Peoria Pundit

* Oh, good God no:

President-elect Barack Obama is urging Congress to postpone the Feb. 17 switch from analog to digital television broadcasting, arguing that too many Americans who rely on analog TV sets to pick up over-the-air channels won’t be ready.

Yeah, that’s just great. More months of scary, misleading ads.

* WHOI’s Tim McGinnis has a daddy/tech blog.

* Progress Illinois has been putting up YouTube clips of FOXNews being, well, FOXNews. FOXNews asked Google to pull the vids down, and Google, being the sheep that they are, complied. So ProgressIllinois is gonna sue. The difference between this and what GateHouse is doing to the New York Times is that ProgressIllinois is actually engaging in fair use to make comments about FOXNews, politics and news.

A Fox Chicago spokesperson said the media company issued the takedown notice because it believed the material violated its copyright.

But Kalven said that the brief clips constitute a fair use of Fox material. “These were not full segments from Fox broadcasts,” he said. “They were clips and snippets from longer reports and they were generally accompanied by links to their Web sites. We tried to drive traffic their way.”

Paul Alan Levy, a lawyer with consumer rights group Public Citizen, said the clips appeared to constitute fair use, based on the publicly available knowledge about them. Specifically, he said, the clips apparently consisted of relatively brief excerpts of longer broadcasts, and were non-commercial. “Under those circumstances, it seems like it would be pretty hard for Fox News to prevail,” Levy said.

Tomorrow’s Cannonball Friday programming is available online here. Well, probably. Or some site like it.

This entry was posted on January 9, 2009 at 12:41 am and is filed under Uncategorized with tags DTV, fair use, GateHouse, WHOI, WMBD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.