Yahoo!MyBlogLog to be Discontinued

Yesterday I received a surprising message on my Yahoo e-mail saying that Yahoo!MyBlogLog shall no longer be in service as of 24 May 2011.

This is a sad news for me considering that MyBlogLog was the first online social media that I have actively participated since I started blogging around three years ago. At that time I have not joined Blog Catalog, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc.

MyBlogLog has enabled me to know, communicate, follow 1,309 blogs and make friends with bloggers who authored them, all of which was done FREELY! MyBlogLog's widget can easily be found on the right hand side of this blog.

As a consequence of this cessation of services, Yahoo shall delete everything in MyBlogLog, therefore it has warned members to save whatever information they think necessary before 24 May 2011, after that they would be totally deleted.
If you want to know more details about the discontinuation of MyBlogLog, please click here.

As an alternative resource for keeping up with our contacts, MyBlogLog suggested us to try Yahoo! Pulse. Although Yahoo! Pulse doesn't provide blog-tracking services, but it is a useful way to streaming information from multiple social media feeds (Yahoo! Pulse, Facebook, Twitter) in one place. Also, we may be able to find and connect to our MyBlogLog contacts there. For more details, please visit Yahoo! Pulse.

Due to this fact, I would like to request all my friends who have followed my blog and whose blogs I have followed on MyBlogLog follow each other on Google Friend Connect, and/or Networkedblogs their widgets can be found on the right hand side of this blog.

Logo : Courtesy of Yahoo!MyBlogLog

Online Porn Sites and Rapes

One of the reasons for the issuance of the Pornography Law was because some politicians alleged that Online Porn Sites have increased the numbers of Sex Crimes including Rapes in Indonesia.

And based on the same reason, the Minister of Communication and Information Tifatul Sembiring has decided to block Online Porn Sites.

In this regards, I would like to share an article on Viva News written by Ari A. Perdana, an Indonesian Post Graduate student at the University of Melbourne, about two studies in the United States showing that the number of Rapes has decreased after the Internet, including Porn Sites, come to existence.

The two studies, by Anthony D'Amato of the Northwestern Law School titled "Porn Up, Porn Down", and by Ted Kendall of the Economic Dept of the Clemson University titled: "Pornography, Rape and the Internet" show that the number of Rapes in the U.S has decreased between early '90s and after the existence of Online Porn Sites.
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Kendall quoted a survey showing that in 1993 there were 1.6 Rape case in every one thousand people, compared to 0.4 Rape case in every one thousand people after the arrival of online Porn Sites in 2004.

Both studies show that existence of Online Porn Sites does not necessarily mean that there will be an increase in Rape cases. Therefore, in my opinion blocking of those sites would only be effective if followed by law enforcement not just on online Porn sites but also offline Porn materials like DVDs  which has long been declared illegal but not difficult to find.

A judge proposed the barring of online links

In the last few months, the new media like Blogs and Facebook have been seen as some sort of a threat by certain people and/or group of people.

For example, one month ago a Moslem Ulama organization in East Java have issued Fatwa which forbid the excessive use of Facebooks. Although a Fatwa is not legally enforceable according to our national legal system, however it would create moral bond among people living in rural area.

Further, I have also read an article by Carolyn Elefant in Legal Blog Watch about a U.S Judge that proposed the barring of online links to Copyrighted materials without the consent of the Copyright owners. Here is the controversial article :

Judge Posner's Proposal: Save a Newspaper, Kill a Blog

Sure, the newspaper industry is in trouble. But not even old-guard media companies have proposed as extreme a remedy as what Judge Richard Posner recommends. In a recent blog post, Posner proposed barring online links to copyrighted materials without the consent of the copyright owners as a way to help revive the failing newspaper business.

Not surprisingly, Posner's proposal has drawn criticism from bloggers, as well as conventional media outlets. Dan Froomkin, of Discourse.net, asks: If links are banned, why not footnotes? (That should give lawyers pause!) Erick Schonfeld at The Washington Post deemed the scheme "misguided," asserting that the Web works via free and unregulated linking. Moreover, linking to a newspaper post is not all that different from engaging in conversations, Schonfeld points out. He continues:

Much of what Posner wants to outlaw is public discourse. Why is it okay for people to talk about the day's news in a bar or barber shop, but not online? People should be able to discuss the day's news on the Web without fear of violating copyright law. The natural way people discuss things on the Web is by quoting and linking to the source. (Except maybe Posner, he doesn't seem to link to much of anything in his blog posts).

David Donoghue, of Chicago IP Litigation, makes the point that newspapers in fact benefit from added links to their stories. And while Donoghue acknowledges the existence of "free-riding" aggregators that do nothing more than point to links, Donoghue argues that newspapers are free riders in a way, getting the benefit of links in the form of traffic from visitors who otherwise would not view the site.

Donoghue also emphasizes that even without a consent policy in place for linking, copyright holders have significant protection. He points out that direct copying of stories is prohibited. Moreover, Congress could choose to revisit copyright laws if it deems that additional protection is necessary.

I can't even imagine how I could possibly write Legal Blog Watch if I needed to obtain consent every time I linked to a news article. Even if requiring consent for online links would help newspapers -- and I doubt this is true -- the tradeoff would the death of blogging.