The US flag with all its stripes and a few of its stars was adopted by a resolution of the Second Continental Congress in 1777. But today, overpriced textbooks and underpaid schoolteachers have sanitized most of our history and hidden the early controversies while fluffing half-truths, leaving us unclear about what that flag really stands [...]

Posted June 14, 2007 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Politics & Controversy. Tags: america, american president, burn, citizenship, civil liberties, civil liberty, first amendment, flag, flag burning, flag day, flags, free speech, liberty, patriot, patriotism, rights. 2 Comments.

I’ve been talking a lot about remixability lately, but Nat Torkington just pointed out that the web services and APIs from commercial organizations aren’t as infrastructural as we might think.
Offering the example of Amazon suing Alexaholic (for remixing Alexa’s data), he tells us that APIs are not “a commons of goodies to be built on [...]

Posted April 30, 2007 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy, Technology. Tags: api, apis, free, free beer, free speech, mashups, public good, remixability, self interest. Be the first one.

Quite a while ago now, stepinrazor asked people to do some self-censorhip in a post in the Flickr Ideas forum. FlyButtafly quickly joined the discussion, noting that she’d encountered some material she found offensive in pictures from other Flickr members: “as I’m going through the pictures, one shows up of a protestor holding a sign [...]

Posted August 1, 2006 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Politics & Controversy, Technology. Tags: Anthony Comstock, argument, Charles Keating, civil liberties, community standards, cultural imperialism, first amendment, flickr, free speech, freedom, J. Edgar Hoover, may offend, moral superiority, obscenity, porn, pornography. 6 Comments.

My feelings on the Flag Burning Desecration Amendment should have been clear from my Flag Day story. Still, let me offer the t-shirts above as confirmation.
america, burn, citizenship, civil liberties, civil liberty, first amendment, flag burning, flag desecration, flag desecration amendment, free speech, liberty, patriot, patriotism, rights

Posted June 27, 2006 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Politics & Controversy. Tags: america, burn, citizenship, civil liberties, civil liberty, first amendment, flag burning, flag desecration, flag desecration amendment, free speech, liberty, patriot, patriotism, rights. 2 Comments.

I caught the following story on NPR’s All Things Considered (RealAudio stream) last night:
New York is known for its vibrant nightlife, yet in many bars and restaurants it’s illegal to dance. Now, a law professor is challenging the “Cabaret Laws,” claiming they violate a dancer’s right of free expression. The city says dancing by patrons [...]

Posted November 29, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Politics & Controversy, Questionable...funny. Pointless., Style, Fashion and Food. Tags: blue laws, cabaret, cabaret license, dance, dancing, first ammendment, foolish natives, footloose, free expression, free speech, jazz clubs, law, legal challenge, license, lynne taylor-corbett, manhattan, new york, new york city, new york new york, newyork, ny ny, nyc, nyny, paul chevigny, rights, wild strangers. One Comment.

Wendy Seltzer alerts us to the Delaware Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Cahill v. Doe, a case that tested our rights to anonymity online, as well as the standard for judging defamation.
As it turns out, the court decided against the plaintiff, a city councilman, and protected the identity of “Proud Citizen,” who the councilman [...]

Posted October 12, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Politics & Controversy, Technology. Tags: blogger, bloggers, blogging, blogosphere, blogs, cahill, cahill v. doe, chatroom, citizen journalism, city councilman, context, delaware, delaware supreme court, first amendment, free speech, freedom of speech, liability, media, media landscape, online forum, proud citizen, pseudonyms, real names, wendy seltzer. 3 Comments.

Copyfight is pointing to the EFF’s new Legal Guide for Bloggers. Most of the content is about liability, but it also addresses issues of access and privilege that are generally granted to journalists, election law, and labor law. From the introduction:
Whether you’re a newly minted blogger or a relative old-timer, you’ve been seeing more and [...]

Posted June 14, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Politics & Controversy. Tags: blogger, bloggers, blogging, copyright, court, eff, free expression, free speech, freedom, law, legal, legal guide, liability, stifle. One Comment.