My column about Tuesday’s Supreme Court argument in the COPA case is now
up, here.
Coping with COPA
Just in time for the reheating of the culture wars, as the social-issues Right tries to scare ma-and-pa America and media megacorporations run for cover, the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) is rearing its head again.
For those of you who don’t remember COPA, here’s the short version: After the original Internet censorship bill, the Communications Decency Act, was struck down as unconstitutional, Congress passed COPA as a dubious successor. It was attached to a big omnibus spending bill that Bill Clinton signed in fall 1998. The ACLU and a group of online-publisher plaintiffs — including, proudly, Salon (here’s our original editorial on the matter) — immediately challenged the law and obtained an injunction against its enforcement. Since then the case has wended a slow path through the Federal judiciary: first, an appeals court upheld the injunction; then the U.S. Supreme Court kicked it back down to the appeals court; then the appeals court, a year ago, offered a more definitive set of reasons why the law is a very bad way to keep kids away from inappropriate material on the Net.
A more sensible administration would have accepted this ruling and gone home. But we’re cursed with John Ashcroft as an attorney general, so the Justice Department is appealing that ruling to the Supreme Court yet again. (The ACLU site offers tons of information.)
The case will be argued on Tuesday, March 2, and I’ll be there for the argument and for a press conference afterwards. The Court isn’t exactly WiFi enabled — in fact, electronic devices are prohibited — so I’ll have to write something up after the fact.
War room stories
Light blogging here as we devoted considerable energy this week to the launch of War Room ’04, our new group blog. Spearheaded by our new senior news editor, Geraldine Sealey, and featuring contributions from across Salon’s staff, War Room will be a centerpiece of Salon’s election-year coverage, and we’ve got more features to roll out in coming days and weeks (including, soon, an RSS feed for it).
We wanted to publish War Room as a blog within Salon’s existing content management system, so its content would be integrated with our search and directory. That meant we couldn’t just pull an existing blogging tool off the shelf; we had to write our own — or rather wrestle the existing software we use to publish articles into a different form. This is something I’ve been waiting for and advocating we do for, well, for as long as we’ve been rolling our own software — since early ’99, when we were still producing the blog-like “In Box” for Salon Technology but had to update and archive everything by hand. I recall conversations with different developers at different stages of Salon’s evolution about the need to flow small items through our site. We sat and talked about how we might do it (“we’ll call them ‘storettes’!”, I recall one programmer deciding), but we never got around to doing it because there was always something more pressing and revenue-related for our production team to focus on.
So hats off to our crew, especially Dominic Dela Cruz and Max Garrone, who did the heaviest lifting, for getting this up and running. I’ll continue to blog here, of course, but you’ll also find some of my commentary over in War Room.
“0wnz0red” is h0n0red
In case you haven’t already seen the notice we posted today on our home page, Salon is super-proud that the short story by Cory Doctorow we published last year, “0wnz0red,” is a Nebula Award finalist. Congratulations to the author. If you haven’t read the story yet, hey, this is the Web — it’s still there. What are you waiting for?
More quake
KCBS says USGS reports it as a 6.4 earthquake near San Simeon (halfway down the Cal. coast between SF and LA)… That’s a fairly big quake: not as big as 1989’s, which, if memory serves, was 7.1 or so, but thankfully (for those of us not living near San Simeon) far away from California’s population centers. A quake that big in the Bay Area or LA would probably have caused considerable damage. Unclear what sort of damage you might find in nearby towns; I’m sure we’ll hear more soon.
Quake
Our office tower just started swaying. Stopped now. Seems like there was just a medium-size quake in the Bay Area…
S.F. blackout
The huge power outage in downtown San Francisco yesterday left our offices without power for 27 hours. Our colocation center, where most of our web servers are situated, held up fine, so Salon’s basic site remained live throughout, but some of our back-end services were affected. We’re working this morning to clean up any remaining snafus.
Loaded questions
The Online Journalism Review is running an interesting set of interviews with “online journalism pioneers” in whose number your humble blogger was included. Curiously, the first part of my response to one of the questions was omitted, so here it is for you:
OJR: Should information online be free, or should publishers try to squeeze out money from consumers?
SR: That’s a pretty loaded way of phrasing the question! With my bias from my experience here at Salon, I’d instead ask, “Is there any feasible model for supporting independent journalism online besides obtaining the support of a mega-corporation?”
Krugman in hardcover
My review of the new Paul Krugman collection is up today.
Kudos for 0wnz0red
Cory Doctorow reports on Boing Boing that his short story “0wnz0red,” which we published here at Salon last year, has qualified for the preliminary ballot for the Nebula Awards. Since he has a better grasp of the functioning of the awards process than I do, I’ll let him explain what this means: “That means that in a couple of months, all the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America will have the opportunity to cast their preliminary vote for the piece, and if it gets enough votes, it will appear on the final ballot.” Congrats. We’re proud here.