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A post from our friend & colleague American University Prof. Amy Eisman, Journalism Division, SOC

I attended the Knight-backed We Media conference in Florida last week, an annual confab of journalists, CitJs, digital media execs, educators, big thinkers and beyond. The focus was supposed to be on community, which digital honcho Merrill Brown called the "most important" topic on the Web today. Read more...

Insurer accepts Fair Use claims!

A major errors and omissions insurer, National Union, a member company of AIG, is accepting Fair Use claims based on the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, when supported by an appropriate lawyer’s letter. This is an extraordinary demonstration of the power of this best-practices approach to making the fair-use option in copyright law useable again. "This is great news," said filmmaker Alex Gibney, who recently got insurance with such claims recognized.Read more...

Yahoo and Copyright in Belgium

A recent article details the struggles that Yahoo has faced regarding providing links to archived stories found in a group of Belgian newspapers. The newspapers claim that providing such an archive is an infringement of copyright laws. Read more...

Pubcasters and Social Networking

Last September, mega-station WGBH in Boston held a conference for public broadcasters about how to cope with the astonishing new world opening up in the land of Web 2.0. Now, reports and podcasts from that conference are available at http://opencontent.wgbh.org/index.html. Conferees listened to network pioneer Mitch Kapor talk about the peril of being an "incumbent" as a new media model arises--"you need to be 'fast followers,;" he advised. Read more...

DocAgora (it's spreading!)

DocAgora, which launched at the International Documentary Festival at Amsterdam (IDFA) in November, is becoming a feature at documentary festivals. The one-day event that features innovative and participatory strategies in documentary has just been accepted as one of the offerings at HotDocs (http://hotdocs.ca/) in late April. The Center for Social Media has joined as one of the cosponsors and organizers, along with an exciting team that includes Canadians Peter Wintonick and Amit Breuer. You can catch a glimpse of the inaugural event at NFB's Gerry Flahive's blog, at http://hotdocs.ca/.