Dear All,
These are the debate topics listed on World Debate Website. Now we've got work to do...
Ella
Afghanistan (e.g. failed democracy and drug production)
AIDS prevention (e.g. condoms, drug patents)
Anti social behaviour orders (ASBOs in UK & Ireland)
Assassination of heads of state
Ban hunting (e.g. fox hunting in UK)
Burma (e.g. Aung San Suu Kyi)
CCTV (use of)
Child care (e.g. for working mothers or maternity/paternal leave)
China and Taiwan
Citizen initiated referenda
Citizenship exams
Class action lawsuits (banning them)
Compulsory ID Cards
Condoms in Pornography
Consensual Cannibalism
Cuba (e.g. sanctions against)
Darfue & Sudan
Death penalty (e.g. 1000th execution in US, concept of “redemption”)
Established Journalism vs blogs/podcasts
Egypt (e.g. rise of Islamist political parties)
EU Commission (e.g. lection of)
EU Constitution/Budget
EU working language
EU/US relations (e.g. trade, terror etc)
Euro (e.g. Italy should abandon)
Exploration of Space (e.g. Mars, ISS, China)
Extended alcohol drinking licences (e.g. 24 hour pubs)
Face transplants, ethics of
Fault divorces vs no fault divorces
Freedom of labour movement (e.g. migrant labour in EU)
Free Speech (e.g. Wikipeadia)
Trade Unions (e.g. future of)
Gay rights (marriage, priests etc)
Honour killings
Human genetics (cloning, stem cells etc)
Human Rights and sporting events (e.g. Olympics in China)
Hybrid energy (e.g. hybrid cars)
Illegal Immigration (e.g. Spanish enclaves in Africa)
International Adoption (e.g. Romanian orphans)
International ban on whaling
International Challenge in business (i.e. industry moving from west to east) AKA Outsourcing
International emergency response force (e.g. Tsunami, Earthquake, New Orleans)
International extradition of terrorists (CIA flights to Europe) Also International Rendition
International laws on intellectual property (copyright, patents etc).
Internet music/film Piracy (e.g. BitTorrent etc)
Internet Pornography (e.g. .xxx domain names, child prono)
Internet regulation (ICANN)
Iraq, future of
Judicial independence (e.g. removal of a judge)
Korea (North v South relations)
Lebanon & Syria
Limit Free speech (e.g. Holocaust denial/incitement of terror)
Limits to self defence (e.g. shoot burglars)
Mandatory minimum sentences
Maritime Law (e.g. flags of convince)
Martial Law (e.g. French Riots)
Medical "fashion" (e.g. Bird Flu vaccine)
National/individual carbon quotas
Nuclear Power (e.g. environmental benefits)
Nuclear proliferation/disarmament (e.g. Iran)
Obesity in Children
Outing gay public figures
Parental consent for medial treatment of under 16s (including seeking an Abortion, obesity, MMR)
Parental responsibility for crimes of children
Performance enhancing drugs (e.g. sport)
Pensions (e.g make them compulsory)
Palestine
Pre-emptive military action (e.g. Israel v Iran)
Privacy of the Catholic confessional
Prostitution
Public vs Private education
Public-Private partnerships in infrastructural development
Religious dress in school/work (e.g. Hijab in France)
Religious education (e.g. what should be taught in state funded schools)
Religious law Vs National Law (e.g. canon law)
Respect for national sovereignty (e.g. in war on terror)
Respecting Ethnic Diversity (Muslims in France, travellers in Ireland, race riots in Sydney)
Retirement Age (raising it)
Rights of minority to homeland (Sri-Lanka, Basque, Kurds etc)
Russian economy
Salary cap in sport
Shoot to kill policy in war on terror (e.g. tube in London)
Social partnership
Social welfare vouchers
State funding for charity
State funding for sports
Tax incentives for artists
Telephone records (e.g. state monitoring private calls)
Term limits for politicians (e.g. Tony Blair, Robert Mugabe)
Testing on Animals (e.g. at Oxford)
Torture (e.g. use of in war on terror)
Traffic problems (e.g. Congestion charges, toll roads, mandatory car pooling etc)
Treatment of addicts (e.g. cold turkey or access to further treatment e.g. George Best's liver transplant)
Truth & reconciliation commissions
Try Saddam Hussein in private
Turkish entry to EU (including Cyprus issue)
UN (e.g. reform of)
Uganda Elections
War Crimes Tribunals (e.g. Croatian general)
Women's rights (e.g. in the Church, workplace, education etc)
Women in politics (e.g. Germany Chile)
WTO Negotiations (e.g. Agricultural subsidies)
Zimbabwe (democracy, constitution, elections)
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Organ Harvesting Before “Brain-Death“ Increasingly Common
By Gudrun Schultz
WASHINGTON, D.C., March 21, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Organ harvesting from patients before brain-death has been declared is a rapidly increasing trend in U. S. hospitals, the Washington Post reported March 18, alarming doctors and ethicists about the dubious ethics behind the practice.
Instead of waiting until brain function ceases and the patient is declared “brain-dead“ by medical officials (itself a questionable practice since there is no universally-accepted definition of brain-death) surgeons have begun following an approach known as “donation after cardiac death.“ Organs are harvested once the heart has stopped beating and several minutes have passed without the heart spontaneously re-starting.
“Non-beating heart“ organ donations have more than doubled since 2003, from 268 to more than 605 in 2006, and the numbers are continuing to rise. The United Network for Organ Sharing and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations now require all hospitals to evaluate the practice and decide whether or not to adopt it.
The Alliance for Human Research Protection issued an alert Sunday warning that the policy is under consideration by hospitals without allowing for public input.
“The race to catch-up to China's policy of live vivisection organ removal from prisoners is underway right here in the US where, the Post reports, the trend is expected to accelerate this year,“ the AHRP stated.
“So far as we know, our right to informed consent--which means the right to
say, NO--has been abrogated without so much as a public hearing!“
While doctors normally wait five minutes after the heart has stopped before pronouncing death, more and more doctors are shortening the wait period to maximize the quality of the organs. Surgeons at the Children's Hospital in Denver, Colorado wait only 75 seconds after infants' hearts stop beating before removing the heart for transplant, according to the Post. The demand for usable organs is a powerful incentive to push back the ethical boundaries of harvesting policies, say alarmed physicians.
“A lot of us are not particularly happy about cutting that line particularly
close,“ said Gail A. Van Norman, an anesthesiologist and bioethicist at the
University of Washington in Seattle.
“It's worrisome when you stop thinking of the person who is dying as a patient but rather as a set of organs, and start thinking more about what's best for the patient in the next room waiting for the organs.“
While the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine approved the practice as ethical so long as strict guidelines are followed, opponents say it is difficult to ensure patients are not being killed by over-eager harvesting, particularly in pediatric situations. Van Norman and others said the practice could put pressure on families to stop care prematurely, especially when doctors and nurses are caring for both the potential donor and potential recipient.
David Crippen, a University of Pittsburgh critical-care specialist, told the Post he is concerned the changing definition of death will eventually lead to organ harvesting from the disabled.
“Now that we've established that we're going to take organs from patients
who have a prognosis of death but who do not meet the strict definition of
death, might we become more interested in taking organs from patients who
are not dead at all but who are incapacitated or disabled?“
THW permit legislating by citizen initiated referenda
Citizen-initiated referendums
We cannot all go down to the local town centre as the ancient Athenians did. Our nations and our states are too big for that. Citizen-initiated referendum is one way for citizens to have a direct say in government decisions where there are large populations. Two of the things citizen-initiated referendum can do are:
• allow citizens to propose a new law
• allow citizens to vote against laws passed by parliament.
Some countries that have citizen-initiated referendum have one of the above and others have both.
Citizen-initiated referendum in three countries
Switzerland
The Swiss have had citizen-initiated referendum for over 100 years and in that time have voted on more than 300 issues. In 1977 the people rejected a proposal by the government for a new kind of tax. In 1984 they rejected another government proposal to reduce the working week from 42 hours to 38 hours.
United States
In the United States many states have some form of citizen-initiated referendum. In California during the 1990 elections, voters had to deal with a ballot paper with 20 referendum questions and 144 pages containing arguments for and against each referendum proposal.
In the 1960s the Californian government passed a law that real estate agents and owners of apartment houses could not use racial discrimination against people who wanted to rent or buy apartments or houses. The real estate agents initiated a referendum to overturn this law so that they could discriminate against people in this way. The real estate agents won.
Four states have voted to bring back the death penalty through referendum. Anti-gun laws have been introduced in several states.
Italy
In Italy the citizens can only initiate a referendum to vote against a law passed by the government. They cannot initiate a referendum to propose a law. In 1991 Italian people voted to remove a law which prohibited divorce.
How citizen-initiated referendum could work
Step 1
Some people in the community want a new law or to remove an existing law. They collect a number of petitions of registered voters and take them to the electoral office (say 1 per cent of voters in a majority of electorates in order to move to the next step).
Step 2
Parliamentary officers prepare a proposed law.
Step 3
The proposed law is debated in the parliament. If the parliament does not pass the proposal, it moves to Step 4.
Step 4
A referendum is held and if a majority of voters in a majority of electorates support the proposal, it becomes law.
This House Believes That we should have more direct democracy?
| Arguments against more direct democracy | Arguments for more direct democracy |
| People already have a choice between members of parliament and the government programs they support. | People have more say about particular issues. Sometimes politicians of opposite sides agree among themselves on a policy they know the people don't support. |
| People already have to vote for federal, state and local governments. They don't want to have to go to polling booths more often. Electronic voting is not a realistic option; it has too many problems. | Electronic media allows debate and voting among large populations without any need for people to come to one place. |
| People have an opportunity, apart from elections through community and lobby groups to influence governments and governments are often guided by opinion polls. | Governments and parties can still play a role as they do today. |
| Citizen campaigns can more easily be led by people or groups with money - meaning wealthy groups have too much influence. Individual citizens or groups of citizens who propose change may not have the interest or the ability to make proposals in the best interests of all the different groups in the country or state. | Politicians are not the only people who are expert in making decisions for the nation as a whole. As people become more involved they become more expert. |
| Representative governments should look after the interests of minorities as well as the majority that voted for them. The people may be more influenced by prejudice or less concerned about minority rights. | Representative governments have not always looked after the interests of minority groups. |
| Once the people had voted on a citizen-initiated referendum it would have to become law. There would be no opportunity for the parliament to review the proposed legislation or make changes before it became law. | There is no reason to think that citizens will be any better or worse than governments. |
referendum campaigning is much less well developed and well understood than the art of election campaigning. More effective in saying “NO” than saying “YES”
Amongst other things, modern political advertising tends to be:
* negative, often fiercely so;
* visual rather than textual;
* targeted to different segments of an electorate which is profiled and segmented in depth by party organisations;
* in particular, targeted at “swinging voters” who are considered by the parties to be the voters who are least well-informed, least civic minded, most materialistic and most easily stirred to negative emotions;
* increasingly short and simple;
* content-free as far as substantive issues and policies are concerned;
* geared to selling personalities rather than policies.
None of this is well suited to securing the passage of a referendum proposal, and task which requires (a) clearly explaining the proposal so that a large majority of the voting population understand it and (b) providing persuasive arguments to convince a majority of the voters to support it.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Poor Behavior Is Linked to Time in Day Care
A much-anticipated report from the largest and longest-running study of American child care has found that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class — and that the effect persisted through the sixth grade. And as expected, parents’ guidance and their genes had by far the strongest influence on how children behaved.
But the finding held up regardless of the child’s sex or family income, and regardless of the quality of the day care center. With more than two million American preschoolers attending day care, the increased disruptiveness very likely contributes to the load on teachers who must manage large classrooms, the authors argue.
On the positive side, they also found that time spent in high-quality day care centers was correlated with higher vocabulary scores through elementary school. The findings are certain to feed a long-running debate over day care, experts say.
The debate reached a high pitch in the late 1980s, during the so-called day care wars, when social scientists questioned whether it was better for mothers to work or stay home. Day care workers and their clients, mostly working parents, argued that it was the quality of the care that mattered, not the setting. But the new report affirms similar results from several smaller studies in the past decade suggesting that setting does matter.
That the troublesome behaviors lasted through at least sixth grade, he said, should raise a broader question: “So what happens in classrooms, schools, playgrounds and communities when more and more children, at younger and younger ages, spend more and more time in centers, many that are indisputably of limited quality?”
The study did not take into account employee turnover, a reality in many day care centers that can have a negative effect on children, said Marci Young, deputy director of the Center for the Child Care Workforce, which represents day care workers.
In 2001, the authors reported that children who spent most of their day in care not provided by a parent were more likely to be disruptive in kindergarten. But this effect soon vanished for all but those children who spent a significant amount of time in day care centers.
“What the findings tell me is that we need to pay as much attention to children’s social and emotional development as we do to their cognitive, academic development, especially when they are together in groups,” said Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit research group.
But the finding held up regardless of the child’s sex or family income, and regardless of the quality of the day care center. With more than two million American preschoolers attending day care, the increased disruptiveness very likely contributes to the load on teachers who must manage large classrooms, the authors argue.
On the positive side, they also found that time spent in high-quality day care centers was correlated with higher vocabulary scores through elementary school. The findings are certain to feed a long-running debate over day care, experts say.
The debate reached a high pitch in the late 1980s, during the so-called day care wars, when social scientists questioned whether it was better for mothers to work or stay home. Day care workers and their clients, mostly working parents, argued that it was the quality of the care that mattered, not the setting. But the new report affirms similar results from several smaller studies in the past decade suggesting that setting does matter.
That the troublesome behaviors lasted through at least sixth grade, he said, should raise a broader question: “So what happens in classrooms, schools, playgrounds and communities when more and more children, at younger and younger ages, spend more and more time in centers, many that are indisputably of limited quality?”
The study did not take into account employee turnover, a reality in many day care centers that can have a negative effect on children, said Marci Young, deputy director of the Center for the Child Care Workforce, which represents day care workers.
In 2001, the authors reported that children who spent most of their day in care not provided by a parent were more likely to be disruptive in kindergarten. But this effect soon vanished for all but those children who spent a significant amount of time in day care centers.
“What the findings tell me is that we need to pay as much attention to children’s social and emotional development as we do to their cognitive, academic development, especially when they are together in groups,” said Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit research group.
Failing Schools See a Solution in Longer Day
States and school districts nationwide are moving to lengthen the day at struggling schools, spurred by grim test results suggesting that more than 10,000 schools are likely to be declared failing under federal law next year.
In Massachusetts, in the forefront of the movement, Gov. Deval L. Patrick is allocating $6.5 million this year for longer days and can barely keep pace with demand: 84 schools have expressed interest.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York has proposed an extended day as one of five options for his state’s troubled schools, part of a $7 billion increase in spending on education over the next four years — apart from the 37 minutes of extra tutoring that children in some city schools already receive four times a week.
“In 15 years, I’d be very surprised if the old school calendar still dominates in urban settings,” said Mark Roosevelt, superintendent of schools in Pittsburgh, which has added 45 minutes a day at eight of its lowest-performing schools and 10 more days to their academic year.
But the movement, which has expanded the day in some schools by as little as 30 minutes or as much as two hours, has many critics: among administrators, who worry about the cost; among teachers, whose unions say they work hard enough as it is, and have sought more pay and renegotiation of contracts; and among parents, who say their children spend enough time in school already.
Still others question the equity of moving toward a system where students at low-performing, often urban, schools get more teaching than students at other schools.
And of all the steps school districts take to try to improve student achievement, lengthening the day is generally the costliest — an extra $1,300 a student annually here in Massachusetts — and difficult to sustain.
The idea of a longer day was first promoted in charter schools — public schools that are tax-supported but independently run.
Pressed by the demands of the law, school officials who support longer days say that much of the regular day must concentrate on test preparation. With extra hours, they say, they can devote more time to test readiness, if needed, and teach subjects that have increasingly been dropped from the curriculum, like history, art, drama.
“As people are starting to really sweat, they’ve increasingly started to think really hard about ‘are we giving them enough time?’ ”
Still, some educators question whether keeping children in school longer will improve their performance. A recent report by the Education Sector, a centrist nonprofit research group, found that unless the time students are engaged in active learning — mastering academic subjects — is increased, adding hours alone may not do much.
Money also has proved a big obstacle.
Given that expense, New Mexico is acting surgically. The state is spending $2.3 million to extend the day for about 2,100 children in four districts who failed state achievement tests. The money, $1,000 a student, goes for an extra hour of school a day for those children, time they spend on tutorials tailored to their weaknesses in math or reading.
Many parents in Fall River said they were pleased by the commitment a longer schedule signaled, reasoning that more hours meant more chances for their children to succeed.
Some parents in this working-class community, like John Chaves, father of a seventh-grader, Mindy, said they supported more time at school simply because so few are home earlier to welcome their children. “We’re never home at the time that they’re home, so at least we know where our kids are,” Mr. Chaves said.
In Massachusetts, in the forefront of the movement, Gov. Deval L. Patrick is allocating $6.5 million this year for longer days and can barely keep pace with demand: 84 schools have expressed interest.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York has proposed an extended day as one of five options for his state’s troubled schools, part of a $7 billion increase in spending on education over the next four years — apart from the 37 minutes of extra tutoring that children in some city schools already receive four times a week.
“In 15 years, I’d be very surprised if the old school calendar still dominates in urban settings,” said Mark Roosevelt, superintendent of schools in Pittsburgh, which has added 45 minutes a day at eight of its lowest-performing schools and 10 more days to their academic year.
But the movement, which has expanded the day in some schools by as little as 30 minutes or as much as two hours, has many critics: among administrators, who worry about the cost; among teachers, whose unions say they work hard enough as it is, and have sought more pay and renegotiation of contracts; and among parents, who say their children spend enough time in school already.
Still others question the equity of moving toward a system where students at low-performing, often urban, schools get more teaching than students at other schools.
And of all the steps school districts take to try to improve student achievement, lengthening the day is generally the costliest — an extra $1,300 a student annually here in Massachusetts — and difficult to sustain.
The idea of a longer day was first promoted in charter schools — public schools that are tax-supported but independently run.
Pressed by the demands of the law, school officials who support longer days say that much of the regular day must concentrate on test preparation. With extra hours, they say, they can devote more time to test readiness, if needed, and teach subjects that have increasingly been dropped from the curriculum, like history, art, drama.
“As people are starting to really sweat, they’ve increasingly started to think really hard about ‘are we giving them enough time?’ ”
Still, some educators question whether keeping children in school longer will improve their performance. A recent report by the Education Sector, a centrist nonprofit research group, found that unless the time students are engaged in active learning — mastering academic subjects — is increased, adding hours alone may not do much.
Money also has proved a big obstacle.
Given that expense, New Mexico is acting surgically. The state is spending $2.3 million to extend the day for about 2,100 children in four districts who failed state achievement tests. The money, $1,000 a student, goes for an extra hour of school a day for those children, time they spend on tutorials tailored to their weaknesses in math or reading.
Many parents in Fall River said they were pleased by the commitment a longer schedule signaled, reasoning that more hours meant more chances for their children to succeed.
Some parents in this working-class community, like John Chaves, father of a seventh-grader, Mindy, said they supported more time at school simply because so few are home earlier to welcome their children. “We’re never home at the time that they’re home, so at least we know where our kids are,” Mr. Chaves said.
Mr. Puck’s Good Idea
From time to time, consumers are reminded of the power they have, and the power of the choices they make. There is no better example than the rising popularity of organic food — a matter of conscience and of taste. More and more people are buying local, organic produce and trying to find meat and eggs and dairy products from farms that are not part of the horror of factory farming.
Not surprisingly, people who shop that way also like to dine out that way. That will now be easier thanks to Wolfgang Puck, the universal restaurateur. He has decided that his culinary businesses will now use products only from animals raised under strict humane standards.
Mr. Puck is not the first chef and restaurateur to decide to forgo factory-farmed meat and eggs. You can find a few restaurants upholding these standards in nearly every major American city. But Mr. Puck runs an empire, not a restaurant. His outreach is enormous, and so is his potential educational impact. In fact, he has come late to this decision, perhaps because it affects a corporation, not the menu of a single restaurant.
For one thing, Mr. Puck’s new standard will help correct a misimpression. Many diners assume that most of the cruelty in factory farming lies in producing foie gras and veal. But Americans consume vastly more chicken, turkey, pork and beef than foie gras and veal, and most of the creatures those meats come from are raised in ways that are ethically and environmentally unsound. Until recently, most Americans have been appallingly ignorant of how their food is produced. That is changing. And Mr. Puck’s gift for showmanship will help advance Americans’ knowledge that they can eat well and do right all at the same time.
Not surprisingly, people who shop that way also like to dine out that way. That will now be easier thanks to Wolfgang Puck, the universal restaurateur. He has decided that his culinary businesses will now use products only from animals raised under strict humane standards.
Mr. Puck is not the first chef and restaurateur to decide to forgo factory-farmed meat and eggs. You can find a few restaurants upholding these standards in nearly every major American city. But Mr. Puck runs an empire, not a restaurant. His outreach is enormous, and so is his potential educational impact. In fact, he has come late to this decision, perhaps because it affects a corporation, not the menu of a single restaurant.
For one thing, Mr. Puck’s new standard will help correct a misimpression. Many diners assume that most of the cruelty in factory farming lies in producing foie gras and veal. But Americans consume vastly more chicken, turkey, pork and beef than foie gras and veal, and most of the creatures those meats come from are raised in ways that are ethically and environmentally unsound. Until recently, most Americans have been appallingly ignorant of how their food is produced. That is changing. And Mr. Puck’s gift for showmanship will help advance Americans’ knowledge that they can eat well and do right all at the same time.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Down the YouTube?
IT HAS been a terrible month for Google, the biggest search engine and the internet’s reigning superpower, and for its subsidiary, YouTube, the pioneer and precocious leader of online video. Users may love them, but the old-media companies, feeling increasingly exploited, loathe them, sue them, and gang up on them. And that matters, because neither Google nor YouTube, as quintessential “new-media” companies, own any of the content that they organise so well.
Viacom is suing them for $1 billion, alleging massive copyright theft; it is also teaming up with an innovative new online-television company, Joost, to make its videos available legally. Walt Disney is allied with Apple and its iTunes store, which is increasingly a squeaky-clean (in terms of copyright law) video retailer besides being a music store. And the NBC/News Corporation venture, which may yet be joined by Sony and others, embraces not only a vast library of video content but also an equally staggering distribution alliance. The videos will play not only on the venture’s new (as yet unnamed) site to be launched this summer, but on the websites of Yahoo!, Time Warner’s AOL, and Microsoft’s MSN, the three biggest web portals. At a stroke the venture will, legally, reach almost the entire American internet audience.
Of greater concern to YouTube, however, is the clear evidence that NBC and News Corporation both realise that they must not try to trap viewers on specific websites, but rather let them watch videos “on the sites where they live,” as Peter Chernin, News Corporation’s president, puts it. Teenagers will be able to post video clips on their own MySpace pages; even bloggers using independent services will be able to embed videos on their personal diaries. They will be able to discuss and annotate the clips and films with their own gossip, and thus be “social” in exactly the same way that YouTube allows. Just as on YouTube, the audience will be in control, by rating videos and spreading them “virally” throughout the entire web.
The only remaining difference will be that the content spread in this manner will be entirely and uncontroversially legal, and that advertising revenues will remain under the full control of the content owners. For the first time, it will be in the interests of the media companies to spill their best content onto the web. This is in stark contrast to the situation on YouTube today.
All this points to a clear trend. All over the chaotic and confusing field of online video, once naughty revolutionaries are suddenly becoming shockingly well behaved. BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file-sharing service that accounts for a big chunk of all internet traffic, has in the past been used for illegal trading of films. But it recently announced a new identity, in which it licences films from Hollywood and shares the rental and sales revenues with the studios. Joost, which was launched by the founders of Skype and KaZaa, another peer-to-peer service that was once used to trade pirated music, has been designed from scratch to be impeccably legal and to make money for participating content owners.
The future, in short, appears to favour old-fashioned, professionally produced content from which traditional media companies can make money. This comes as a shock after a year when YouTube seemed to herald the dawn of a new and different media era—that of “user-generated”, or amateur, content.
Was YouTube—and the bigger “Web 2.0” movement that it symbolised—just a brief bout of silliness, an echo of the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s? It was not. YouTube has already changed society and democracy in lasting ways, by lowering the barriers to entry for talented amateurs to reach an audience, and by providing an outlet for the creative impulse of millions. This is hardly trivial. But what YouTube has not done is to make professional content less attractive. YouTube has earned its place in the history books; just not on a profit-and-loss account.
Viacom is suing them for $1 billion, alleging massive copyright theft; it is also teaming up with an innovative new online-television company, Joost, to make its videos available legally. Walt Disney is allied with Apple and its iTunes store, which is increasingly a squeaky-clean (in terms of copyright law) video retailer besides being a music store. And the NBC/News Corporation venture, which may yet be joined by Sony and others, embraces not only a vast library of video content but also an equally staggering distribution alliance. The videos will play not only on the venture’s new (as yet unnamed) site to be launched this summer, but on the websites of Yahoo!, Time Warner’s AOL, and Microsoft’s MSN, the three biggest web portals. At a stroke the venture will, legally, reach almost the entire American internet audience.
Of greater concern to YouTube, however, is the clear evidence that NBC and News Corporation both realise that they must not try to trap viewers on specific websites, but rather let them watch videos “on the sites where they live,” as Peter Chernin, News Corporation’s president, puts it. Teenagers will be able to post video clips on their own MySpace pages; even bloggers using independent services will be able to embed videos on their personal diaries. They will be able to discuss and annotate the clips and films with their own gossip, and thus be “social” in exactly the same way that YouTube allows. Just as on YouTube, the audience will be in control, by rating videos and spreading them “virally” throughout the entire web.
The only remaining difference will be that the content spread in this manner will be entirely and uncontroversially legal, and that advertising revenues will remain under the full control of the content owners. For the first time, it will be in the interests of the media companies to spill their best content onto the web. This is in stark contrast to the situation on YouTube today.
All this points to a clear trend. All over the chaotic and confusing field of online video, once naughty revolutionaries are suddenly becoming shockingly well behaved. BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file-sharing service that accounts for a big chunk of all internet traffic, has in the past been used for illegal trading of films. But it recently announced a new identity, in which it licences films from Hollywood and shares the rental and sales revenues with the studios. Joost, which was launched by the founders of Skype and KaZaa, another peer-to-peer service that was once used to trade pirated music, has been designed from scratch to be impeccably legal and to make money for participating content owners.
The future, in short, appears to favour old-fashioned, professionally produced content from which traditional media companies can make money. This comes as a shock after a year when YouTube seemed to herald the dawn of a new and different media era—that of “user-generated”, or amateur, content.
Was YouTube—and the bigger “Web 2.0” movement that it symbolised—just a brief bout of silliness, an echo of the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s? It was not. YouTube has already changed society and democracy in lasting ways, by lowering the barriers to entry for talented amateurs to reach an audience, and by providing an outlet for the creative impulse of millions. This is hardly trivial. But what YouTube has not done is to make professional content less attractive. YouTube has earned its place in the history books; just not on a profit-and-loss account.
Europe, a Moment to Ponder
IT is not easy to think of Spain as Poland. Stroll around this southern city at dusk, beneath the palms, beside the handsome bridges on the Guadalquivir River, past the chic boutiques and the Häagen-Dazs outlet, the Gothic cathedral and the Moorish palace, and it is scarcely Warsaw that comes to mind.
But, insisted Adam Michnik, the Polish writer, “Poland is the new Spain, absolutely.” He continued: “Spain was a poor country when it joined the European Union 21 years ago. It no longer is. We will see the same results in Poland.”
If history is prologue, Mr. Michnik is likely to be right. The European Union, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its founding treaty this weekend, is more often associated with Brussels bureaucrats setting the maximum curvature of cucumbers than with transformational power. But step by step, stipulation by stipulation, Europe has been remade.
What began in limited fashion in 1957 as a drive to remove tariff barriers and promote commercial exchange has ended by banishing war from Europe, enriching it beyond measure, and producing what Mr. Michnik called “the first revolution that has been absolutely positive.”
Asia, still beset by nationalisms and open World War II wounds, can only envy Europe’s conjuring away agonizing history, a process that involved a voluntary dilution of national sovereignty unthinkable in the United States.
But it is a celebration in uncertainty. A bigger union, expanded to include the ex-Communist states of Central Europe, has proved largely ungovernable. A constitution designed to streamline its governance was rejected in 2005. Integration has been a European triumph, but not always of those who are part of large-scale Muslim immigration. The founding treaty, signed by the six founding members on March 25, 1957, rested on creative ambiguity. It called for an “ever closer union among the European peoples”; behind it lay dreams of a United States of Europe.
Still, the ambiguity persisted; it has proved divisive. Economic power has been built more effectively than political or strategic unity. Military power has lagged.
Nonetheless, “autopilot” in the union still amounts to a lot.
It will ensure, for example, that over $100 billion is sent to Poland from now to 2013 to upgrade its infrastructure and agriculture, a sum that dwarfs American aid. Similarly, more than $190 billion has been devoted to Spain since it joined the union in 1986, 11 years after the end of Franco’s dictatorship.
The result has been Spain’s extraordinary transition from a country whose per capita output was 71 percent of the European average in 1985, 90 percent in 2004, and now 100.7 percent of the median of the 27 members. Spain has moved into the club of the well off. Dictatorship seems utterly remote.
“The E.U. slashes political risk,” said Chris Huhne, a Liberal Democrat member of the British Parliament. “It also exercises a soft power on its periphery that has far more transformational impact than the American neocon agenda in the Middle East. Countries in the Balkans wanting to come into the European democratic family have to adapt.”
That adaptation is economic as well as political. The creation of something approximating an American single market has been powerful in ending cartels and monopolies, introducing competition, pushing privatization and generally promoting the market over heavily managed capitalism.
Indeed, defense of what is called the European social model, with universal health care and extensive unemployment benefits, has become a tenet of European identity. How far that identity, as opposed to national identities, exists today is a matter of dispute. Only 2 percent of European Union inhabitants of working age live in member states other than their own.
But a survey in the French daily Le Figaro showed that 71 percent of French people now feel some pride in a European identity.
It is also open politically: How much of a federation should Europe be?
Germany has been utterly remade by an integrating Europe to the point that more people worry today about German pacifism than expansionism. But Poland is just entering that transformational process; under Lech Kaczynski’s conservative presidency its wariness of the pooling of sovereignty inherent in the union has been clear.
“The E.U. is an unfinished project, but so what?” Mr. Voigt said. “Why be nervous? We have time.”
But, insisted Adam Michnik, the Polish writer, “Poland is the new Spain, absolutely.” He continued: “Spain was a poor country when it joined the European Union 21 years ago. It no longer is. We will see the same results in Poland.”
If history is prologue, Mr. Michnik is likely to be right. The European Union, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its founding treaty this weekend, is more often associated with Brussels bureaucrats setting the maximum curvature of cucumbers than with transformational power. But step by step, stipulation by stipulation, Europe has been remade.
What began in limited fashion in 1957 as a drive to remove tariff barriers and promote commercial exchange has ended by banishing war from Europe, enriching it beyond measure, and producing what Mr. Michnik called “the first revolution that has been absolutely positive.”
Asia, still beset by nationalisms and open World War II wounds, can only envy Europe’s conjuring away agonizing history, a process that involved a voluntary dilution of national sovereignty unthinkable in the United States.
But it is a celebration in uncertainty. A bigger union, expanded to include the ex-Communist states of Central Europe, has proved largely ungovernable. A constitution designed to streamline its governance was rejected in 2005. Integration has been a European triumph, but not always of those who are part of large-scale Muslim immigration. The founding treaty, signed by the six founding members on March 25, 1957, rested on creative ambiguity. It called for an “ever closer union among the European peoples”; behind it lay dreams of a United States of Europe.
Still, the ambiguity persisted; it has proved divisive. Economic power has been built more effectively than political or strategic unity. Military power has lagged.
Nonetheless, “autopilot” in the union still amounts to a lot.
It will ensure, for example, that over $100 billion is sent to Poland from now to 2013 to upgrade its infrastructure and agriculture, a sum that dwarfs American aid. Similarly, more than $190 billion has been devoted to Spain since it joined the union in 1986, 11 years after the end of Franco’s dictatorship.
The result has been Spain’s extraordinary transition from a country whose per capita output was 71 percent of the European average in 1985, 90 percent in 2004, and now 100.7 percent of the median of the 27 members. Spain has moved into the club of the well off. Dictatorship seems utterly remote.
“The E.U. slashes political risk,” said Chris Huhne, a Liberal Democrat member of the British Parliament. “It also exercises a soft power on its periphery that has far more transformational impact than the American neocon agenda in the Middle East. Countries in the Balkans wanting to come into the European democratic family have to adapt.”
That adaptation is economic as well as political. The creation of something approximating an American single market has been powerful in ending cartels and monopolies, introducing competition, pushing privatization and generally promoting the market over heavily managed capitalism.
Indeed, defense of what is called the European social model, with universal health care and extensive unemployment benefits, has become a tenet of European identity. How far that identity, as opposed to national identities, exists today is a matter of dispute. Only 2 percent of European Union inhabitants of working age live in member states other than their own.
But a survey in the French daily Le Figaro showed that 71 percent of French people now feel some pride in a European identity.
It is also open politically: How much of a federation should Europe be?
Germany has been utterly remade by an integrating Europe to the point that more people worry today about German pacifism than expansionism. But Poland is just entering that transformational process; under Lech Kaczynski’s conservative presidency its wariness of the pooling of sovereignty inherent in the union has been clear.
“The E.U. is an unfinished project, but so what?” Mr. Voigt said. “Why be nervous? We have time.”
City in Florida Fires Official Who Planned to Change Sex
The longtime city manager here was fired early Saturday, one month after he disclosed his plans to seek a sex change.
The City Commission voted 5 to 2 to dismiss the man, Steven B. Stanton, after a six-hour hearing in which he and his supporters argued that he could do his job just as well once he became a woman. Some commissioners said they had voted to fire Mr. Stanton not because he wanted to become a woman, but because he had violated their trust and caused a major disruption.
Several transgender people spoke on Mr. Stanton’s behalf, including a former deputy mayor of St. Paul, as did a few dozen people from Largo and throughout the state. A smaller number spoke in favor of firing him, including one man who said Mr. Stanton had made Largo “the laughingstock of the whole country.”
Mr. Stanton’s wish to become a woman named Susan came to light last month, after The St. Petersburg Times learned of it, got him to confirm it and published an article. Before that, Mr. Stanton said, he planned to announce his decision later this year, when his son would be out of town.
The City Commission had generally praised Mr. Stanton in performance reviews, and it gave him a raise last year. But within a week of the newspaper’s report, the commission voted to begin the process of firing him. Mr. Stanton filed an appeal on March 8 in hopes of keeping his job of 14 years, which paid $140,000 a year.
The City Commission voted 5 to 2 to dismiss the man, Steven B. Stanton, after a six-hour hearing in which he and his supporters argued that he could do his job just as well once he became a woman. Some commissioners said they had voted to fire Mr. Stanton not because he wanted to become a woman, but because he had violated their trust and caused a major disruption.
Several transgender people spoke on Mr. Stanton’s behalf, including a former deputy mayor of St. Paul, as did a few dozen people from Largo and throughout the state. A smaller number spoke in favor of firing him, including one man who said Mr. Stanton had made Largo “the laughingstock of the whole country.”
Mr. Stanton’s wish to become a woman named Susan came to light last month, after The St. Petersburg Times learned of it, got him to confirm it and published an article. Before that, Mr. Stanton said, he planned to announce his decision later this year, when his son would be out of town.
The City Commission had generally praised Mr. Stanton in performance reviews, and it gave him a raise last year. But within a week of the newspaper’s report, the commission voted to begin the process of firing him. Mr. Stanton filed an appeal on March 8 in hopes of keeping his job of 14 years, which paid $140,000 a year.
Friday, March 23, 2007
Federal Judge Blocks Online Pornography Law
background
A federal judge in Philadelphia struck down a 1998 law today that made it a crime for Web sites to allow children to access material deemed “harmful.”
Under the law, the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, commercial Web publishers would have been required to request credit card information or other proof of age from Web site users to prevent children from viewing material deemed “harmful to minors” by “contemporary community standards.” Penalties included a $50,000 fine and up to six months in prison.
pros
Senior Judge Lowell Reed Jr. of the Federal District Court ruled that the law was ineffective, overly broad and at odds with free speech rights. He added that there are far less restrictive methods, including software filters, that parents can use to control their children’s Internet use.
“Despite my personal regret at having to set aside yet another attempt to protect our children from harmful material,” Judge Reed wrote, he was blocking the law out of concern that “perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.”
“If this law had gone into effect, it would have resulted into dumbing down of the Internet,” said Chris Hansen, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. “All Internet would have had to be brought down to a level that is acceptable to a 6-year-old and that would have had a devastating effect on the kind of interactions that take place on the Internet.”
cons:
But others were disappointed.
“It’s a very frustrating decision. We have an epidemic problem of kids accessing pornographic material online,” said Donna Rice Hughes, president of Enough is Enough, a nonprofit group that works to protect children from pornography and online predators. “Pornographers continue to get a free pass on the Internet from our federal courts, and efforts by Congress keep getting trumped.”
In 2000, Congress passed a law requiring schools and libraries receiving certain federal money to use software filters. The high court upheld that law in 2003.
Lawrence Lessig, a constitutional law professor at Stanford University, said the case decided today indicates the shifting stances that civil libertarians have taken regarding controls placed on the Internet.
“Civil libertarians have long had a ‘love-hate’ relationship with filters,” he said, adding that while the A.C.L.U. argued in this case that filters are preferable, the organization has also voiced concerns about them.
“People buy filters worried about pornography, but then they see they can also block sports, politics and lots of other things, so they block those, too,” Professor Lessig said. “The result is to reinforce this infrastructure of filters.” That, he said, may lead to “less free speech than we would have if the government could only get it right in their approach to limiting pornography.”
Mr. Hansen said that his organization has only opposed the mandatory use of filters, not filters themselves.
Sexual health sites, the online magazine Salon.com and other Web publishers backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, said the law would have a chilling effect on free speech.
“We know from experience that putting up any barrier in front of your content, whether its an advertisement or a subscription wall or anything that delays someone’s access, has a big impact on traffic,” said Joan Walsh, editor of Salon.com.
In a post-trial brief, Peter D. Keisler, a government lawyer, argued that depending solely on filters was insufficient. “It is not reasonable for the government to expect all parents to shoulder the burden to cut off every possible source of adult content for their children, rather than the government’s addressing the problem at its source,” he wrote.
A federal judge in Philadelphia struck down a 1998 law today that made it a crime for Web sites to allow children to access material deemed “harmful.”
Under the law, the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, commercial Web publishers would have been required to request credit card information or other proof of age from Web site users to prevent children from viewing material deemed “harmful to minors” by “contemporary community standards.” Penalties included a $50,000 fine and up to six months in prison.
pros
Senior Judge Lowell Reed Jr. of the Federal District Court ruled that the law was ineffective, overly broad and at odds with free speech rights. He added that there are far less restrictive methods, including software filters, that parents can use to control their children’s Internet use.
“Despite my personal regret at having to set aside yet another attempt to protect our children from harmful material,” Judge Reed wrote, he was blocking the law out of concern that “perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.”
“If this law had gone into effect, it would have resulted into dumbing down of the Internet,” said Chris Hansen, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. “All Internet would have had to be brought down to a level that is acceptable to a 6-year-old and that would have had a devastating effect on the kind of interactions that take place on the Internet.”
cons:
But others were disappointed.
“It’s a very frustrating decision. We have an epidemic problem of kids accessing pornographic material online,” said Donna Rice Hughes, president of Enough is Enough, a nonprofit group that works to protect children from pornography and online predators. “Pornographers continue to get a free pass on the Internet from our federal courts, and efforts by Congress keep getting trumped.”
In 2000, Congress passed a law requiring schools and libraries receiving certain federal money to use software filters. The high court upheld that law in 2003.
Lawrence Lessig, a constitutional law professor at Stanford University, said the case decided today indicates the shifting stances that civil libertarians have taken regarding controls placed on the Internet.
“Civil libertarians have long had a ‘love-hate’ relationship with filters,” he said, adding that while the A.C.L.U. argued in this case that filters are preferable, the organization has also voiced concerns about them.
“People buy filters worried about pornography, but then they see they can also block sports, politics and lots of other things, so they block those, too,” Professor Lessig said. “The result is to reinforce this infrastructure of filters.” That, he said, may lead to “less free speech than we would have if the government could only get it right in their approach to limiting pornography.”
Mr. Hansen said that his organization has only opposed the mandatory use of filters, not filters themselves.
Sexual health sites, the online magazine Salon.com and other Web publishers backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, said the law would have a chilling effect on free speech.
“We know from experience that putting up any barrier in front of your content, whether its an advertisement or a subscription wall or anything that delays someone’s access, has a big impact on traffic,” said Joan Walsh, editor of Salon.com.
In a post-trial brief, Peter D. Keisler, a government lawyer, argued that depending solely on filters was insufficient. “It is not reasonable for the government to expect all parents to shoulder the burden to cut off every possible source of adult content for their children, rather than the government’s addressing the problem at its source,” he wrote.
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