cybersoc.com

french "anti citizen journalism" law & the case for union recognition for bloggers

The French Constitutional Council has, according to the IDG News Service, "approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday."

Pascal Cohet, spokesperson for the French Civil Liberties group Odebi which has been gathering reports about the law from around the world, points out that under the law, George Holliday, who recorded LA Police beating Rodney King, could have been sentenced to up to 5 years in prison and fined €75,000 (USD $98,537).

The law was proposed by Minister of the Interior and Presidential Candidate Nicolas Sarkozy and was, according to the IDG report, intended to clamp down on a wide range of public order offenses, including "happy slapping". Campaigners, however, worry that the law was intentionally written in such a way that allows broad interpretation that effectively outlaws the efforts of citizen journalists to photograph and film violent acts, including police brutality.

The French Government has also reportedly proposed "a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules. The journalists' organization Reporters Without Borders, which campaigns for a free press, has warned that such a system could lead to excessive self censorship as organizations worried about losing their certification suppress certain stories."

Nicolas Sarkozy, regular readers of this blog will recall, is the right wing French politician who caused quite a stir by turning up to address Le Web 3 after being invited by Loic Le Meur, one of France's most widely read bloggers who has endorsed Sarkozy's candidacy. Le Meur, a serial entrepreneur, supports Sarkozy in part because he feels that Sarkozy is the candidate most likely to help bring new opportunities to the French software and technology industries by supporting start-ups and venture capital investment in them. Sarkozy has, in the past, also been supportive of journalism.

It's quite difficult to understand why Sarkozy would propose a law that seems to go against both the internet publishing/tech community he's been courting as well as journalists.

Citizen journalists and bloggers can't, of course, ignore the existence of libel law, contempt and other restraints that are placed upon what they can and can't publish online. Indeed, The Press Gazette reported last December that violation of such laws (as well as repression) on the internet accounted for "one in three jailed journalists". It's important that bloggers understand both their rights and their legal responsibilities and there are a growing number of resources, including this one from NewAssignment.net, offering explanations of these.

The good news is that in some places, for example California, courts are beginning to recognise that bloggers and citizen journalists should have the same legal protection as journalists. The bad news is that, in most jurisdictions, such recognition is probably still a long way away.

Existing organisations created by and for bloggers, such as the Media Bloggers Association, tend to be more about cross-promotion and don't get the same respect or recognition from governments that more mainstream journalism bodies receive.

The way forward, if bloggers and citizen journalists want to work together to ensure their recognition and rights, is to begin speaking with existing journalism industry trade bodies and unions, for example the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) in the UK or the Online News Association internationally. Seeing that more and more bloggers are doing journalism, and more and more journalists are becoming bloggers, they may very well be willing to take bloggers on as fully fledged, card carrying members and/or to set up branches specifically for bloggers.

Once onboard with the trade unions, bloggers could join professional journalists, free speech and civil rights campaigners, mainstream media organisations and other interested parties to form a united front in fight against laws like this one in France and elsewhere.

[Update: BBC News Online is now reporting on the proposed French law]

bookmark this post: del.icio.us l Digg l Furl l ma.gnolia l Newsvine l reddit l Yahoo MyWeb l Track with co.mments

leweb 3: fall out continues

Blimey. I never thought that when things started to go a bit strange at Le Web that the resulting fallout would be so far and wide.

This evening the editor of TechCrunch UK, Sam Sethi got sacked. [Please note disclosure posted 17.29 Thurs below] Sam had criticised Le Meur, as half the blogosphere seems to be doing at the moment, and drew a comment from Le Meur saying he was an asshole. Sam then wrote another post highlighting, I think rightly, Le Meur's outburst. Unfortunately, Sam went a bit far and decided to promote plans for his own events in the same post. I agree that this last bit seemed odd to me, but certainly think he got it right in his first post about Le Web and was also right to post again having drown the "asshole" comment from Le Meur.

I wonder how this will affect the growing post Le Web now that we have reliable internet access blog-lash:

David Weinberger

Scobleizer

The Guardian

Graham Holliday

Shane Richmond at the Telegraph

Scripting News

Oliver Thylmann

Techmeme

One man and his Dog

Tom Raftery's I.T. Views

Ivan Pope

Jackie Danicki

That's only scratching the surface...and Tom Morris has a good set of links too.

Updated with some links: Thursday 10am

UPDATE: Journalism.co.uk does an eloquent job with this story - and reveals that it might still be growing.

UPDATE: 17.29 - I've just remembered that I met Sam from TechCrunch UK very briefly on Saturday evening. I thought he was Mike Butcher, also from TechCrunchUK. A lot of people I know probably know one or both of these people. Sam said to me on Saturday that we'd crossed paths before although wasn't sure when. Just wanted to get that out in the open as soon as I realised it. Thanks.

le web 3: stats

Some quick stats from Le Web 3, as of 2am Paris time on Wednesday:

# Le Web 3 blog rank on Technorati: 5846
# Le Web 3 blog rank on Technorati, 09 December: 25,284
# of words posted here: 4907 (some of it duplicates BBC posts)
# of words I wrote for BBC News Online: 3451 (995+2456)
# links to Le Web 3 blog according to technorati: 1377
# number of people in attendance: 1000, swelling to 1300 for Sarkozy
# technorati rank of loic le meur: 796
# page impressions and unique users here Tuesday: 740 / 576
# people alledgedly connected to the conference wifi: 625+
# page impressions and unique users here Monday: 473 / 380
# countries in attendance: 37
# of photos I uploaded to flickr since I set off for Paris: 28
# videos I posted to nowpublic: 1
# links, according to Technorati, to le web related posts here: 12
# hours of sleep since Thursday night: 17.5
# hours spent at conference: approximately 19
# hours of hotel wifi used: 9
# cost of that wifi: €6 per hour
# uk press organisations covering event: 3 (BBC, Telegraph and Guardian)
# times ate omlette and chips: 2
# of French Presidential candidates making appearances: 2, unless you count Le Meur
# number of former Prime Ministers and Nobel Peace Prize winners: 1

and, finally, amount of sleep I'm going to get tonight... currently unknown.

le web 3: an end is in sight

Les Politics 3
Originally uploaded by jaygooby.

What do you do when you are writing a reporters log for BBC News about a conference like Le Web? Sit behind the guy doing the same thing from the Guardian and nick his good finds, of course.

Hugh Mcleod just gave me a great quote to end on after today's day: "Web 2.0 is about love - it's about putting the love back in people." Off to write my last post...

leweb3: no politicians for the politics and blogging session

David Weinberger from Harvard's Berkman Center started his presentation, "Blogging Our Way to Democracy", by observing that "Today seems to be a day where politicians say the internet isn't going to come to them, so they better come to the internet."

He wasn't going to insult anyone by saying that since none of the politicians who visited Le Web earlier today stuck around long enough to gain from Weinberger's insights - which attracted a lot of flack. Weinberger would probably say that politicians ignore the internet and bloggers at their own peril.

According to Weinberger, the American presidential candidacy of Howard Dean was the the first to really understand and embrace the internet and it's culture by hiring a blogger to run their website. He said, "Bloggers are not on message, Matthew was not on message. He wrote as an enthusiastic supporter." That, says Weinberger, built trust within the electorate and, for a time Dean, "an obscure Governor from Vermont" was able to lead the field of Democratic candidates.

This, in Weinberger's view, was an extremely positive develop. "The broadcast model has nothing to do with democracy. It's killing democracy..." and, says Weinberger, the Dean campaign did everything they could think of to break up that top down pyramid model. The result was that people ended up being more enthusiastic about the campaign than they were about the candidate.

One of the main things, in Weinberger's view, that sets the internet apart from broadcast media, is that most internet pages are not self contained. Bloggers link out to other content because it's their way of keeping their audiences happy by pointing them to other stuff they might be interested in. "This is how we, WE, built OUR internet - out of links!!!!"

David Weinberger compared and contrasted a blog he reads regularly, which is full of links to other blogs, and the front page of the New York Times website which has many links but all of them inward looking. Looking up at the large presentation screen behind him, Weinberger exclaimed, "look at all those links, all that blue - they must be really generous too. They don't want us to go away because they think that, if we do, we won't come back - and they are probably right."

Weinberger says that linking is just one example of the way that internet users are taking greater control of the way that information on the internet is organised.

The organisation of information not only just helps us find that content, but it also helps us to understand it and give it meaning. As an example, Weinberger uses the example of a hammer which, he says, can't be understood unless one knows what a nail is.

"We are now, right now, in the process of externalising meaning. In doing so, we are creating meaning and that's a way of sharing the world. We need to find meaning and engage with - conversation gives us a good model for that."

Speaking of conversations, during a later panel, Bo Y. Shao, who set up the "Chinese answer to ebay" said he wished the two Presidential candidates who spoke at us earlier today would have stayed for a bit of enlightenment from the panel on politics and blogging.

Le Meur looked genuinely surprised and, for a very brief moment, slightly unnerved when a few people applauded, making him realise, or at least ponder for a few seconds, the idea that not everyone wanted Le Web to get taken over by his political aspirations .

It was the first time I saw that plastic fantastic ear-to-ear perma-grin he's been wearing all day dissappear for even a moment. Le Meur does, of course, have every reason to smile about today. Hell, he got his kid to come along to see how great he is and even took him for a stroll on stage, explaining to the audience that he was teaching his son how to get up on stage with him.

Unlike Le Meur, and apparently oblivious to him, those guys from Belgium and a lot of other people sitting where I am haven't managed to crack a smile all day.

real live bloggers spotted at le web 3 (no really!)

real live bloggers spotted at le web 3 (no really!)
Originally uploaded by robinhamman.

This conference just keeps getting stranger. As we left the previous session for lunch, I spotted some people busy building a wooden booth with windows at the back of the hall.

Now that we've come back, and got past the half dozen men in suits with radio earbuds not so discreetly in their ears, we could see that the booth now contains a large audio mixing board and microphones for live translation and there are hundreds of headsets stacked in front of the booth. And thus the transformation from Les Blogs to Le Web takes on another, perhaps it's last, transformation of this conference into Le Politique.

Members of the security detail aren't the only new comers to the conference - there are lots of mainstream media folk lingering at the back, quite a few new TV camera's and lots of attractive women - this is France - carrying around clipboards and chatting busily into their mobiles. There's also a few people walking up and down the aisles asking, in French, if anyone needs the English translation.

This is all in preparation of a visit from Nicolas Sarkozy in a few minutes time. He'll be the second French presidential hopeful to address us today, the first being François Bayrou who seemed to grasp the whole blog thing. But all this previously unplanned political speechmaking is riling some of the conference goers, particular the people from the UK I spoke with at lunch, who, as they point out, parted with good money to be "subjected" to this all day. It's not just the British who are moaning.

I'm sitting next to Erlend Debast and Bart De Waele from Belgium. I asked Bart if he paid to come. The response was a quiet "yeh" which dripped with the disappointment of someone who feels they've been ripped off. Erlend, sitting beside him, has started an unofficial Le Web blog, written in Dutch, to cover the conference. I guess he was really excited to come but, now he's so disappointed that he didn't feel up to putting it into words and, instead, do what bloggers do and linked to someone else who'd said it, the blog of another Belgian sitting a few seats down our row where it says, in English, "for some reason, this "web" conference has been transformed into a political rally".

Not only have speakers been pushed back or forgotten, but the whole place is giddy with an awkward feeling of apprehension as we await the may who could, if Le Meur has his way, be the next leader of France.

One can't help but notice that Sarkozy's blog is based on the blogging software provided by the company that Le Meur works for, Six Apart. As previously mentioned in this column, Le Meur has also publicly endorsed Sarkozy on his website.

Why am I writing so much about politicians? Because that, rather than the internet, blogging, web 2.0 and all the themes we came here for, is what this conference now seems to be all about.

want to be french president? come to le web...

Bayrou at Le Web 3
Originally uploaded by robinhamman.

This is truly extraordinary. Le Web has become, well, something rather different to what I and many other conference goers expected.

Shimon Peres kicked off the morning and now we're being treated, if you can call it that, to a parade of French politicians making their bids for the leadership of France in the elections being held in early 2007.
François Bayrou (in photo), president of the centrist Union for French Democracy has just given a talk that showed he really gets the whole blogging thing. We've been told that later today we'll also be seeing Nicolas Sarkozy, leader of French President Jacques Chirac's centre-right UMP party, his arch-rival Socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal.

What, one could ask, are all these politicians doing at a blog conference turned marketplace for web 2.0 startups? You can read more on that over on my BBC News column.

I shot some video of Bayrou, talking blogs, with my cameraphone. He was, just before he was to answer questions from the floor, some important French media conglomorate boss appeared at the corner of the stage, much to the shock of Le Meur, and step up on stage taking the microphone. Le Meur sort of danced around on his toes flapping his arms for a moment until, much to his credit, the other presenter on stage (sorry, I don't have his name) called to a stop by cutting off previously mentioned big media boss mid-sentence and pointed out that it was time for the bloggers, not him, to answer questions.

Now Danah Boyd is on - I wanted to hear her but I've got to get that video up...



UPDATE: There is now an open letter of protest to the conference organisers.

le web 3: ten commandments with one internet

Shimon Peres at Le Web
Originally uploaded by robinhamman.

When asked by a member of the audience, from the World Economic Forum, "what can an army of bloggers do to help relieve the Israeli/Arab conflict?", Peres looked to the others on stage for, I think, a quick explanation of what a blog is.

After a long pause, Peres said "Look, it's an interesting question. In my judgement, I told my american friends, instead of going to other countries with ideologies, governments, armies, come with your private sector. Build branches, schools... we welcome you to come and do it. You can take the risk. You can seriously opening private businesses... it can change every country in the middle east. You don't have to do it in the name of governments, do it in the name of the future, another world."

Peres miandered through a discussion of how private investment can provide a solution to the conflicts of the Middle East and elsewhere before saying that the internet does have a part to play in this. He called it "10 commandments with one internet".

There will be more on my rolling BBC column soon...

le web 3: strange visitor in the morning

There are some words that you just shouldn't be subjected to early in the morning. Amongst those are "first mover advantage", "click stream revenue sharing" and "open your bag please".

In a few minutes, the 83 year old former Prime Minister of Israel, Shimon Peres, is going to address Le Web. There's nothing like a heavy security presence, including bag searches and vans full of police outside the venue, to get the blood moving in the morning.

What Peres is going to say to a room full of web start-up people and venture capitalists is anyone's guess. As I wrote in my BBC News Online Reporter's Log, Peres's people found out about Le Web and phoned the organiser on Sunday to ask if Peres might be able to come address the conference. It's a pretty strange thing to be in the situation where you can simply assume that a conference, even one utterly unrelated to anything you've ever publicly spoken about or been involved in, might want to have you get up on the stage to speak. It's a bit like a non-swimmer diving into the pool at the Olympics and no one thinking anything odd of it.

Loic is moving the warm-up speaker, who was saying something about RSS, off the stage so Peres must be here...

le web 3: strange visitor in the morning

There are some words that you just shouldn't be subjected to early in the morning. Amongst those are "first mover advantage", "click stream revenue sharing" and "open your bag please".

In a few minutes, the 83 year old former Prime Minister of Israel, Shimon Peres, is going to address Le Web. There's nothing like a heavy security presence, including bag searches and vans full of police outside the venue, to get the blood moving in the morning.

What Peres is going to say to a room full of web start-up people and venture capitalists is anyone's guess. As I wrote in my BBC News Online Reporter's Log, Peres's people found out about Le Web and phoned the organiser on Sunday to ask if Peres might be able to come address the conference. It's a pretty strange thing to be in the situation where you can simply assume that a conference, even one utterly unrelated to anything you've ever publicly spoken about or been involved in, might want to have you get up on the stage to speak. It's a bit like a non-swimmer diving into the pool at the Olympics and no one thinking anything odd of it.

Loic is moving the warm-up speaker, who was saying something about RSS, off the stage so Peres must be here...