The Control and Ownership of Media

          For this past week we have been talking about the place that social media has in our lives. We've covered most of the aspects of this topic, such as the growth of these media outlets, the good and bad potential in them, and the right to take information that a person has on his computer of on social media and use it in court. The topic I was interested in expands on the third topic listed, as I was hoping to talk about concentration of media ownership, the control over what we see and don't see through media, and internet censorship/ piracy concerns.

          The best way to start this will probably be to just expand on the last topic we talked about. There has always been a question about how far is too far when it comes to being able to take the information that someone puts online and their internet histories? As we have seen in cases like the Dharun Ravi case, these things can be very influential in public opinion and can even sway jurors into choosing whether someone is innocent or guilty. Now, I personally am biased on this situation since i believe that if there is a reason to suspect that someone did something wrong, then you should be allowed to look into that person's internet history. I personally see it as the same thing as a search warrant for a house. I feel that having your internet history looked at isn't an automatic guilty verdict, but just another way to see if someone may be guilty. We have seen that internet history doesn't always lead to a guilty verdict in the Casey Anthony case. However, I will leave the rest of this for class debate. Here is an article that goes along with this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/nyregion/jurors-say-digital-evidence-convinced-them-of-dharun-ravis-guilt.html (Digital Evidence's Importance in the Dharun Ravi case)

          This leads to a bigger topic that I want to focus on, which is who really owns the things that we post on the internet. Now about a month ago, Facebook changed their terms of service and tried to make it seem as though it was trying to make it clear to us what they controlled of our pages and such on Facebook (https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54434097130). Zuckerberg also stated in that post that Facebook was only trying to be helpful and efficient for us. However, if he really wants to do this, why doesn't he put the terms in language that we can understand in the first place? But more importantly, how is it more helpful and efficient for us to try and delete our Facebook accounts, only to allow Facebook to keep the information we stored on it forever? (http://consumerist.com/2009/02/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can-do-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever.html). Now, to play devil's advocate here, these terms are subject to your privacy settings, so you can stop Facebook from having total control of your information. To expand the topic even further, YouTube has a policy of allowing owners of videos to keep ownership of them. That seems all nice and dandy; however, YouTube keeps the right to "Non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual license to freely sub-license, re-distribute, re-publish, monetize, and whatever they may want to do with your video,"(http://www.reelseo.com/youtube-copyright-ownership/#ixzz1pR3otf91). Just for fun, you can add that Twitter maintains that you have complete intellectual ownership of your tweets and twitter pictures (http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/social_network/220000033). 

          The next topic is really just another extension of the previous topic: The ability to keep ownership of your ideas. Except this time, we are looking at it in the realms of celebrities and Hollywood. Recently, most of you know that there will bills in congress looking to make copyright infringement: SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA  (If you don't really know about these bills, a basic overview can be seen here http://www.iste.org/connect/iste-connects/blog-detail/12-02-03/SOPA_PIPA_and_now_ACTA_What_do_all_these_anti-piracy_acts_mean_for_schools.aspx under the What are SOPA and PIPA?  title). Now, these acts were to protect the works of Hollywood artists from being pirated and put on the internet for free usage. However, there was a huge concern because it was so general, that all someone had to do was accuse a website of having one pirated thing on it, and that website would basically be killed off. Now, again, being devil's advocate, there are a lot of websites that pirate material, allowing people too use the works of artists without paying them. So clearly something needs to be done about this. Yet is there really a good solution to this?

         The next topic I want to address the issue of media being gatekeepers of information and how political ideology can affect our access to information as well. For instance, in a flashback to the past, you guys can remember that interview with Newt Gingrich's Ex-Wife that aired right before the South Carolina primary. Now ABC had held onto this interview for a while before airing it, causing people to suspect that ABC wanted to make the interview air at the most  harmful time for Gingrich's campaign (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/19/rush-limbaugh-abc-newt-gingrich-wife_n_1216552.html). In another blast to the past, we can see that there isn't much media coverage on the revolution in Syria or the EU's embargo on Iranian Oil. These are two examples I found of media control over what we see and I was just hoping to hear some of your thoughts on this topic. Another example includes a chart that came out a few months ago on how presidents have raised the deficit in relation to Obama (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/a-bogus-chart-on-obama-and-the-debt-gets-a-new-lease-on-life/2011/09/28/gIQAx40Y6K_blog.html).\

          If you guys have any other examples you would want to talk about, you can comment and I will try to include them in the conversation in class.