valued freedom, and was shot while stopping to get some fresh air after driving home from a singing lesson.

When she got out of the car, she was shot by a sniper. Her death was captured on cell phone video. The person who captured the video then e-mailed it to a friend, who then forwarded it to the Voice of America, the British newspaper The Guardian,and several friends. One of those friends, who lives in the Netherlands, posted the video to Facebook. From there, it moved on to a report Sunday night on CNN.

 

A second person at the scene captured a shorter bit of video as well:

 

All of this allowed the person who shot the video to bypass the official Iranian censorship effortsto block Internet, cell phone, and text message traffic, and some have charged that Western technology companies have assisted with this censorship – though the companies deny it.

Citizen video has been used in a wide range of ways.Here is a collection of images and videos set to the music of U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday:

 

As I’ve written about many times in the past, I’m not a big believer in the idea of the press having some kind of overarching uniform liberal or conservative bias. I do think, that as Herbert Ganshas written, that the American press does hold a set of shared values, both liberal and conservative, the resonate with Americans. These values laid out by Gans include: ethnocentrism, altruistic democracy, responsible capitalism, small-town pastoralism, individualism, moderatism, social order, and leadership. We can see these values playing out, especially that of individualism, with the story of Neda Agha-Soltan from Iran.

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Link Ch. 10 – Media Web Site Examples

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Ralph Hanson

Here are links to a range of media Web sites I mention in Ch. 10:

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Link Ch. 10 – How ARPANet Grew

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Ralph Hanson

ARPANet was the joint military/academic computer network that would eventually give birth to the Internet.  Here are a series of maps that show how ARPANet slowly grew in size and complexity from its founding in 1969 until 1977.

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Link Ch. 10 – Zhao Jing: Blogging in China

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Ralph Hanson

Zhao Jing, who writes under the pen name “Michael Anti” was one of the first Chinese bloggers to come to world attention when Microsoft took his blog down from their servers following complaints from the Chinese government:

In a somewhat strange update to this story, Facebook denied Jing the right to have a profile under his pen name “Michael Anti” because everyone must use their real name on their Facebook page.

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