Steaming past Macedonia

US rockets up 12 places in press freedom rankings - to 36th in the world. via Digby.

Last year's performance was noted here.

Setting it free

A link on David Weinberger's blog goes to an interesting article he wrote for the Harvard Business Review entitled If You Love Your Information, Set It Free. Yesterday, when I clicked on it, an interstitial something or other advised that one could quote up to 500 words of the article and no more. That bit of reintermediation doesn't seem to be there today, but if one searches for the article at the Review's site, one arrives at this:



It's unclear what exactly I am purchasing if I purchase copyright permission. Am I paying for the right to set David's article free? Am I under some limitation to be specified in the fine print of whatever I get when I buy permission?

What exactly is the institutional understanding at Harvard of the meaning of the work of someone like David, a Berkman Center fellow who has been an apostle for freeing information, whose latest book prophetically and proleptically sees it as inevitable?

What if I gave myself permission to cause the article to appear, say, here, without purchasing a download, a pdf, or copyright permission?

Jewel y Yanni

In the New York Posts on March 3, 1994, Rudy Giuliani defined freedom:

"Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it."