Fintan O’Toole makes a strong case in today’s Irish Times (sub req’d) that the leaders’ debates on RTÉ’s Prime Time television programme the week before last (the debates are here and here) were crucial to the outcome of last week’s general election. He is not the only person to have said so; comments to this effect were on the lips of many commentators as the result began to become clear. It is a pity, therefore, that RTÉ did not agree to make the debates available online without restriction so that the video can be lawfully share and reused without infringing RTÉ’s copyright. They were asked to do, and thought about it, but eventually said no (even though Fianna Fáil, of all parties, urged them otherwise). If they had, then online discusson could have put claims like O’Toole’s into the context of clips from the debates. We could only benefit from a this kind of detailed discussion of the turning points of the debate. Imagine if the threads on IrishElection.com, politics.ie, and elsewhere could have been illustrated by such clips. Perhaps next time.

I like Eamonn Fitzgerald’s Rainy Day blog. Today – fatefully, perhaps, the day Daithí is blogging live from the OpenNet Initiative’s Oxford conference on The Future of Free Expression on the Internet – Eamonn writes:

Banned in Beijing

Was it something we said? According to the Great Firewall of China, Rainy Day is being blocked by the regime in Beijing. read more

Always curious about these things, I immediately clicked on the link to find out if Cearta is being blocked too. It is! The text in the middle of the screen-grab thumbnail on the right (click on it – or here – for full size image) says: “Your URL is Blocked!”.

Eamonn and I must be doing something right …


Update (19 May 2007): More on ONI from the BBC and MediaPal@LSE; and another live blog from the day from Tobias Escher at the OII. The ONI website also has a system for checking whether a site is blocked, and according to that, neither Rainy Day nor Cearta is blocked by anyone, not even by China. What a pity. Of course, this raises the age old question of trust, especially online. What was it about Great Wall that led both Eamonn and me to trust its assessment that our sites were blocked, or at least to trust it sufficiently to blog about it – perhaps it was because it told us what we wanted to hear? And what is it about the ONI that leads me to trust its assessment over Great Wall’s – perhaps it is because I am already familiar with, and already respect, the work of many of the people involved? Deep philosophical questions about the nature of trust here, then. All the same, I still think it’s a pity that the ONI check didn’t come up with the same result as the Great Wall check. To reflect the difference, I’ve added the question mark to the title.

The classic liberal justification for freedom of expression has been stated by John Milton (pitctured left) in Areopagitica – A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England and by John Stuart Mill (pictured right) in On Liberty.

New from SSRN: David O Brink “Mill’s Liberal Principles and Freedom of Expression” in CL Ten (ed) Mill’s On Liberty: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). From the abstract:

John Stuart Mill’s defense of freedom of expression has proved extremely influential and finds important echoes in First Amendment jurisprudence. Though important in its own right, Mill’s defense of freedom of expression also plays an important, though sometimes overlooked, role in his more general defense of individual liberties. Mill turns to freedom of expression in the belief that there is general agreement on the importance of freedom of expression and that, once the grounds for expressive liberties are understood, this agreement can be exploited to support a more general defense of individual liberties. This means that a proper understanding of the significance of Mill’s defense of freedom of expression requires not only reconstructing his arguments on behalf of expressive liberties and exploring their bearing on issues of freedom of expression but also seeing how these arguments generalize to other kinds of liberties. In this regard, it is especially instructive to consider how his claims about freedom of expression inform his liberal principles, especially what his discussion of the best grounds for expressive liberties can tell us about the best grounds for opposing paternalism. But it is also worth exploring whether philosophical pressure runs in the other direction as well – whether Mill’s discussions of liberalism, in general, and paternalism, in particular, have implications for the proper articulation of principles governing expressive liberties. This perspective requires viewing Mill’s defense of freedom of expression in the context of his liberalism.

Meanwhile, from John Naughton:

Quote of the day

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.

John Milton: Areopagitica

The case for the blogosphere, in a nutshell.

Indeed.

There has been an exciting development in my campaign (see my earlier posts: here, here and here) to persuade RTÉ to make the Prime Time leaders’ debates available online without restriction. I received the following letter from Fianna Fáil (for reasons of accuracy, I have retyped it as it came in (here’s the PDF), including the not uncommon mis-spelling of my name, which I will forgive as I welcome the rest of it!):

Dr. Eoin O’Neill
School of Law
Trinity College
Dublin 2

14th May 2007

Dear Dr. O’Neill,

I refer to your letter to An Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern TD, who has asked me to reply directly to you on his behalf.

Fianna Fáil would be in full agreement that the Leaders debate should be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. It is a crucial part of the General Election campaign and for many people plays a key role deciding their voting intentions.

We fully support your proposal and will make our views in this regard known to RTE.

Kind regards,

Yours sincerely,

________________
Gerry Hickey
Special Advisor to An Taoiseach

It’s still not too late for the other party leaders to come on board or for RTÉ to change their minds. So, come on guys, how about it?

Bonus links: (i) Larry Lessig’s most recent post about his similar campaign in the US (which inspired mine); (ii) Wednesday’s Prime Time debate from RTÉ’s website; (iii) Thursday’s Prime Time debate from RTÉ’s website – the debates are available on their website, but is a pity we can’t legally share and reuse them online without fear of infringing RTÉ’s copyright.

There have been two developments today. First, I discovered that not only is there to be a debate between Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny on Thursday night, there is also to be one among the leaders of the next four parties on Wednesday. From RTÉ’s website:

The RTÉ television debate among leaders of the smaller parties has been announced.

Labour, the Greens, the Progressive Democrats and Sinn Féin will debate their issues on RTÉ One at 9:30pm on 16 May.

Just in case it wasn’t clear, the logic of making the coverage of the Prime Time debate between Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny on Thursday available to be shared and reused online applies equally to this debate on Wednesday. As a consequence, I emailed RTÉ making it clear that my request extended to both debates, and I wrote to the leaders of these parties (pdf here), asking for their support for this initiative.

Second, in a formal response from RTÉ to my initiative, early this afternon, Peter Feeney emailed me as follows:

Further to your request that RTÉ waives its copyright to the debates between the party leaders due to take place on Wednesday and Thursday RTÉ has decided not to agree to your request. We believe that by making the debates available on the rte.ie web site anyone who wishes to analysis or review the debates is fully facilitated. The view has been taken that it would not be prudent for RTÉ to waive its rights to the migration of the debates to other sites.

This is, to say the least, disappointing. Read the rest of this entry »

RTÉ were quick off the mark. Further to my letter to the Director General yesterday, mentioned in my previous post, RTÉ rang the Law School in Trinity where I work, to explain to me that all the Prime Time programmes are available on the RTÉ website and that this should answer my enquiry.

I should say at once that I think that it is a splendid website, especially since its recent revamp. Moreover, I am impressed with the amout of material that they make available online. However, I don’t think that this is a full answer. My concern is not so much with availability as with lawful sharing and reuse. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few weeks, I have been tracking the fate of a call on Larry Lessig’s blog for the US political parties and television networks to eliminate unnecessary regulation of political speech by allowing unfettered online access to the recording of the parties’ debates among presidential candidates. First, Barak Obama came on board, next John Edwards and then Chris Dodd. Then CNN announced that it would make presidential debate footage available without restrictions (though Fox News has announced that it will not).

Following yesterday’s RTE.ie web debate comes the news that there will be a television debate between Fianna Fáil leader Bertie Ahern and Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny on Prime Time on 17 May next. Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Jon Heller cuts right to the heart of what will happen now that the EU Criminalizes Racist and Xenophobic Speech:

The real problem with the Framework’s approach to racist and xenophobic speech is the profoundly chilling effect it will almost certainly have on such speakers. What rational artist or filmmaker will risk pushing the ideological envelope if she knows that the criminality of her speech depends not on her intent but on the (unpredictable) reactions of others to it?

Read the rest of this entry »