Brazil introduces OER into federal legislation and adopts local government policy
Creative Commons reports on two new developments in Brazil around open educational resources. Thanks to sustained advocacy from OER-Brazil, legislation is being debated in Brazil that would require government-funded educational resources to be made open. Meanwhile, the municipality of São Paulo’s Department of Education has mandated that all the educational content it funds should be released under a Creative Commons licence.
United States faces legal challenges to domain name seizures
The Open Net Initiative reports that “Puerto 80 Projects, owner of one of Spain’s most popular websites, is suing the United States government for seizing their domains, rojadirecta.com and rojadirecta.org”. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and the Center for Democracy and Technology have filed an amicus brief arguing that the seizures amount to prior restraint on speech.
ONI report | Amicus brief
French government plans to extend internet censorship
La Quadrature du Net reacts to reports of a draft executive order put forward by the French Government which would several of its ministries the power to arbitrarily censor any content or service on the internet.
Turkey continues to push for restraints on internet
Voice of Amwerica summarises developments in the Turkish government’s bid for increased control of the internet.
Knight Foundation announces winners of 2011 News Challenge, plus funding for Center for Civic Media
Sixteen winners of the 2011 Knight News Challenge were annouced this week, including the Open Knowledge Foundation, Ushahidi’s Swiftriver social media parsing web application and UK-based data lab ScraperWiki. In parallel, the foundation has announced over $3m of support for MIT’s Center for Civic Media (formerly the Center for Future Civic Media) over three years. The rebranded Center will be led by Ethan Zuckerman.
News Challenge winners | Interview with Ethan Zuckerman about his new role
Information imperialism?
Adam Fish points at the dark side of US State Department funding for “Internet Freedom” projects in other countries.
Book: The Long History of New Media: Technology, historiography, and contextualizing newness
This new collection of essays takes the long view on “new” media, arguing that “the new in new media must be understood to be historically constructed… with an eye on the future, or more correctly, an eye on what we think the future will be.”
EIFL 2010 annual report
The annual report of the activities of the Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) project in 2010 celebrates the role the organisation played in getting libraries’ copyright concerns on the agenda at the World Intellectual Property Organisation, and in negotiating over $175 million of savings on commercial e-resources for libraries in its network, which stretches over 45 countries.
The state of e-Government in Latin America
The Information Civica blog has published an English translation of Juan Arellano’s comprehensive profile of e-government initiatives in Latin America.
Fair use best practices: the Israeli experience
This paper describes the authors’ experience building a coalition of scholars in Israel to decipher and defend fair use provisions in the context of education and research. The website openeducation.org.il provides a summary of the paper, and a copy of the best practice guidelines the scholars developed for teachers and researchers making use of fair use provisions in Israeli copyright law.
Paper | Summary | Guidelines
Audio: Through a Web Darkly
Participants including Ben Hammersley and Evgeny Morozov discuss how the web spreads ignorance and conspiracy, and examines ways in which an open society can mitigate these effects at this event co-sponsored by OSF.
The Barefoot Technologist 