The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Photo credti: dcwriterdawn on Flickr

NYS Senate bill 06779

AN ACT to amend the civil rights law, in relation to protecting a person’s right to know who is behind an anonymous internet posting

The Senate sponsor is Republican Thomas O’Mara, 53rd Senate district. The Assembly sponsor is Republican James Conte, 10th Assembly district.

As Wired reports

Proposed legislation in both chambers would require New York-based websites, such as blogs and newspapers, to “remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post.” … Oddly, the bill has no identification requirement for those who request the takedown of anonymous content.

There are a lot of idiots in the world, and some of them are unfortunately Republican. O’Mara’s Senate district includes Ithaca, Elmira, Corning and my birthplace of Arkport. Conte’s district is a chunk of Suffolk County gerrymandered to include a winding piece of Nassau County. I suspect the voters of both districts may wish to choose another representative in the next election, based solely on the sheer stupidity of their current state Senator and Assemblyman.

In 1992, sixteen years ago, it was virtually impossible to view a picture on the Internet. Connection to the Internet was through a slow dial-up modem or, for a lucky few, through academic, governmental or business T-1 connections.

Today, I can look at a photograph taken in China at the scene of a disaster within moments after it was taken. I can read first person accounts of a battle in Iraq within hours. I can exchange points of view with a Peruvian in real time,

You young people, he says in a quavery old voice, don’t know how lucky you are.

The Internet has made the world realtime. The potential of the Net is that everything can be witnessed, worldwide, as it happens. The only obstacle is implementation of the existing technology.

CNN, Fox News, and others have been featuring photos from their viewers that involve current news. Fox isn’t very good about giving those folks credit but the pics do get put up.

There’s the rub. Should we, the public, be contributing to the success of media if we do not get credit or payment for our work?

Let’s face it. In the “old” days, freelance photographers got big money for capturing pictures of news value. Yet, here we are in the Internet age, sending our work to CNN or Fox or the local station for free. And much of the time we don’t even get a printed credit on screen for the effort.

The Internet makes this realtime coverage possible. But, it is destroying the economic model that used to pay for the coverage we saw. Is there a new model that will compensate the public for participating in news coverage yet allow for a valuation of that effort by the media?

I write for a couple of different sites that pay a fraction of a cent per view. For all intents, they do not do news, just opinion and features. I’ve made $19 in the last year off this work. If I wrote more, I’d make more but the incentive is rather low.

Could the local news media find an incentive price that would attract me to provide them articles or photos? You bet! I’ve covered a number of local stories that should have been in the paper or on the TV.

And, I’ve done some work that belongs on CNN. They could have had it for a modest, for them, sum, but there is no mechanism to do that sort of thing.

The old media is beginning to be a day late and a dollar short. They don’t need to be but that’s the way they are applying their business model. I can see up to the minute coverage of many stories on line at no cost. What does the old media have to offer?

Great article by Mitch Wagner at Information Week. Key graf:

What we really need on the Internet is more competition, not less. Right now, if you want Internet access, you have a choice between your local telephone company and your local cable TV company. When there are only two businesses providing a service, that makes it easy for them to collude against customers. We need to encourage WiMAX, satellite Internet, and other technologies that will give customers dozens of options for getting Internet access, so if the customer doesn’t like the terms set by one provider, the customer can just pick another.