Berkman Buzz: December 8, 2014

UBER, the popular car-service app that allows you to hail a cab from your smartphone, shows your assigned car as a moving dot on a map as it makes its way toward you. It's reassuring, especially as you wait on a rainy street corner.

Less reassuring, though, was the apparent threat from a senior vice president of Uber to spend "a million dollars" looking into the personal lives of journalists who wrote critically about Uber. The problem wasn't just that a representative of a powerful corporation was contemplating opposition research on reporters; the problem was that Uber already had sensitive data on journalists who used it for rides.

In the Internet age, we have no choice but to entrust our data with private companies: e-mail providers, service providers, retailers, and so on.

We realize that this data is at risk from hackers. But there's another risk as well: the employees of the companies who are holding our data for us.

In the early years of Facebook, employees had a master password that enabled them to view anything they wanted in any account. NSA employees occasionally snoop on their friends and partners. The agency even has a name for it: LOVEINT. And well before the Internet, people with access to police or medical records occasionally used that power to look up either famous people or people they knew.

Commons-based production generally, and commons-based peer production in particular, are the most important and surprising organizational innovation to have emerged in networked economy and society. Surprising, because throughout the 20th century our intellectual frame for understanding production was dominated by a binary vision: state and market. By the end of the last century, we had shifted from a view of state- and managerial-hierarchy-based production as dominant to a view of market- or decentralized price-based organization as the dominant model.

In either framework, however, Wikipedia was simply impossible, as were Apache, PHP, Perl, Firefox, the GNU project or Linux. Over the past fifteen years commons-based peer production turned from invisible, to theoretically inadmissible, to an acknowledged curiosity, to a threat, to an inevitable part of the background production system and a normal solution space to a range of information and cultural production problems; all the while projecting the imagination of an utopian possibility-set able to solve the core problems associated with early-21st century capitalist democracy.

The international human rights system is broken - or perhaps it never worked at all.

In case after case, citizens' human rights are violated under the national laws of their respective countries, despite the existence of international human rights commitments in the United Nations' Universal Declaration, and by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Organization of American States, the African Commission, and others. The International Criminal Court has little say concerning any but the most egregious of international human rights violations, and member states have wide latitude to dispense justice as they see fit.

For those who live in countries that fail to provide or enforce their own laws protecting freedom of expression, international principles have rarely provided actual recourse. Today, this is the case with the independent Ethiopian blogger collective known as Zone9.

It's a somewhat complicated situation, but it highlights a longstanding unease in this arena. Are we getting a fair trade for what we so willingly give to these giant companies? Most people would say yes, but the digital world includes an evolving marketplace that has a long way to go before it reaches equilibrium.

The Flickr case looks from here like mostly good intentions run awry. Flickr has picked images from its vast photo library and plans to monetize them by reselling "custom wall art"-excellent prints mounted on premium paper or canvas. Some photographers, selected by Flickr, will share revenues. So far, so good.

[T]he book web site [for Open Access] shows that a book can be a finished product of a certain length with an unfinished library of supplements of indefinite length. It lets me make additions in real time without delay or compromise. It lets me link to each growing thread of evidence, and because the supplements are open-access, it lets other scholars do the same. It also lets me expand the documentation and deepen the inquiry of the original book, thinking only about relevance, not length. If I had to keep my supplements short enough to fit into a new edition, then I'd have to omit most relevant new studies, which would recreate the problem that made supplements necessary in the first place. Finally, it lets me do justice, or try to do justice, to a rapidly growing field, together with its nuances and complexities, in a way that no single, short, dated book ever could.

Two hugely popular Chinese websites that provided free subtitles for foreign films and TV series ceased operations on November 22. Both sites hosted platforms for special files designed to store subtitles that can then sync with a video file so that the viewer can see the subtitles while watching a show or film.

A report from China.cn.org, an official Chinese government news portal, linked the closures to criticism from the Motion Picture Association of America, the lead lobbying group for the Hollywood film industry.

But it is not entirely clear that the MPAA was behind the decision. Indeed, earlier this month, China banned websites from streaming or providing downloading services for foreign movies and TV shows without prior official approval.