Some good news came from the battlefield that is media and technology policy recently: some important fair use rulings that help to hold off the ever expanding clutches of copyright.  Through a nice (if small) corrective built into the generally heinous Digital Millennium Copyright Act, every three years the Library of Congress rules on exemptions to the anti-circumvention clause that makes it illegal to break technological protections on copyrighted material.  Here are the new exemptions:

• Ripping clips of DVDs for educational purposes and use in documentary and noncommercial works is now allowed under the law.  This extends the previous exemption enjoyed only by lucky film and media studies instructors and their classroom uses to recognize more instructors, non-classroom uses, and students.  Make sure to check out Jason Mittell’s posts here and here for details and what this means for academics.  Beyond that, this ruling is also a big victory for those documentary filmmakers and remix video artists who have to crack encryptions on the existing material they transform for criticism and commentary.

• It’s also now legal to jailbreak your phone, opening up its operating system for other mobile networks and applications.  This ruling is most specifically about unlocking the iPhone for use with carriers other than AT&T and to run apps other than those available on Apple’s tightly controlled iTunes App Store, which is an important limitation on the power that device producers like Apple can have over users.

• Users also now have the right to crack digital rights management in order to run screen-readers on ebooks.  Many publishers technologically restrict the use of text-to-speech functions on computers and devices like the Kindle, so allowing for getting around this is especially key for promoting accessibility for people with print and visual disabilities.

• The ruling also allows for academic security research on video game DRM, in response to concerns over some specific security vulnerabilities.

The legal recognition of these fair uses is a very encouraging development— the result of a lot of great work by organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, American University’s Center for Social Media, the Organization for Transformative Works, the Society for Cinema & Media Studies, and others.  As Jonathan Zittrain and others point out, though, there are still a number of technological and legal hurdles that remain in the way of these uses— not least, of course, are the technical skills necessary to pick the locks in the first place.  And this is all only good for another two years, when these exemptions will have to be defended at the next review.

The Library of Congress’s ruling is even more encouraging, though, when taken along with two other recent court decisions on copyright.  The first case made some headlines: in June, a federal court threw out Viacom’s $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube.  The summary judgment ruling took a good strong reading of the “safe harbor” provision of the DMCA, finding that Google only hosts others’ content on YouTube and therefore can’t be held liable for the actions of its users.  The second case went relatively unnoticed: the day after the LOC announced its exemptions, a federal appeals court ruled that breaking DRM just to access a piece of software isn’t illegal under the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules.  While a rather abstruse case involving medical system software and dongles (yes, dongles), the decision sets a pretty clear and substantial fair use precedent: breaking technological protections on a work is legal as long as the use you make of it is legal.  These cases, though, are likely far from over— expect to see appeals to the Supreme Court in both.  Nonetheless, in the fight for a more balanced approach to copyright regulation (and especially in light of some really scary stuff on the horizon), it’s nice to have some victories to celebrate.

GeoAPI’s website boasts services like reverse geocoding (or translating latitude and longitude coordinates into words, like names of towns and intersections), searching for places of interest, mapping and annotation capabilities, and a “writable private layer” that allows tech developers to perform various “geo queries” (ie “which burger joints in Madison, WI has Germaine checked into?”; or “where do all the bike messengers in San Fransisco hang out?”). In short, the product can help locative media developers, and consequently other locative media users, track your whereabouts more efficiently. These services could also be harnessed for place-based recommendation systems, or identifying patterns of activity.  Judging by reactions from competitors, once Twitter fully integrates GeoAPI the locative media industry, and the mobile tweet: “Eating lunch downtown, then going to the movies”, might never be the same again.

Though Twitter has yet to fully integrate GeoAPI or other geocoding software, it might be useful to take a look at the emerging “place race” now, and what some of the major players have to offer. It’s difficult to say exactly how Twitter will further introduce location into it’s service. But judging by the recent merger of mobile social network services and locative media, we might begin to imagine how the combination of 140 characters and “place” might change the way we tweet.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I think “where” does matter in social media and everyday life. I’m also very interested to see how developers implement something like GeoAPI, and the information produced and gathered through its various services. However, “where” can definitely be overdone, or done. . . creepy. The flak Google has recently received concerning Google Buzz and privacy issues, might have overshadowed the flak Google is concurrently receiving regarding Google Latitude and privacy issues. Additionally, Foursquare founders were recently prompted to give a public statement in reaction to concerns and controversy surrounding Please Rob Me,  a parody site which re-presents tweets and Foursquare check-ins as evidence that a user is not at home.

While privacy and surveillance have definitely been main concerns, there’s still something completely intriguing about displaying and playing with location, especially the location within which you currently reside. Ads and websites for various locative media services like CitySense, EveryBlock, and Foursquare all emphasize discovery of your neighborhood, your city, and connecting with friends within your hometown. These applications seem to render the city as a layered space full of encounters waiting to be had, hidden treasures, secret hot spots, and “you should have been there” gatherings that even the urban resident needs help finding. In a sense, living like a local merges with seeing like a tourist. Yet, these mobile applications invest the user with an augmented visual capital, and the illusion of an omniscient gaze over the city and its exchanges. By alerting you to the location of your “friends” or other people with similar traits, a suggested route of travel or particular image of the city might be offered — one that extends the way a person is “at home” while moving through urban space.

There’s a further tension between exploration and familiarization in some mobile locative media projects as well. The promotional descriptions and gaming aspects of these projects encourage the user to explore the unfamiliar, but simultaneously reward participants for repetition. In Foursquare for example, points are awarded for traveling across distance, but the status of “mayor” for frequenting the same place over and over again. In either case, there seems to be a promise of comfort through connection. The “ambient awareness” of your position, and other peoples’ position within the city, might not only render urban space more manageable, but keep your social network in tow in a very tangible way. The potential for physical accessibility of your social network, coupled with the “social proprioception” that Clive Thompson notes Twitter has capitalized on already, will deem them leaders of the place race. However, the problem might be that sensing where your social limbs are (especially the ones you connect with on Twitter), is only useful when it’s just a sense.