民法视野中的网络转载直接侵权之归责

网络转载行为在极大地丰富互联网信息的同时,也可能侵犯到著作权人的信息网络传播权。平衡网络发展与著作权保护之间的冲突是解决纠纷的正确思路。应当在明确界定网络转载直接侵权行为的基础上,以责任归结为路径,实行过错推定责任。     

Soviet legacies,organized crime,and economic gangsterism: Russia, 1995–2010

In countries like Russia, where legal institutions providing political accountability and protection of property rights are weak, some elite actors accept the use of violence as a tool in political and economic competition. The intensity of this violent exposure may vary depending on the position the province had had in the Soviet administrative hierarchy. The higher the province's position before 1991, the greater the intensity of business violence one is likely to observe there in post-communist times, because the Soviet collapse left a more gaping power vacuum and lack of working informal rules in regions with limited presence of traditional criminal organizations. Post-Soviet entrepreneurs also often find it worthwhile to run for office or financially back certain candidates in order to secure a privileged status and the ability to interpret the law in their favor. Businessmen-candidates themselves and their financial backers behind the scenes may become exposed to competitive pressures resulting in violence during election years, because their competitors may find it hard to secure their position in power through the existing legal or informal non-violent means. To test whether Soviet legacies and Provincial elections indeed cause spikes in commerce-motivated violence, this project relies on an original dataset of more than 6000 attacks involving business interests in 74 regions of Russia, in 1991–2010. The results show that only legislative elections cause increases in violence while there is no firm evidence that executive polls have a similar effect.     

Does online voting change the outcome? Evidence from a multi-mode public policy referendum

Do online and offline voters differ in terms of policy preferences? The growth of Internet voting in recent years has opened up new channels of participation. Whether or not political outcomes change as a consequence of new modes of voting is an open question. Here we analyze all the votes cast both offline (n = 5.7 million) and online (n = 1.3 million) and compare the actual vote choices in a public policy referendum, the world's largest participatory budgeting process, in Rio Grande do Sul in June 2014. In addition to examining aggregate outcomes, we also conducted two surveys to better understand the demographic profiles of who chooses to vote online and offline. We find that policy preferences of online and offline voters are no different, even though our data suggest important demographic differences between offline and online voters.     

The social semiotic of homophone phrase substitution in Chinese netizen discourse

The paper addresses an ingenious way by which Chinese netizens manage to reach their intended audiences under the radar of censors surveying the Internet in China. One specifically Chinese social use of language in this respect is the option to express criticism by using inoffensive characters that share the same or similar pronunciation with politically sensitive phrasing. We identify this type of expression as homophone phrase substitution (HPS). The device has been part of Chinese since ancient times under the name political metaphor. We address the main constraints at work in HPS, especially the role of voice (prosodic contour) that guides the construction of two divergent kinds of aboutness. Leaving aside its critical function in contemporary society, by contrasting HPS with verbal irony, metaphor, and Australian rhyming slang, and by drawing on semiologie and semiotics, indirect speech acts and implicit deixis, we suggest that this linguistic option throws new light on the semantic/pragmatic distinction.     

#Democracy: social media use and democratic legitimacy in Central and Eastern Europe

Since 1989, many of the former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have made the dramatic change from communist regimes to democratic nations that are integrated in the European sphere. While these sweeping changes have given rise to a successful transition to democracy unlike any the world has ever seen, there remain issues with governance as well as citizen support for the regime. While other studies have shown that mass media can influence a person's attitudes and opinions in the region, none has explored what effect social media can have on orientations toward democracy in the region. In the following paper, I build several hypotheses based on previous studies of media effects and democratic survival. I then employ survey data to empirically test whether social media increases support for democracy. The study finds that not only does using social media increase support for democracy, but also simple usage rather than information seeking provides more consistent effects on a person's support for democracy in CEE.     

‘Flat and fabulous’: women’s breast reconstruction refusals post-mastectomy and the negotiation of normative femininity

The ‘pinkification’ of breast cancer culture in recent years conflates women’s empowerment with the celebration of hyperfemininity. Consistent with this trend, reconstructive surgery post-mastectomy is increasingly normalised: restoring the breasts is to restore ‘lost’ femininity. Contextualised within the pressures of this normalisation, our article explores how women who decide against breast reconstruction negotiate their non-normative ‘flat’ bodies. We examine women’s posts in a breast cancer forum about their refusals of breast reconstruction. Using thematic and feminist post-structuralist analyses, we suggest that although health and body acceptance discourses enable resistance to embodied femininity norms, pressures to conform permeate practices related to appearance. Clothes and prosthetic breasts enabled forum participants to pass as ‘healthy’, ‘whole’, and ‘recovered’. The study’s findings emphasise the limitations to agency and resistance that emanate from the ways constraining gender discourses infiltrate every aspect of a woman’s life. In line with a critical awareness approach to breast cancer education, we discuss the possibilities of resistance afforded by the safe spaces of online communities.     

Last Thoughts on <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Last Intellectuals</Emphasis>

Over twenty years ago my book The Last Intellectuals put into circulation the phrase “public intellectual.” The term unexpectedly enjoyed great success. It encapsulated a new division between a professional or academic intellectual focused on his or her specialty and an intellectual orientated to a larger public. The former tend to disappear into the university, while they latter write for the educated public. In the twenty years since its publication, my book has been sharply challenged. Moreover the emergence of African-American and women intellectuals, and well as new developments such as Internet, have possibly undermined my thesis. Yet these phenomena amount to revisions, not refutations, of my thesis. Moreover the role of intellectuals in France and Germany suggest that the same process of academization is taking place in other advanced industrial nations. What is called for is not nostalgia or its opposite, a celebration of everything that happens, but a consideration of the real shifts that affect the lives and work of intellectuals.

平等互动引导--青少年网络思想政治教育初探

网络的出现和发展 ,不仅为青少年思想政治教育工作提供了先进的工具 ,而且给青少年思想政治工作提出了严峻的挑战 ,更重要的是形成了一个新的思想文化阵地和思想斗争阵地。因此 ,思想政治教育工作如何尽快进入互联网 ,并以强大的信息资源占据主导地位 ,就成为每位思想政治教育者的重要任务。     

浅析未成年人犯罪

我国的未成年人犯罪已成为社会各界所普遍关注的问题之一。本文概括出未成年人犯罪的基本状况和心理行为的特点,着重探讨了未成年人犯罪的主客观原因,从社会、学校和家庭三方面进行了系统分析,重点分析了社会因素中的网络因素及家庭教育因素。通过预测分析未成年人犯罪的发展趋势,有针对性地提出了预防未成年人犯罪的基本对策。     

Tony Blair's 'Media' Speech: The Commentators

Tony Blair's speech challenged the media over its standards in his valedictory lecture. Many of his charges about the absence of balance, attacks on motive and a pack mentality stand up, even if some are exaggerated and also applied well before his arrival in 10 Downing Street. Mr Blair's solutions did ot match his critique. What is required is a more self‐questioning media, being held to account on the internet and on specialist blogging sites. Vigorous criticism, requiring justification, is a more credible rout than tighter regulation. Tony Blair's speech on the changing pressures on the media is both interesting and convincing in its diagnosis (although generally reported in ways that did not reveal this). It is less convincing in suggestions for change: the fact that on‐line media will fall under Of‐com, and so under its minimal ‘content regulation’ will have little impact. Effective change could begin with other types of (self or other regulation). Some steps towards change might include minimal requirements for journalists and editors to accept elementary forms of accountability, such as disclosing conflicts of interest and payments made for ‘stories’. The scale of media coverage may be crucial in determining the allocation of aid, yet the attention the media pays to particular causes is arbitrary. Many serious disasters are not reported and as a consequence do not receive adequate aid, so that the victims of the crisis will lose out. Chronic long term problems, like famine, are ignored in favour of ‘sudden emergencies’. Reporting seeks sensation and simple stories which influences the way that aid agencies respond to the media. The complex background to a faraway disaster is often overlooked and not properly reported. Tony Blair's speech describing some of the news media as ‘feral beasts’ contained one paragraph which contained an insight into his views on new media. It was known that the outgoing Prime Minister was uncomfortable with some aspects of new technology but his remarks reveal a wider disappointment with how new media has failed to deliver changes which he had hoped for in political communications.This paper records Mr Blair's problems with new media and argues that by focusing on how the new technologies might provide a better way for politicians to by‐pass the traditional media he has missed the point of their wider benefits.