February 21, 2003
Dear Subscribers:
Here's our lineup for this third week of February (we think you'll enjoy reading
about Webmaster Heather below as much as we enjoyed talking with her):
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How a 15-year-old Webmaster took on Warner Bros.
A little over two years ago 12-year-old fellow Harry
Potter fan Lindsay called 15-year-old Heather Lawver in tears, saying Warner
Bros. had sent a threatening letter about Lindsay's Harry Potter fan site,
BestHogwarts.com (no longer online). The letter said Lindsay was violating
copyright law, and "if she didn't hand over the domain name within 30 days,
they'd put the matter in the hands of their lawyers," Heather told us in a
recent phone interview.
"I was infuriated," she said, "because she [Lindsay]
was so upset and her father had just died, and I knew that what Warner Bros.
was doing wasn't legal and told her to calm down and I'd do what I could."
Heather - with her own Harry Potter fan site, DProphet.com
- is one of this year's finalists for the Cable
& Wireless Childnet Awards (see
our coverage, 1/31). Childnet's judges mentioned her success in tangling
with a giant media corporation in their remarks about the Daily Prophet, and
we were curious to know more, thinking other parents of online kids would
be too. So we called Heather; here's her story, mostly in her own words:
Heather's first move after Lindsay's call was to email
another friend and fan site owner, Christine in Singapore ("The Harry Potter
fan community on the Web is so connected," Heather explained). Christine politely
listened to Heather "rant," as Heather put it, then told Heather, "That happened
to me too." "I was aghast," Heather told us. "I couldn't believe [Warner Bros.]
went after both of my friends. Basically, Christine told me she didn't want
to lose her Web site. So she went to the media, and soon the David-and-Goliath
story "was all over Asia," Heather said. [Heather said that, at the time,
Christine's "Harry Potter Network" (whose domain name is now TheHPN.Rupture.net/)
was one of the world's Top 5 Harry Potter fan sites, in terms of traffic,
as was her DProphet.com.]
We asked Heather why she hadn't heard from Warner
Bros. like her friends, and her theory was that, because DProphet.com was
a high-traffic fan site like Christine's, the company didn't want a North
American repeat of all the media coverage Christine's case got in Asia.
Christine "didn't end up keeping her domain name because
she couldn't fight Warner Bros. - she didn't have time. She was 15," Heather
said. "I had some time on my hands, and I'm also home-schooled, so I had the
resources" to take on Lindsay's problem. "I researched about a billion other
fan sites and found that dozens of other kids had gotten the exact same letter.
One was Claire Field, 14, in the UK. She hired a solicitor pro bono. They
had a really hard time getting press attention, and Warner Bros. was tough
in the UK."
Further research turned up a site called Potterwar.org.uk,
operated by Alastair Alexander, another Briton who, as a hobby, had spearheaded
other boycotts (most notably the Switzerland-based artists' site eToy.com's
fight with US-based toy retailer eToys.com before the latter went bankrupt
in the dot-com downturn). "He [Alastair] was a London city councilman at the
time," Heather told us, "and had heard about Claire, spent 5 pounds, bought
his domain and put up a site" with the idea of creating a place on the Web
where all Harry Potter fan site Webmasters being bullied by Warner Bros. could
find each other (see an article by fan site advocates The Bringers).
Heather wrote Alastair "a big letter about forming
a boycott because the only thing Warner Bros. would respond to was a boycott
by fans of their Harry Potter products. Alastair really loved the idea - he
thought it was really funny coming from a 15-year-old - and we started working
together" on a "Defense Against the
Dark Arts", Heather told us. "It was named after a class at Hogwarts,"
Harry Potter's school of wizardry.
The campaign was about a month in the planning, with
a manifesto, instructions for Harry Potter fans, a statement to Warner Bros.,
and a press release. Alastair "handled the European part," Heather said, "I
handled North America. We launched the campaign Feb. 19, 2001 [close to Heather's
16th birthday]. Our first big event was a piece in USAToday on the 22nd, on
the front page of the tech section. It caught a lot of attention. My phone
was ringing off the hook. I appeared on TV and radio shows," Heather said,
mentioning "Hardball with Chris Matthews" on MSNBC, ABC Radio, Disney, Canada's
CBC, a station in Australia, and "dozens of papers around the world. We were
suggesting a full boycott of everything having to do with Harry Potter except
the books." Heather said it was her appearance on Hardball that "finally caught
their attention." Before that, she said, Warner Bros. didn't seem to be afraid
of what the media could do.
Then Heather received an email from Warner Bros. spokesperson
Diane Nelson "telling me to stop. A blatant threat didn't come till later
in the campaign. What they were hoping, I guess, is legal intimidation - where
you just scare the children rather than actually come out with threats. Alistair
and I started to play good-cop-bad-cop with Warner Bros. - one of us talking
about how we can work things out, the other asking, 'What do you think you're
doing?' We threatened litigation back."
The campaign began to wind down when Heather became
ill. "I had a brain infection, so I was having a hard time keeping things
straight. We had a few 'poster children' - a few victims whose parents had
given us permission for us to use their kids' names. We started getting emails
... about cases getting solved. All of a sudden Warner Bros. had gotten nice
with certain kids - but only the poster children. There was one case, Ross
McCaw, 13 [against his site HarryPotter-World.com].
Warner Bros. had threatened him over and over, then all of a sudden that May
he heard from them saying, 'Keep your site, and not only that, you can have
$400 if you sign a contract.'" Heather had heard about this through the boycott
grapevine. "For some reason Ross didn't tell us - we're guessing that was
in his contract [not to tell anyone]."
Heather told us she figured that, by making deals
with all the "poster children," Warner Bros. was chipping away at the campaign's
credibility because then "we couldn't give concrete examples of what was going
on.... By June we decided to end the campaign because we'd done everything
we could - more than any other campaign had ever done. And I could hardly
talk any more."
Heather is feeling much better now - the speed and
substance of our phone conversation was certainly an indicator. Here's an
addendum she emailed us this month: "I forgot to mention a rather important
bit of the story. All through this campaign it was Warner Bros.'s stance that
they never meant to threaten children, and that the minute they found out
they had threatened innocent fan sites, they said they would stop pursuing
any legal action and leave the fan sites alone. This was discredited by their
constant pursuit of Claire Field's [UK-based] domain - they knew perfectly
well she was a child doing nothing more than shouting the praises of Harry
Potter. [Warner Bros. later stopped threatening Claire and her site, TheRegister.com
reported.] Additionally, it has recently come to my attention that Warner
Bros. is indeed still sending out letters. Details are still sensitive, but
a few days ago I received notice from a man in Chicago who says he has been
threatened.... I have seen the letter and am doing all I can to protect his
Web site."
[For another view on what the campaign accomplished,
here's an interview with Alastair Alexander (bottom half of page) and
an article
at TheRegister.com.]
Meanwhile, Heather has other plans, which include
attending the Childnet Awards in London in April, going to college, and developing
DProphet.com as a peer- reviewed, or juried, academic publication for students.
"It is being turned into an interactive tool for classrooms," she wrote us,
"allowing teachers to create their own miniature branches of the site. Their
students can then act as their newspapers' columnists, publishing their English
and creative writing homework on the Internet for others to read and review.
It will provide more incentive for excellence, as their work will be presented
to a worldwide audience, rather than just stashed in a teacher's cupboard."
She's fund-raising for the project right now, she says. Contributors can reach
her here.
Email us your stories of amazing things
kids and teens are doing on and with the Internet - via feedback@netfamilynews.org.
We love to hear and share them.
* * * *
A subscriber writes: A spam filter he likes
This week Godfrey in the UK emailed us in response
to "The fight against spam" in last week's Web New Briefs .
Thanks, Godfrey! Here's his quick tip for battling junk email:
"I have just read your latest newsletter and on the
spam thing I have been trying a free downloaded spam killer: MailWasher,
which checks emails at the server, then you can delete, bounce, or blacklist
spam. I've only had it for a couple of days but it's reduced my spam from
about 20 a day to about 7 so far. Hope that is useful."
Let us know if you try MailWasher and feel it's
reducing your spam count too. The software can be downloaded at the site linked
to above. Reader feedback is so very welcome! Email
us any time.
* * * *
Web News Briefs
- Tell kids: Think before you click!
An unsuspecting email user gets an email saying
something like, "Check out this Web site about Greece, site of the next
Summer Olympic Games!" She clicks on the link and is slowly sent to just
such a Web site - "slowly" becomes it seems to take longer than usual
to download. Next she gets an email from an unknown address demanding
$50 (and her credit card number) or they'd tell the police her hard drive
contains child pornography (they told her what folder it was in on her
PC). The Web page had loaded slowly because, while it was loading, porn
files were being sent to her computer. This true story was told anonymously
by the CSO (chief security officer) of a major corporation in CSO
Magazine.
We're telling you about it because there's no
reason why it couldn't happen to an unsuspecting Web surfer at your house.
It's more likely to occur at corporate offices because hundreds of employees
represent a more lucrative opportunity for - in the case above - Bulgarian
extortionists (the company's network security team had tracked the porn
files and emails on the woman's hard drive to a Bulgaria-based IP address).
But that doesn't mean it can't happen to a block of household PC users
whose email addresses have been "harvested" by people with similarly malicious
intentions.
The important thing to draw from all this is:
Clicking on Web addresses or links in emails from strangers can be just
as risky as clicking on attachments emailed by people we don't know. Parents
might want to include this tip in any family discussion about home computer
security and online safety. Our thanks to the National
Center for Missing & Exploited Children for pointing this story out.
- Net use in US: The view from UCLA
The results are in for 2002 - Year 3 - of UCLA's
ongoing "Internet
Report" , studying "the impact of online technology on America." The
survey found that more than 80% of US children who used the Internet last
year did so at home, "a substantial increase over 2000 and 2001," and
nearly three-quarters of children who used the Internet in 2002 went online
at school, up from little more than half of children in 2000. Here are
some other key findings concerning kids:
- 44.9% of adults surveyed said that the children
in their households watch too much TV, while 18.3% say the children
spend too much time online (but that 18.3% figure has "drifted
upward" over the 3 years the study's been conducted).
- Almost a third of children watch less TV since
having Net access, up from 23% the year before (2001).
- Nearly 75% of adults said that, since their
homes started Net service, their children's school grades have stayed
the same.
- Almost all adults said the Internet had no impact
on their kids' interaction with friends (but they also said that - since
getting the Net at home - the number of people they - the adults - are
in touch with has increased).
- Many Net users have more than one screen name
for email, chat, instant- messaging, etc. They average 2.2 screen names
each. A small number across all age ranges say they have multiple screen
names, each with its own personality.
More generally, the survey found that the percentage of Americans who use
the Net was 71.1% in 2002 (down from 2001 at 72.3%, but up from 2000 at
66.9%); the percentage of those who use it at home was 59.3% (58.4
for '01, 46.9% for '00); and the percentage of students who use the Net
at school was 73.7% (72.9% for '01, 59.9% for '00). Americans spend an average
of 11.1 hours online a week (9.8 hours in '01, 9.4 in '00).
One of the report's conclusions about the "dot-com
collapse" was that "the only thing dead about the Internet is the extravagant,
unrealistic, 'anything goes' attitude that prevailed in the dot-com sector
in the late-1990s." The researchers also suggested that "we may find that
the most important issues about the Internet are trends that have not
yet emerged," and they may emerge when most of the population has high-speed
connections. The complete report can be downloaded in pdf format here.
- Microsoft gets some clues?: 'Threedegrees'
It took some doing, says MSNBC,
but the old fogies at Microsoft finally listened to a smart, young business
development manager (named Tammy Savage) and got some clues about product
development for the teen and 20-something market, or "NetGenners," as
Microsoft puts it. The result: a new product called Threedegrees ("half
the amount of the alleged Six Degrees of Separation allotted to any two
randomly chosen people" anywhere on Earth, explains MSNBC). You could
call it multimedia group instant-messaging software. Threedegrees groups
can be up to 10 people, and they can share tunes, photos, and virtual/animated
"winks" as well as chat. "Microsoft used the dinner party as the model
for developing the size of the social group and the way music is shared
within it," CNET reports.
What took Tammy a while to explain to the baby-boomer Microsofties is
that the way young people use technology and the Net is radically different
from the way we boomers do, and it was time for Microsoft to move beyond
its fixation on productivity into anti-productivity (group communications)
and take the leap past tools to environments!
Threedegrees.com, which will be free for the time
being, is, among other things, "a fascinating experiment in how music
can be legally shared over the Internet," MSNBC reports. "After much negotiation,
the [record] labels OK'd [its music feature] musicmix, once Microsoft
agreed to somewhat hobble its features. (Playlists have a maximum of 60
tunes, and the songs won't play unless the original owner is participating.)"
The MSNBC piece noted something else very interesting about the music
feature: Men and women use it differently. "Guys will see it as a contest
- who's brought the coolest tunes? - and do virtual chest-thumps, introducing
the hottest bands. Meanwhile, the girls use the music as background for
their chats."
- Blogs now more mainstream
At least that's what several reports concluded
in their coverage of Google's purchase of Pyra Labs, the little company
that "helped jump-start the personal publishing phenomenon known as blogging,"
as Reuters
put it. Pyra created the easy-to-use Web log software Blogger and runs
the blog hosting service Blogspot.com. "Blogger has about 1.1 million
registered users and about 200,000 active ones. Google gets 150 million
queries a day from more than 100 countries," the New
York Times reports. "What newsgroups were to the early days of the
Internet, blogs are to today's World Wide Web," explains the Washington Post. "The buyout is a huge
boost to an enormously diverse genre of online publishing that has begun
to change the equations of online news and information," points out the
San
Jose Mercury News , one of the first papers to cover the story.
- CIPA at Supreme Court
The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments
concerning the Children's Internet Protection Act March 5. "Freedom of
speech advocates have begun filing briefs in the Supreme Court seeking
to uphold a Philadelphia federal appeals court ruling that ... CIPA [where
US public libraries are concerned] was in violation of the First Amendment,"
reports Internet
News. The law requires schools and public libraries receiving federal
e-rate funding to install filtering technology on computers connected
to the Internet. "Last May, the so-called Internet porn law was tossed
out, with the appeals court agreeing that the use of filtering technology
blocked portions of protected speech 'whose suppression serves no legitimate
government interest'." Observers say the case could help determine "just
how far constitutional liberties go on the Internet," according to the
Washington Post. The Post piece has links to friend-of-the-court
briefs that have already been submitted to the Supreme Court justices
by the American Library Association, the National Law Center for Children
and Families, the American Civil Liberties Union, and other organizations.
- 'A Word a Day'
That's basically all there is to one of the most
popular email newsletters in the world: Each "A Word a Day" message contains
simply an English word, its etymology, pronunciation, and an example of
how it's used. The daily email has more than half a million subscribers
in more than 200 countries, according to the South
China Morning Post. The person behind it is Anu Garg, an American
software engineer who "began developing his Web site [Wordsmith.org]
in 1994 when doing his master's degree in computer science in Ohio," the
Post reports. "He had never aspired to be a writer but loved words and
wanted to share his passion with others." He credits his father, a government
official in Uttar Pradesh, India, for helping him develop that interest.
Wordsmith is a great site for students - it includes a dictionary, thesaurus,
and anagram and acronym finders. Mr. Garg published his book, "A Word
a Day," last October, and it was soon the No. 1 seller at Amazon.com.
His favorite quotation is, "If your ship hasn't come in, swim out to it,"
the Post points out.
* * * *
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That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!
Sincerely,
Anne Collier, Editor
Net Family News
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